Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

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.

> 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.

> 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.