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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: 0s | 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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sbierwagen ◴[30 Mar 25 19:13 UTC] No.43526688[source]▶
Push notifications. Apps have them on by default, websites have them off by default. 100% of Temu's valuation is because they pester users all the time with nudges to buy stuff, which works.

Normies don't turn off notifications. Over the last few years all my relatives have picked up smart watches, (thanks to cell carriers upselling them hard during phone replacements) and in any given conversation at family events they'll be glancing at their wrist every 100 seconds.

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1. retrac ◴[30 Mar 25 19:19 UTC] No.43526736[source]▶
Registering for push notifications ought to be a protocol much simpler and lightweight, compared to this spinning up a virtual machine and running a downloaded binary for each channel of notification you wish to receive.