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turblety ◴[] 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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setopt ◴[] No.43522076[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.

In cases where a native app and web app are both available on iOS, there’s often a huge difference in battery usage and sluggishness. Also, as a sibling poster mentioned, I like having fully “offline” apps as well, for example for maps and notes.

I’m not saying that I like how Apple and Google have done this in practice, but I don’t think going webapp-only is the future. For the same reason I won’t replace my real computer with a Chromebook for the foreseeable future.

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1. wodenokoto ◴[] No.43522160[source]
When the iPhone came out, you had full offline access on PC to Gmail and google docs using Google Gears.

Google Gears got deprecated because something something move to standard HTMl and browser features and now we don’t really have any offline web apps.

The ability to have non sluggish, offline web apps has existed for decades now, but the interest from providers has been declining and the understanding that this is possible is also declining on the consumer side.