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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

(peabee.substack.com)
1192 points gniting | 9 comments | 29 Mar 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.238s | source | bottom
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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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ulrikrasmussen ◴[30 Mar 25 06:13 UTC] No.43521779[source]▶
There are also an increasing number of services which are ONLY available as apps now, including, but not limited to, many financial apps such as Revolut.

A big issue with this trend is that unlike the web, the whole Android ecosystem is a walled garden which is strictly controlled by Google. In principle you can run your own custom Android ROM, but in practice this will lock you out from any app which uses Play Integrity API to enforce Google's totalitarian regime which dictates what software YOU are allowed to run on "your" hardware.

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1. IshKebab ◴[30 Mar 25 07:21 UTC] No.43522087[source]▶
The worst one is the UK's NHS app, which is only available as an app, despite being just a webview wrapper! I have no idea what they were thinking.
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2. cyberpunk ◴[30 Mar 25 08:14 UTC] No.43522366[source]▶
Sometimes it’s a compliance thing, e.g we can only show health data if your device passes some security controls first.
3. WesolyKubeczek ◴[30 Mar 25 08:18 UTC] No.43522375[source]▶
What happens when you visit whatever URL is being wrapped?
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4. IshKebab ◴[30 Mar 25 08:26 UTC] No.43522423[source]▶
I dunno, I haven't reverse engineered it to find the URL. But I would imagine it gets confused about authentication.
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5. donalhunt ◴[30 Mar 25 09:17 UTC] No.43522701{3}[source]▶
Would put money it on it using something like '?device_verified=1'.
6. whstl ◴[30 Mar 25 10:10 UTC] No.43522932[source]▶
IME those apps often have the HTML/JS embedded, so you would have to extract the contents, host them somewhere and proxy the API calls.
7. pasc1878 ◴[30 Mar 25 13:49 UTC] No.43524183[source]▶
You go to the nhs webpage and it works in the same way.

Login is better on the iOS app as you can use touch id/faceId and not userid/password also the webpage asks for cookies as it can't seem to remember the choice

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8. IshKebab ◴[30 Mar 25 17:18 UTC] No.43525792{3}[source]▶
Really? What's the URL that would allow me to see test results and book appointments?
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9. pasc1878 ◴[31 Mar 25 09:07 UTC] No.43532802{4}[source]▶
Unfortunately that seems to depend on who did the test or your GP.

There seem to be sites for your GP (which mine does via a .nhs.uk domain it used to be via https://account.patientaccess.com/ which still shows appointments but does not allow booking but still allows requests for repeat prescriptions.) or hospital portal for results.