This is why I never use native apps on my phone. The experience sucks but I muddle through using the web for reading Twitter, reddit, etc.
I am constantly, constantly bombarded with "this looks better in the app! please just run our app!!" as I browse. Still I refuse--with the web I at least know they can't harvest information about everything I'm doing. There are still some privacy concerns of course but it's much better to have the web as a firewall of sorts.
Twitter and (old)reddit are better as mobile websites in every way.
We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form a queue of things to read.
Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that. They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at social media companies, they want to prevent their users leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net negative feedback loop for user satisfaction.
Social media apps have no multitasking features (at least last time I used them). It's absurd.
I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three years. Will never install the app again.
(Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React Native is an attempt to distract developers from the advantages of a WebView based app development process that would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs into the app stores as a distribution channel)
It's incredibly interesting that consumer operating systems have done nothing to try to catch the web browsing experience. They've let themselves go no where. Tabs, multi-document interfaces, managing many files at once, is just not something the OS is good at.
I remember the couple months or years where each Chrome tab was it's own app instance. I thought it was incredibly ambitious & interesting to make the OS try to deal with tabs, be a manager. And indeed Google backed it out. And so as usual, Android is in the background of daily life, hardly ever touched or used, and I just stay in Chrome almost all day letting it define every bit of my computing existence.
The web experience just has so many more hooks & so much more power, than these little self-defined bespoke inward experiences. Because so much part because browser gives us such basic & flexibility utility as we compute & surf.
Thanks for the good post, enjoyed reading very much, & two thumbs up!
Why torture yourself with any reddit website though? Popular websites like reddit have multiple open source native apps. Just slap F-Droid on your Android and download Redreader, Slide or any of the 10+ clients you find.
If you don't care about being logged in libreddit is even better, especially for especially for image-heavy subs. https://farside.link/libreddit should get you a currently working instance.
i.reddit.com is amazing but broken in small ways. you can't sort comments or browse multis. Also, trying to pull comments beyond a page breaks in some places.
The funniest thing is that this trickles down to small SAAS companies, all of whom think they need two native apps. Talking to them about it is illuminating. Their app doesn't need to:
- use bluetooth, accelerometer data, or anything else not exposed to a browser
- spy on their user closely to generate valuable data (your app is the product, not the user)
- be discovered in the apple or google app stores. Relatively expensive, niche, high touch, business to business apps are not impulse buys for bored managing directors.
And their dev team is usually already over burdened just dealing with the web stuff.
But still they pour money into the two native apps bucket. Before they're even profitable...
I wonder how much this "IT LOOKS BETTER IN THE APP" propaganda is affecting their business sense. Twitter and Facebooks business model is a bit different from B2B SAAS SME.
When you need to do anything actually useful in these apps they typically send you to a browser anyway. Or worse, you have to do so yourself because you discover something isn't fully implemented in the app part way through using it.
Recently a coworker was struggling to change some personal details online and got stuck in a loop of no access due to multi-factor authentication. The phone helpdesk kept directing them back to the site to get stuck again. The solution? In this case the app's lack of support was a blessing. Personal details could be easily changed there because the app hadn't implemented multi-factor authentication.
As someone who works with mobile apps that use Bluetooth, I would be very happy to just write one app in the browser if that was available. However we are not there yet, so two native apps it is.
As a mobile dev, it's sometimes frustrating finding interesting work and BLE seems to be one area where businesses are willing to do something useful outside of duplicating simple REST calls and occasional multimedia uploads so the app can be at parity with the limitations of a website. Most product people are limited in their thinking of what's even possible because of their narrow usage of the capabilities.
Our phones are packed with sensors, and are more powerful than the computers that landed us on the moon. Apps can be so much more than dumb pipes for simple data upload and download from a server.
I agree, the whole mobile ecosystem feels just gross to me. Microtransactions, everyone pushing their shady app instead of a website, navigating the app stores feels like wading in a swamp where everything wants to kill me.
I predicted that it would end up this way way back in the 2000s when mobile was “the future” and was going to supplant all other forms of computing. I just saw it as obvious due to the walled garden nature of the system. It prohibits so much innovation so all we get is surveillance and addictionware plays.
I really think so, so I'm running /e/ OS with F-Droid as the app store. Thanks to the preinstalled microg, it can even run normal Android apps just fine, and with the built-in privacy settings I can disable trackers inside the few apps I opted to install from the normal Play store.
I typically prefer app UI and use permissions to control my data. If I set iOS to deny location data to Twitter, then Twitter cannot log my location even if the mobile app runs code to do so.
There is a lot that a website can do to profile you too.
While I agree in principle, wouldn’t it be true that cookies from e.g. Safari aren’t going to be readable by an external app, the way they could be from an iframe or whatever the cross-site tracking tricks are today?
same, my Wife who has 2-3 dozen apps is asking me why do you not use apps?(I have <10 apps on my phone) and I said I do not trust my data for one second with alot of these unscrupulous apps. I have a strong bias towards privacy - caveat emptor.
As an aside, if you use iOS, Banish will nuke those “open in app” popups. Costs one $2 payment, which I was more than happy to give to a dev working on a useful product. Works very well, and gets updated quickly when it doesn’t.
And this is also why sites like twitter and reddit are absolutely insistent and completely obnoxious if you don't use their apps... even though their service could and should run extremely well as a plain webpage.
The webbrowser limits their ability to spy on you dramatically.
Apps cannot run constantly in the background, they're very much at the whim of the Operating System and must register background operations and complete them usually in ~30s before being killed.
They also can't collect any information in the background they couldn't in the foreground. Like apps can't tell which apps you open, can't tell what info you put into other apps, can't track you across other apps etc.
Actually upon further looking at the docs I don't think they can collect any information in the background.
Like the app has to register as being allowed in background mode, upon which if a push notification is sent to it the OS wakes it up for ~30 seconds to make an API call or set data. But there's no UI shown, there's no ability to track which app is open, or even if the device is awake or asleep. It's not like the apps are able to run code in the background whenever they choose.
not including apps with Allow in Background location permission, like bicycle tracking apps etc. but those are done with explicit permission from the user.
Seconded. Nearly no apps are doing anything that warrants a "native" experience, they're glorified document viewers and form fields. Fuck 'em, I'd rather stop using a service than install an app.
My android phone's apps must ask for permission to use some of this data (location, microphone, filesystem, etc.), and android provides the options "always", "only when using the app", "this time only", and "never"; which seems to help with this problem, though I'm sure it's nowhere near a silver bullet. When I leave my home I only feel (mostly) untracked if I do so without my phone and only buy things with cash, which is almost non-existent behavior for myself and the people I know.
Apps don't have access to device IDs other than IDFA, which can be reset at any time by the user.
> wake/sleep/network events, etc
Apps can't tell if the device has been woken up or put to sleep, apps only have access to their own application state events like didEnterForeground and didEnterBackground.
Apps can tell if the device's internet has been connected or disconnected, I didn't know that was not possible on websites.
As someone who disables JavaScript while browsing, I find it disappointing that you are encouraging more developers to build web apps rather than a native experience.
I can't really inspect or block things in the iPhone browser either. The javascript is opaque and I can't easily inspect what it's doing or what it sends.
Web apps have a lot of access to your data as well, especially your location data.
Not if you deny the sites access to your location data, the permission for which is denied-by-default and is never, ever actually necessary for anything.
Because I honestly never know whether or not an app has permission or not to access my location. App permissions are granted when the app is installed, not when it's run. Furthermore, apps update silently, and are they giving themselves new permissions or not with each update? If I have given an app permissions to access my location, how do I see that, and how do I revoke it? And if I don't manually close the app, is it still running in the background accessing my location at all times? For how long? For websites, these questions are easy to answer. For apps, I find it to be an utter mystery. App permissions are mess; better than free-for-all OSes like Windows, but worse than the web.
> App permissions are granted when the app is installed, not when it's run
This is not the case in iOS, and I don't believe it's the case in android either, IIRC. You can also always audit app permissions via the settings app.
> how do I revoke it
Settings app. No idea how I'd do it in the browser, FWIW. Nor how I'd audit what permissions an app has.
> it still running in the background accessing my location at all times
Apple has a "allow location access only while running [in the foreground]" option as well. Not sure about Android.
> Furthermore, apps update silently, and are they giving themselves new permissions or not with each update?
They are absolutely not doing this. Security auditors would be screaming from the rafters if Apple or Google allowed app updates to change their permissions settings.
Who said websites have to use JS? Your argument is orthogonal to companies using apps to harvest user information, and being blocked by web platform there. There's no reason Facebook, Twitter, etc. has to use JavaScript in their web experience.
I am constantly, constantly bombarded with "this looks better in the app! please just run our app!!" as I browse. Still I refuse--with the web I at least know they can't harvest information about everything I'm doing. There are still some privacy concerns of course but it's much better to have the web as a firewall of sorts.