Why native apps have become privacy liabilities, and why the browser is almost always the better choice.
  • uuj8za@piefed.socialEnglish
    7 minutes

    Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict.

    On March 27, 2026, the Trump administration released an official White House app for iOS and Android. … Apple requires apps to submit a privacy manifest disclosing what data they collect. The White House app declared an empty array. Zero data collection. Meanwhile, the actual binary contained ten analytics frameworks, including the full OneSignal SDK with a sub-framework specifically for location tracking

    Hm. Didn’t think about it like that.

  • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4 hours

    For mobile

    I initially thought this was an argument for electron/PWA bullshit. “Why is <app> eating 2GB of RAM and has no locally loaded content?”

    When companies are pushing apps as hard as they usually are, I assume there’s a benefit to them and not to me.

    • chisel@piefed.socialEnglish
      4 hours

      For any platform, really, it’s just that mobile suffers from the “everything must be an app” problem the worst. Luckily, fast food hasn’t gotten bold enough to ask you to install a desktop app when opening their website.

      99% of apps can just be websites, and probably 80%+ of them are just PWAs in a wrapper that can be published on an app store.

      • [object Object]@lemmy.caEnglish
        3 hours

        A lot of fast food places offer coupons only in the app.

        I used to go in to pick up the coupon books or they’d get sent to my mailbox.

        RIP “2 can dine for $6.99”

        • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
          2 hours

          I just realized it’s been months since I got the bundle of coupons in the mail.

        • YurkshireLad@lemmy.caEnglish
          3 hours

          That’s fine, I don’t eat from fast food places. One less app to install.

          • Yaky@slrpnk.netEnglish
            3 hours

            IIRC (from others, never installed it) McDonald’s app is also obnoxious, requiring permissions and refusing to run on custom ROMs and rooted devices. It was once used alongside some common banking apps as a metric of “how close to Google Android is this ROM”.

    • chris@links.openriver.netEnglish
      3 hours

      PWA is where you save the website as an icon on your desktop right? I use several websites like that. What’s the drawback?

      • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3 hours

        PWA isn’t as bad as electron but it’s similar. No local storage or offline capability - which is fine for a weather app, but not fine for something with persistent data like email or chat or a word processor. My computer has loaded up an entire GUI, with local storage and RAM, make use of it in an intelligent way instead of just loading a browser instance and assuming I don’t mind latency.

        PWA is 100% better than an “App” that’s just a data collection unit showing the website. Which is all too common too.

  • warm@kbin.earth
    3 hours

    Web apps ruined UX though, at least with apps (historically anyway) you would get some consistent UI. There were design guidelines developers could follow. Same for programs on PCs.

    Then PWAs came along and ruined UI/UX. Do UX designers even exist anymore?

    Sigh. But trading good UI for tracking and data collection, is indeed, not worth it.

    • uuj8za@piefed.socialEnglish
      12 minutes

      Web apps ruined UX though

      How so? Do you mean that companies are allowed to customize their own apps now? Cuz with regular desktop frameworks it’s pretty hard to do that (compared to web frameworks anyway). All apps end up looking the same.

    • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
      2 hours

      I’m pretty sure the degradation of websites has been intentional to drive app usage.

      • warm@kbin.earth
        1 hour

        The apps are not much better these days. I think it’s just cost cutting, avoiding hiring dedicated UX designers.