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.
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)
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!
"This looks better in the app" because they sabotage the web experience so they can do this very thing.
- 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.
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.
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.
Not sure if this changes your calculus at all, but it can (theoretically) be used on chrome for android.
There is a lot that a website can do to profile you too.
The webbrowser limits their ability to spy on you dramatically.
In what way?
What information can a native app get from a user that a website couldn't?
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.
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.
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.
Web apps have a lot of access to your data as well, especially your location data.
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.