LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The online community is turning increasingly to Smartphones, tablets and now some TVs, the world's reliance on the Web is changing.

A new report on the future of the Web from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University says that the world's Internet habits are rapidly changing.

Mobile apps are changing the way we've been sharing information in the last 15 to 20 years, via the Web. Pew and Elon University interviewed more than 1,000 tech experts and critics from the public and private sector, about what the Internet will look like in the year 2020. 

"Apps are like cable channels - closed, proprietary, and cleaned-up experiences," Susan Crawford, former White House technology adviser says in the report.

"I don't want the world of the Web to end like this. But it will, because people's expectations have been shaped by companies that view them as consumers. Those giant interests will push every button they can: fear, inexperience, passivity, and willingness to be entertained. And we'll get a cleaned-up world that we can be perfectly billed for. It's not good."

A Rubicon could have been reached last June, Pew said, when researchers reported the amount of time Americans "spent on apps began to outpace the time spent on the desktop or mobile Web," an average of 81 minutes a day with apps compared to 74 minutes a day on the Web.

The gap was even wider in December, with 72 minutes a day on the Web compared to 94 minutes a day with apps, according to comScore, Alexa and Flurry Analytics.

Along those lines, "the boom in mobile connectivity has been accompanied by a boom in innovation and sales" of apps, Pew said.

Apple announced earlier this month that 25 billion apps have been downloaded since it opened its App Store in 2008, making it easy, inexpensive and fast to download programs tailored to a user's interests onto their mobile devices.

Google's Android Market, recently renamed Google Play, reached 10 billion downloads by last December -- "and users have been downloading apps at a rate of 1 billion a month," Pew says.

"I wish it weren't true, but the history of enclosure, centralization, and consolidation makes me very pessimistic about the open Web winning over the closed apps," Seth Finkelstein, a civil libertarian programmer, and past winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award said in the report.

"There will always be a Web, but it may end up like the imagery of a person standing on a soapbox, referred to more for its romantic symbolism than mattering in reality."

The full report can be read here:The Future of Apps and Web - http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Apps-and-Web.aspx

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