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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

(peabee.substack.com)
1192 points gniting | 7 comments | 29 Mar 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 1.164s | 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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setopt ◴[30 Mar 25 07:20 UTC] 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. wiseowise ◴[30 Mar 25 08:12 UTC] No.43522352[source]▶
> 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.

Yeah, like single native instagram draining battery faster than combination of multiple websites that I visit in Safari.

> For the same reason I won’t replace my real computer with a Chromebook for the foreseeable future.

> real computer

Where most of the modern applications are either web wrappers or Electron apps.

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2. carlosjobim ◴[30 Mar 25 13:20 UTC] No.43523966[source]▶
> Where most of the modern applications are either web wrappers or Electron apps.

Only if you're stuck on a depreciated platform like Linux. If you are on Mac, native applications – real applications – are much more powerful and usable than any web wrapper on Linux.

I've noticed Linux users have taken a habit of proposing their broken way of using a computer through the browser for other platforms as well. But on other platforms we are already spoiled with quality software.

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3. rlpb ◴[30 Mar 25 13:40 UTC] No.43524116[source]▶
Native applications are way better on Linux, too. But only where they exist. There are plenty of "apps" where there developers have taken shortcuts by getting "Linux support" by using Electron. These app perform noticeably worse and are generally disliked by their users.
4. mattl ◴[30 Mar 25 15:56 UTC] No.43525127[source]▶
Good native Mac apps are on the decline too.
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5. alabastervlog ◴[30 Mar 25 16:10 UTC] No.43525216[source]▶
I’m still bitter about Apple backing off their stance against using web tech in apps. Most apps that are really bad, are really bad because they’re just wrapping websites.
6. carlosjobim ◴[30 Mar 25 17:40 UTC] No.43525964{3}[source]▶
What are you missing?
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7. mattl ◴[30 Mar 25 19:02 UTC] No.43526613{4}[source]▶
I was lamenting the lack of native UI in Blender last night.

I’ve been using Nova for the last few years. Increasingly native non-Xcode development tools seem to be few and far between. I have BBEdit and Nova, but a lot of people have switched to VS Code it seems.