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Comment by ulrikrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

There are also an increasing number of services which are ONLY available as apps now, including, but not limited to, many financial apps such as Revolut.

A big issue with this trend is that unlike the web, the whole Android ecosystem is a walled garden which is strictly controlled by Google. In principle you can run your own custom Android ROM, but in practice this will lock you out from any app which uses Play Integrity API to enforce Google's totalitarian regime which dictates what software YOU are allowed to run on "your" hardware.

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The worst one is the UK's NHS app, which is only available as an app, despite being just a webview wrapper! I have no idea what they were thinking.

Sometimes it’s a compliance thing, e.g we can only show health data if your device passes some security controls first.

What happens when you visit whatever URL is being wrapped?

You go to the nhs webpage and it works in the same way.

Login is better on the iOS app as you can use touch id/faceId and not userid/password also the webpage asks for cookies as it can't seem to remember the choice

Really? What's the URL that would allow me to see test results and book appointments?

Unfortunately that seems to depend on who did the test or your GP.

There seem to be sites for your GP (which mine does via a .nhs.uk domain it used to be via https://account.patientaccess.com/ which still shows appointments but does not allow booking but still allows requests for repeat prescriptions.) or hospital portal for results.

IME those apps often have the HTML/JS embedded, so you would have to extract the contents, host them somewhere and proxy the API calls.

I dunno, I haven't reverse engineered it to find the URL. But I would imagine it gets confused about authentication.

Would put money it on it using something like '?device_verified=1'.

Not only that, but these companies are effectively letting Google decide who they can do business with. It's insane.

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