Reddit might be worse, actually, given their app is mediocre at best and they killed 3rd-party apps.

LinkedIn too. The first time they show a bottom sheet dialog thing on the website, and if you dismiss it, it scrolls you all the way to the top. The second time it appears, it messes with the page and sometimes automatically closes the tab.

Idk Google Maps is pretty bad. Clicking on the search bar force opens the App Store, and trying to load photos does the same and straight up lies to you saying it’s only available in the app. But if you scroll down to the second carousel of images it loads fine in web.

It's worse than that. 90% of the time I click on a tweet I just get the fucking login page. It seems to happen unless the tweet is from a very popular twitter account, ie one with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.

The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.

Most Apps are just emasculated and spyware-infested WebApps version of the website, anyway. Why not just use the Browser and get the real experience?

I do not want you app of crap.

Who on earth is still using Xitter, and what for?

> Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience

Uh, yeah you can.

> Can't buy a tesla without the app.

Works for me. No Tesla it is, then.

Not the only reason, but one of several.

You can absolutely buy a Tesla and operate it for the life of the vehicle without an app or even a smartphone. They have key fobs and keycards for this purpose. Go into the store or order online. Everything can be handled by the Tesla store if you are selling the car and need to transfer it to another person.

> that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car

Not sure why you’re blaming Apple for Tesla’s mistake of thinking a phone UI is appropriate for a car system UI.

Besides, you can “trace it back” to anyone you want really. The problem is not Apple. The problem is people accepting this nonsense from bullshit companies and apps in the first place.

Using umatrix or a monkey script and selectively editing what their website does, however, certainly help with privacy.

They're not able to spy on all the other websites I visit or apps I use via the browsers in the way they are by forcing me to install spyware on the spyware machines from Apple and Google.

There are a lot of businesses that have a semi-captive hold on a market. Like a recent example was I drove my daughter and I to a stage play, and to pay for street parking I had to install an app, make an account, and add a credit card. A thing that should have been scan the QR code and click one button to mobile pay became a five minute ordeal.

In theory we could have gotten back in the car and looked for parking elsewhere but the curtain was in 30 minutes and who's to say they didn't have a contract with the city that covered all the parking?

Overall a very hostile experience and I was annoyed about how little I felt I had a choice in it.

Not OP, but with DNS ad blocking like pi-hole you need to be aware that any "normies" living with you will hate it. DNS blockers silently break any kind of "sponsored links" in search results and a lot of the links in email marketing, and most people use those frequently. They don't take kindly to being told they're doing it wrong and have to change their browsing habits for benefits they don't perceive.

RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.

My setup is similar: A server at home runs Unbound for recursive DNS, filtered by Hagezi's blacklists. The phone (running GrapheneOS) consumes the DNS service through a Wireguard tunnel. This is 100% self-hosted and does not rely on Tailscale or a third-party DNS service. All the mobile carrier or WiFi hotspot used sees is a single encrypted connection to the server.

I'm also interested. I use tailscale and there is supposed to be a way to configure it to use my pihole DNS, but there is something in Android that prevents that. I think I have to set a custom DNS on the phone.

Their scheduling software is also blatantly broken. I understand the difficulty in monitoring a large distributed fleet, but their software loves to say trucks are unavailable where a quick phone call reveals they can accommodate the exact request.

That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...)

Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...

> just scan the QR

Lord no!

Scanning a random QR code.... where is the worst it will take you?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrpknqpgzlo

Unfortunately consumer preference surveys are all over the place. Most I've seen show they do prefer an app but data isn't exactly open. If you have this data feel free to share.

I'm sure every industry is different. For my current work, our users overwhelmingly want a native app. The majority of traffic is mobile and iOS. Everytime I tell someone about what I do they open up the app store and I have to tell them it's not on there and they ask why.

Anyway, apps have higher monetary conversion. The desire to push users to the app needs no other reason.

Do you run a consumer to web app? What do your users say? What's the predominant device and OS?

Data from your own users is the most useful, but here's some published data. There's plenty more to be found and of course methodology, quality and intention varies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK616185

https://www.aba.com/news-research/analysis-guides/preferred-...

https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-IAB-Glob...

NFC reading is one. That's why lots of Governments publish apps - it's a reliable way to check your passport if you need a visa etc.

It might be coming to the web - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API

Realtime stuff. Audio, video etc, games. Apps with a large user library (like the Photos app) that should work offline.

A ton of features work only or better on app:

  - anything privacy sensitive
  - anything processing intense (using optimized binaries)
  - widgets
  - camera and audio based features *can* work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
  - local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
  - performance/latency sensitive work
  - (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)

It’s also about friction.

No one wants to troubleshoot a card decline by logging into their mobile browser bank account in checkout at the grocery store.

True for genuine native apps, but most apps these days are just wrappers around web apps so you get none of the benefits of a true native app while also losing some of the benefits of a web app.

> And your data is on your machine.

Not really true anymore, especially on mobile. Plus the privacy invading abilities of native are much higher

No need to litigate this again, digital audioguides are now 20-25 year old technology and very popular.

> gratuitous over-use of technology.

That describes silicon valley tech culture to a tee.

Appclips in iOS are a decent shot at that. But require it to be under 15MB, which is really hard to hit, especially if you use RN, but we'll be dumping RN to make this happen as a next step.

>>The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time

Fundamentally though, iOS will auto-offload the unused apps for you (you won't get any notifications). For all intents and purposes, it is an ephemeral app already.

My android phone will put apps into "deep sleep" and remove all their permissions if I haven't opened it in a month or so. I just toss travel apps into a folder in my launcher and they are there if I need them but become just a consumer of drive space on their own.

When it comes to airline tickets I've been able to check in to a flight through a web page and then add the boarding pass to my Google Wallet without having to install that airline's app before. I'm pretty sure Apple has had some similar kind of a workflow but I wouldn't know for sure.

Not persistently, the user has to constantly bring the phone up and re-enable, which as you can imagine gets really annoying really quickly.

> amusing

You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.