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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

(peabee.substack.com)
1192 points gniting | 1 comments | 29 Mar 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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turblety ◴[30 Mar 25 05:53 UTC] No.43521702[source]▶
I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp.

The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need.

Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept introduced by Apple/Google so they could scrape a huge percentage in sales.

Web browsers have good (not perfect) sandboxing, costs no fees to "submit" and are accessible to everyone on every phone.

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1. unethical_ban ◴[30 Mar 25 07:04 UTC] No.43522003[source]▶
There is nothing inherently evil about an app, or inherently good about a website - it's only because historically we have allowed crappy app permissions structures and allowing apps to ask for things they don't need.

Apps are faster, are more predictable (no auto-reloading or rendering issues) and generally perform better IMO.

On the other hand, in reality, you're correct. I think the NYTimes app will collect more data from me than the NYTimes website.