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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

WhatsApp would be the only thing you couldn't replace with a web version, since you need to use WhatsApp on your phone to verify your session.

Sites like Instagram will also become increasingly aggressive in pushing you towards the app as you use the mobile web version until it eventually denies you new content. I believe Twitter and TikTok are the same.

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There's a bunch of other social media services (Line does something similar, mixi does too) that force some anchoring to a mobile phone, probably to guarantee access to the phone number and be sure to have you use the service on the go.

I think they care less about being native than having direct access to your phone and data. An alternative OS giving similar privileges to PWA could probably be rubber stamped by these services. (do we want that though ?)

I use Instagram mostly through the web interface (because uBlock Origin), and while it works pretty well on desktop, on mobile Firefox its super buggy and generally not a great experience. It's worth it for me to see what's going on without adds, but I can't imagine most people would accept the tradeoff.

Whatsapp does have a PWA variant though, used in India for KaiOS (which is pretty much FirefoxOS)

> WhatsApp would be the only thing you couldn't replace with a web version

Well you _could_, they just don't want you to. I very rarely use Whatsapp on my phone. Then again, I very rarely use Whatsapp :P

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