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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: 0.308s | 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. dagmx ◴[30 Mar 25 17:02 UTC] No.43525642[source]▶
While many native apps could be web apps, you’re ignoring a very large reasons for native apps:

1. Better UX and responsiveness for users, including better offline use.

2. Using native hardware APIs. How are you going to do things that require on device video compression, or realtime graphics that are more advanced than GL ES, etc

3. Battery life and performance. A native app can use less power than a web view for doing its work, and it can also make use of better async/concurrency/threading than a web view allows for.