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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

I dont agree, personally.

I believe that putting everything online is not sustainable. It might be very difficult to believe for people who earn so much that they can afford 24/7 stable and fast internet anywhere they go, but there are places where even good old broadband dsl is unstable, in the west.

The reasoning of "appstore bad -> lets not use any appstores" is flawed. There are "appstores" like the ones on FOSS systems like linux (discover on Arch/Manjaro comes to mind), which show that you can make an appstore yourself.

All we need is to build a cross platform, community managed app store, which allows foss and non-foss apps, with a payment system. Thats the solution, not "make it a webapp".

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There's no reason why a web app can't work in offline mode.

Think of a web browser as the ultimate App Store -- you navigate to any "app" by using your search engine of choice or by passing around links to the "apps" via email / messaging. Then, you bookmark your "app" so that it's available with one click.

Offline storage, offline compute, notifications, etc. are all things that we can do via web APIs just as easily as proprietary vendor code.

Sure, some things might need native experiences, but those are definitely the exception, not the rule. Even games and navigation and real-time video can be accomplished via web-only APIs.

You’re overstating the capabilities of web APIs. Good luck trying to make a real web app with 3D graphics, offline storage, offline compute, or push notifications. All of that stuff is totally gimped compared with native iOS and Android APIs. This is no accident; widespread cross-platform app development with no revenue cut would go against the interests of the browser engine vendors.

As far as I can tell, a native dating app or a webapp for that matter require an active web connection for full functionality.

Should be possible to queue up profiles when online, review them offline, and sync back responses to the service when online again.

The first thing we need to do is stop confusing content filters with app stores.

You can have a choice in both.

It's app stores as the single gatekeeper to a platform that's bad. I think it's actually fine if there's an app store where you can get vetted apps that have some official stamp of approval from the store owner, but it's also important that that store doesn't have the monopoly to that platform. It should be possible for users to choose a different app store.

Ugh. Why do we even need an app store exactly?

Visit site. Click download app. Click install.

This pattern has worked for 20 years. What changed?

Nothing. Google and apple just decided it wanted a walled garden and ya'll said ooo shiny.

Though I share your sentiments, that pattern worked very well at infecting machines with malware for 20 years because the average user is a bad judge of which sites to trust to install software on their device.

Then again, app stores haven't solved the malware problem, and neither have solutions like trusted publishers / signing executables / etc. I look forward to seeing a solution that isn't worst-of-both-worlds.

I remember installing software before app stores. Everyone was always afraid of malware but very few people I knew ever suffered from it. Most people used anti virus software, asked their friends which programs they recommended, or did some research of their own to figure out what was safe to download. All that was probably at least as effective as the “curation” that app stores provide. The problem is that now a lot of people implicitly trust apps from app stores and there is the added harm that there are now sanctioned forms of malware that serve ads, steal info and try to sell you exploitative in app purchases.

> Everyone was always afraid of malware but very few people I knew ever suffered from it. Most people used anti virus software, asked their friends which programs they recommended, or did some research of their own to figure out what was safe to download. All that was probably at least as effective as the “curation” that app stores provide.

That’s the opposite of my experience. I remember lots of malware - toolbars, search engine defaults, using malware bytes, ccleaner, antivirus programs, and a bunch of other crap I can’t remember to de-malware my older relatives’ computers when I was a kid. There was no way to prevent my elders from getting malware on their Windows computers, because they just had to click on everything.

Then iOS came out and I never spent another minute dealing with uninstalling and scanning for malware. Any software problems were solved by deleting the app, or turning the device off and on.

The problem is that code execution evolved to ransomware because cryptocurrency.

If we’re being honest, some barriers were crossed and the threat evolved

> code execution evolved to ransomware because cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency might have made it easier, but such scams are older than that. Just look at the whole range of tech support scams based on voucher codes.

A tech support scam can be unlocked by a competent technician for much less than the amount requested by the crooks. A ransomware attack with asymmetric crypto cannot be unlocked in a similar way, math simply won't let you (bar faulty ransomware that happens to reveal its key).

What fixed that is sandboxing. It's not really clear how much app stores do. And in fairness to Google, their malware scanning system is not tied to their app store. Stuff installed outside the store gets scanned too.

> I look forward to seeing a solution that isn't worst-of-both-worlds

Software repositories? Still not perfect in terms of security but better than manually searching for installer packages, deciding between the official download that requires some account registration or a slightly questionable download site and then hoping for the best. Same for updates - the way many third-party programs on Windows expect me to basically download and reinstall the whole program again unless the developer built their own custom auto-updater is ridiculous.

And for the average user I'd say technologies between flatpak and Snap are a decent step in the right direction - easier installation and updates, less trouble with dependencies(in theory), a bit of isolation and file access limits. Unless you want to explain relatives how to setup Qubes OS this is probably the next best thing within the near future.

> Though I share your sentiments, that pattern worked very well at infecting machines with malware for 20 years

And what happened? Did we all die? It's not just the security promise that's unfulfilled, it is also the threats that are way overblown.

I don't know there's a great solution to secure general purpose computing. Malware has been part of my life since 5.25" floppy disk era.

You can still do that on android if you want. I still like to have an option of walled garden platform where everything is vetted so flashlight app wont dump every single thing that I have on the phone just because it can.

That would be a problem if we would have no choice, but that is not the case.

Sandboxing and permissioned APIs for accessing data is what prevents that, not the half-assed vetting that Google does.

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