this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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48
Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One's Happy (nooneshappy.com)
submitted 6 hours ago by 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 10 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict.

On March 27, 2026, the Trump administration released an official White House app for iOS and Android. ... Apple requires apps to submit a privacy manifest disclosing what data they collect. The White House app declared an empty array. Zero data collection. Meanwhile, the actual binary contained ten analytics frameworks, including the full OneSignal SDK with a sub-framework specifically for location tracking

Hm. Didn't think about it like that.

[–] morto@piefed.social 4 points 2 hours ago

And don't forget one of the main reasons to push for apps: to drain your attention by showing notifications, maximizing your usage of their products

[–] FatherPeanut@pawb.social 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

No shame if you're one of these people, but I figured mostly everyone on Lemmy would've known about this sorta stuff by now. While many apps are just frontends for services, the presence of an app alone is enough to massively expand trackability of the user. Heck, its profitable enough for companies to force people to use apps that some services are forcing all mobile website visits to redirect straight to an app store.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 56 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

For mobile

I initially thought this was an argument for electron/PWA bullshit. “Why is eating 2GB of RAM and has no locally loaded content?”

When companies are pushing apps as hard as they usually are, I assume there’s a benefit to them and not to me.

[–] chisel@piefed.social 30 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

For any platform, really, it's just that mobile suffers from the "everything must be an app" problem the worst. Luckily, fast food hasn't gotten bold enough to ask you to install a desktop app when opening their website.

99% of apps can just be websites, and probably 80%+ of them are just PWAs in a wrapper that can be published on an app store.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

A lot of fast food places offer coupons only in the app.

I used to go in to pick up the coupon books or they’d get sent to my mailbox.

RIP “2 can dine for $6.99”

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 4 hours ago

I just realized it's been months since I got the bundle of coupons in the mail.

[–] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

That’s fine, I don’t eat from fast food places. One less app to install.

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 hours ago

IIRC (from others, never installed it) McDonald's app is also obnoxious, requiring permissions and refusing to run on custom ROMs and rooted devices. It was once used alongside some common banking apps as a metric of "how close to Google Android is this ROM".

[–] chris@links.openriver.net 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

PWA is where you save the website as an icon on your desktop right? I use several websites like that. What’s the drawback?

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

PWA isn’t as bad as electron but it’s similar. No local storage or offline capability - which is fine for a weather app, but not fine for something with persistent data like email or chat or a word processor. My computer has loaded up an entire GUI, with local storage and RAM, make use of it in an intelligent way instead of just loading a browser instance and assuming I don’t mind latency.

PWA is 100% better than an “App” that’s just a data collection unit showing the website. Which is all too common too.

[–] elmicha@feddit.org 10 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

PWAs can use local storage and they can have service workers, which allows them to run offline, at least in theory.

[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 3 points 2 hours ago

No local storage or offline capability

Yeah, this is 100% wrong. They definitely can use local storage and have offline capabilities.

They even have an object store: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API

[–] chris@links.openriver.net 2 points 4 hours ago

Okay I think I get it. Yeah the PWA I save are usually websites I frequent but don’t want to install their app.

[–] warm@kbin.earth 9 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Web apps ruined UX though, at least with apps (historically anyway) you would get some consistent UI. There were design guidelines developers could follow. Same for programs on PCs.

Then PWAs came along and ruined UI/UX. Do UX designers even exist anymore?

Sigh. But trading good UI for tracking and data collection, is indeed, not worth it.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure the degradation of websites has been intentional to drive app usage.

[–] warm@kbin.earth 2 points 3 hours ago

The apps are not much better these days. I think it's just cost cutting, avoiding hiring dedicated UX designers.

[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Web apps ruined UX though

How so? Do you mean that companies are allowed to customize their own apps now? Cuz with regular desktop frameworks it's pretty hard to do that (compared to web frameworks anyway). All apps end up looking the same.

[–] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Yes. That's literally the point. The more things look and behave as expected, the easier they are to use.

Of course these days that gets trumped by the desire to shove the corporate design everywhere.

[–] uuj8za@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

I'm not sure limiting customization is actually a good thing... There are legitimate customizations and innovative inputs that people like.

For example, Logseq has a fancy text field that can bring up a submenu if you type two left brackets. Something like this is pretty specific to Logseq (or at least certain notes apps) and this would be much harder to replicate in a native app.

Or are you saying Logseq shouldn't do that? And it should assume that the notes area is just a plain text field? I guess that would be considered more "expected".

At least in my experience with Vala and GTK, this would take significantly more effort.

[–] fogrye@lemmy.zip -3 points 1 hour ago

You Americans are crazy about ICE / Palantir now don’t you. Anyway article is factually incorrect and very biased.