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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this, personally I stopped installing new apps a while ago and use the browser more. I see apps as just security and privacy nightmares and forget about getting me to pay for them. Not to say I won't pay for good things, I have a number of subscriptions to various web services. There are a few exceptions where I have to install and use an app, and I resent each of those situations.

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I use F-Droid for pretty much everything now. They've had zero malware, and are very good about privacy. While the app selection is much smaller, I've been pretty happy with what I find there, at least for apps that were released within the past few years. Examples: Florisboard, Aegis Authenticator, Material Files, Finamp, Newpipe, Shelter, Connectbot, and anything by Simple Mobile Tools

Simple mobile tools recently fucked their gallery by removing password protected hidden folders for some bullshit reason.

The only fuckup they've done so far.

> Hi, apps like this can no longer show hidden files on Android 11+. It is a system limitation, not something we chose to do ourselves.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SimpleMobileTools/comments/u5fopt/s...

how are older app versions working?

Commenting to remind myself to check these out later.

I've also found SunTimes, SMS Backup+ (for SMS, MMS, Call log -> SMTP email), Markor, LawnChair, OpenCamera (specifically for manual camera control like exposure and focus), NewPipe, Aegis Authenticator, and FluffyChat to be really useful.

Thanks for your list of apps, there were a few I didn't know and that are what I had been searching for :)

I hate installing new apps as well and prefer mobile websites for most things.

So on a new project, we just created an amazing, reponsive web-app.

The most frequent feedback we got from users we showed it to was: "That's awesome! When is the (IOS/Android) app ready?"

Sigh...

just ship a launcher that opens the webpage with the address bar disabled :p

Or a PWA!

These two are not mutually exclusive, and well supported by most app stores now.

Apple rejects apps that are just wrappers around a website. :(

Apple will not accept that, unfortunately. :(

They will accept apps if it does something lame like implement login natively and have a bottom menu bar launcher.

I hate to say it, but I’d probably pay apple a cut if they’d let me distribute PWAs through their App Store without going through the trouble of building a lame native wrapper.

No need to ship a launcher. You can already do this on iOS/iPadOS:

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/add-a-web-link-to-home-scre...

When you tap on the icon on the home screen, it'll open up in Safari without any browser chrome visible.

Yes but then users know it's a weblink, and you're back to square one: "when is the Android/iOS app coming out?"

Similar views here.

It has recently become even worse as the Google Store no longer shows permissions.

Same exact sentiment and behavior on my end. I’ve become what I call “app-averse”

Would you be more likely to pay for a chrome extension?

Potentially, provided I found it both useful and trustworthy.

Most people don't even know what those are.

I will never pay for a chrome extension because of the threat vector it allows for malicious actors. Yes, maybe you've got a great extension, but you require DOM access for every page I hit. Maybe I even trust you completely! But

I can't trust that next week a bad actor buys you out and drops in a browser exploit.

Reminds me of people at work who blindly download and run github repos.

Yeah, I always get the heeby jeebies when I'm about to use a new github repo at work. I tend to add creedence to projects that have loads of stars simply because someone would've complained in the issues section if some nefarious things were afoot. Obviously this isn't foolproof.

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