*Smartphones are not web native devices so there is no pressing reason for them to have "web semantics." Except for skeuomorphism.
"Stories" yes, news feeds who cares
by Ian Bogost
(...)
For 25 years after the web commercialized, the things people made online—for home pages, blogs, and eventually social-media sites—happened separately from the devices used to view and interact with that material after publication. A photograph would have to be scanned and uploaded, for example. Text, too, would often be authored somewhere else, then uploaded or emailed.
Eventually, services like Facebook and Twitter tied composition to the platform on which it would be shared. But even then, the process involves translation. When Facebook’s post field asks, “What’s on your mind?” the poster must review their world, process it, and then transform it into writing, video, or sound.
But since 2007, people have been filtering their lives through the window of the smartphone. That name is vestigial now, because it’s only incidental that an iPhone or a Pixel is a telephone. Instead, it’s a frame that surrounds everything that is possible and knowable. A rectangle, as I’ve started calling it.
The rectangle now frames experience. Information is rectangle-shaped, retrieved from searches in Google or apps or voice assistants. Personal communication comes in the form of a list of bubbles spilling down a rectangle. The physical world can be accessed by a map scaled to the boundaries of the rectangle, which can also provide way-finding through it. Music, movies, and television appear on these screens, and increasingly there alone. The rectangle is also an imaging device, capable of capturing a view of the world in front of it and the operator behind it....
