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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: 0.209s | 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. hedora ◴[30 Mar 25 16:28 UTC] No.43525355[source]▶
It’s clearly for data collection. Take the yelp web app for example. It used to be much nicer than the native one. Then, they intentionally defeatured it until it was useless.

Also, this situation benefits the google-apple duopoly, since it means superior products (remember Windows Phone 8?) or privacy focused devices (FirefoxOS) have no chance of getting a foothold in the marketplace.

The objections I see in sibling comments are nonsense. Modern web supports high frame rates, developer control over the UI, etc, etc.