Majority of my phone usage outside of reading HN is through dedicated apps. News, social media, chats and even substack. If I was building a product today, web would be quite low on the priority list outside of SEO capture.
I’m not disagreeing with you, merely providing more context. Companies like Reddit and Facebook definitely push you more to the apps so they can extract more value out of you.
Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.
That's not always possible. There might not be enough quality competition and I don't see others following my example to beat the shitty company into submission and make them change their ways if I do that.
> Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.
Web is very different in that regard. You can pry any app open and change basically anything with a single press of F12. Most of the time, people already did that for you and submitted an ad blocking filter for everyone to use. This isn't even close to the crapware of a typical app store.
Web is the last democratic platform we have left.
Some of what you gain is pretty important though. For example, well written native apps integrate better with the platform’s accessibility features and they typically consume less power, storage, and memory.
Well written web apps can be very accessible too and some companies do actually go out of their way to ensure this.
As an example: an absolutely vital tool for me is the Vimium keyboard control extension for navigation, which unfortunately can't be used in dedicated apps.
(Other than Google apps, that is.)