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Looking at you Reddit...

Just when we got everything somewhat standardized to use the same application (browser) for all content this stupid separate app for every content producer culture explodes. Seems like three steps back

Isn't there a Google PageRank penalty for sites that do that now?

There’s a dedicated API now…

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/app-install-b...

It uses some heuristics:

> Be visited by the user twice, over two separate days during the course of two weeks.

I think apps installed this way should be also limited to some subset of permissions they can request[1]. Otherwise this is almost like a bookmarking mechanism.

[1] They could still explicitly ask for more, on use.

Google's own site doesn't do this! I haven't visited google sheets on my phone in quite a while (ever?), but when I go to sheets.google.com, I get an ad for the google sheets app, and it's in no way clear that it's possible to use a web interface. Same for google docs.