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There's a reason everybody wants you to install their app instead of just using their website, there's much more opportunity of tracking.

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To hurt you. The reason is to hurt you and it's unfortunate that we're in denial about it.

> The reason is to hurt you

I'm not sure how this reasoning works. Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual, generally speaking. It's rare that such an opportunity even exists.

My data is worth money, that's why they want it. If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing? And then isn't stealing obviously hurting me?

Just because you don't know how much your data is worth, and may not even know the crime happened, doesn't make it not a crime or not harmful.

Consider voyeurs who take upskirt photos. Even though the victim may never know that data was stolen, it's undeniable that it's an invasion of privacy and often a criminal offence.

> If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing?

They don't take it. The value of your information is either inherent (is all information inherently valuable somehow?) or in how it can be used. There is no information "staked claim" as with a natural resource. If you don't have the infrastructure and relationships, you can't monetize it... similar to natural resources. Maybe there should be an individual "staked claim" (which is what the GDPR mostly does), but arguing as if it's a given because "I should be able to make money and nobody else should" is not compelling. This is why there are so few laws regarding it and there's the inherent quasi-legal issue of tracking someone's "staked claim" without tracking them.

Isn't it disingenuous to say it's stealing? From my perspective, I would be exchanging my data with the services provided and if I have a problem with the level of data collection I can always stop using the service and delete my account. I'm sure there are services today that are useful to me that are not possible without data monetization.

It's a question of degree, I don't inherently mind being advertised too or getting targeted advertisements. I do mind having my entire location history known by many parties.

I can get the former largely without the latter. I am concerned when a random app has access to the latter because they feel entitled to collect it by virtue of installation.

> My data is worth money, that's why they want it. If they take it from me without permission, how is that not stealing?

Because it’s not actually yours and you didn’t create it. It’s about you which is a critical difference.

If you connect to a web server and it records a standard access log of a timestamp that it received a request from a given IP address, that’s data 100% generated by the server. That’s not “your data” any more than a recording from a surveillance camera at a gas station you frequent is “your video”.

The number of leaps you made in this one short post is truly astounding.

To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual; a blatant disregard for their interests accomplishes the same thing at scale. Not caring about what occurs to the individual means that systemically decisions will be made at their detriment.

Get put in a filter bubble? Have your government track you for protesting? Get on the wrong side of grey market price discrimination? Have your access to data and websites revoked?

Parties to a transaction that have no power don't come out ahead.

>> The reason is to hurt you and it's unfortunate that we're in denial about it.

> To the extent that the individual and the marketer's interests are not aligned, the harm is borne entirely by the individual. It doesn't matter if the intention is to harm the individual

Of course it does. That's the claim. Don't bring up tangential subjects and then try to associate them as if it's a rephrasing.

GP is saying disregard for the population's interests (plural "you") is equivalent to intending to harm many individual "you"s.

I agree that intent matters, but lack of intent is not a get out of jail free card.

There's a reason both murder and manslaughter are crimes.

The hyperbole against adtech on hackernews is insane. I swear most people here think its the biggest problem that the world faces.

I mean, it arguably drives the out-of-control materialism that is currently devastating the environment. Not sure it’s hyperbole.

Yeah I'm no fan of it either, but i don't think its responsible for materialism in our society, thats been around much longer than adtech.

It's the biggest problem the online world faces? It's structurally unsound and it's making itself into the foundations of the future world in general.

Maybe we are among the few people who understands the issue??

I mean, grandma isn't going to figure this out on her own. She is happy to have a way to get in touch with her grandchildren and has no idea she is being exploited.

Or maybe our sense of whats important is warped because of the bubble we live in ?

> Some company making money using your information isn't with intent to hurt an individual

The Mercer family didn't personally want to kill, imprison, or cripple a bunch of people, but that's certainly what they achieved with their opiod business.

In some way they actually DO have the goal to hurt you though, specifically because it is aligned with their way of making money. When it comes to the attempt to shackle you onto their platform, increase "engagement" (outrage and negative emotion), put dark patterns into place to make leaving as hurtful as possible, and also invading the privacy of people not even directly using their platform. [1]

Facebook hurting you might be because they want the money, but they specifically choose to make money by hurting you, and society. [2][3]

So in the end I don't think it is wrong to phrase it that way. Someone beating you up in exchange for money still has the goal of beating you up.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...

[2]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007995.2021.1...

[3]: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/social-media-news%20consumpt...

I think "exploit" is more accurate than "hurt" here.

There's several reasons why everyone wants you to install the app, some of which aren't sketchy.

Seriously, what are they? Every time I get pointed at an app, I can only think of https://xkcd.com/1174/

Many (most?) apps don't do it, but the useful feature for me that's not possible with a web page is reliable, unobtrusive, background updates.

Things like weather (with or without current coarse location), sports scores, headline news benefit from up to the minute data fetches, but older data is still useful.

For communication apps, often people would like notifications on inbound messages, so that can fit with web push apis to get data; but if you don't want notifications, you can't consistently make messages available to read offline.

A few out of my head:

1) Shortcut on the homescreen by simply tapping 1 button(install) instead of hoping that the user will somehow remember you. WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.

2) Sign in once with a forever session. I hate apps where I need to sign in again because having an App is a great opportunity to have one time sign in that runs through generations of phone upgrades. Even better, the sign in doesn't have to involve the user, the data will be there and not accidentally deleted which means that the presence of the app is as good as username and password.

3) Immersive experience means better user experience. The UI becomes part of the Phone's UI instead of another App's UI's sub UI. A well designed app is very effective. I haven't seen a well designed mobile Web App, Web is great for websites and "possible to do" Mobile Web Apps.

4) Smaller download sizes, faster launches. A website would usually download a few MB of scripts and images, an App without bloated frameworks would be easily around that size and will download it only once. It will be ready to use in less than 0.5s every time.

5) Any advanced stuff is done much better natively even if it is possible to do through the browser. This is because the browser put extra boundaries around the boundaries that has due to the OS boundaries.

6) notifications.

Though, (1) is wrong on iPhone; there’s an “add to home screen” action in the share menu.

This exists on Android browsers as well (and has for years).

>Though, (1) is wrong on iPhone; there’s an “add to home screen” action in the share menu.

As I said:

>WebApp shortcuts are quite involved.

Most people don't know about that functionality, you need to teach them. It would have been cool if Apple supported that, then I guess everyone would have been trying trick you into it like the good old days where every website was trying to trick you into making it you start page.

Only 5 is really a legitimate reason, all the other things can be done on par with a website.

I think we need "Demand explanation" button for comments like this . It's a useless statement as is. It's essentially trolling and trolling shouldn't be happening on HN.

I know the reasoning of that statement but it's not providing an argument to refute. What am I supposed to say? "No. You can't, that's why it's not happening".

I do not see how you could read it as such. Because the reason / explanation is already given, as all the options that were mentioned (1-4) can be easily matched by any website, I think it is rather self evident.

1) You can add websites as app icons to iOS and Android. 2) Websites can hold persistent identities, and devices can otherwise remember the login details. 3) Websites UI can be anything and have nearly all options that apps can have, depending on the quality of the UX, which depends on the designer in any case. 4) A professional website will not be any slower if properly designed.

Now on 5, that depends on the specifics of the app. Some types do benefit greatly from being boarded on a device. An example would be Procreate for instance, which can not be mimicked on par in webform.

1) As I said, it's too involved. Only a fraction of your users would know how to do it, you will need to teach them.

2) Websites do that through Cookies and Local Storage. These have limits and users would be purging them en mass. The data of the app doesn't disappear for no reason.

3) As I said, the problem is that it runs within a browser if not added to the homescreen. It is a window within a window.

4) Professional or amateur design, websites data is managed by the browser and not you. Caches get invalidated, you download everything again. It happens all the time.

Just being able to do something is not enough, Apps are much smoother experience.

As an android user, I personally hate having to use apps. Websites are much easier to use and I can zoom (and override if they try to block it). I can use extensions on firefox (yes it's possible) and modify the behavior when needed.

I also cannot bookmark pages from apps. I can, however, add websites to the home-screen. I don't see any reason to download fat binaries for a worse experience.

Are you an app developer? You seem to be very biased.

I do Web and Apps. I also hate apps on Android, it feels like invasion.

BTW, I’m not talking about websites(articles and forms) but Web apps(task achieving experiences). Of course it’s just as bad experience to have a website as an app. it’s even worse when you are being forced to.

I get pop ups from sites all the time asking me to try their site, every darn time I visit. Mai it stuff like Reddit, Imgur, most news sites. I’ve tried the apps and they’re worse.

I’m not sure there’s any explanation other than more ad/data revenue.

Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays? Even not accounting for privacy, the apps are generally just shittier with less functionality.

I used to give the Google apps as examples of apps being better, but the gmail app is more buggy than just using gmail in a mobile browser, not to mention the integrated phone mail app.

Our experiences overwhelming align but one counter example is Discord. The chess.com native client is also reasonable.

There are some apps that provide some functionality that genuinely works best and I use the Discord mobile app. Of course, I didn’t instal it based on the pop ups.

Similar, there’s quite a few chat/video apps and games where apps make sense. And none of them prompted me to download the app or show lies like “better in our app” crap.

> Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays?

The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website. Other than that, I agree with the sentiment that most apps for websites are not worthwhile to install.

It is not necessarily a dumpster fire if one uses something else besides a popular graphical web browser to make the HTTP request and view the text. The "modern" web browser is complicit in creating the dumpster fire. Web developers can provide the inflammable materials, but a "modern" browser that by default auto-loads resources and runs Javascript is required to ignite it. There is no fire unless the right (=wrong) HTTP client is used.

I use a text-only browser and write simple command line "apps" (scripts) to retrieve text from sites like IMDB. It works very well. Opening pages on these sites in a "modern" web browser is an entirely different experience. We cannot ignore the complicity of the "modern" web browser in degrading the "user experience" in cases like this one.

My primary use case for IMDB is to figure out names of actors, for which I need to see the photos. There’s a lot to dislike about the modern web, but images are fairly useful.

1.sh takes an IMDb URL on stdin, saves the page temporarily and outputs a "lite" version, a more minimal page containing only actor photos. Of course, if desired, other film details could also be extracted and added to the output. 1.sh takes a single argument: photo size. Options are 140, 210 and 280. Requirements: curl (or quivalent), grep, sed, cut, sort, nl.

Example:

    # Don't forget the trailing fwd slash else 302 redirect
    echo https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9484998/ | 1.sh 280 > 1.html
    firefox ./1.html

    case $# in 1);;*)echo "usage: echo URL | $0 size";exec echo size options are 140 210 280;esac;
    read x;case $x in https://m.imdb.com/title/*/);;*)exec echo error: URL \(should end with fwd slash\);esac;
    x1=$(echo "$x"|cut -d/ -f5); 
    curl -H"User-Agent" -0 -4o "${x1}" "$x";
    (grep -o "<title>.*</title>" "${x1}"|sed 's/  */ /g';
    echo "<h3>Image size: $1</h3>";
    (exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's>.*href=><a href=\"https://www.imdb.com>;s/?ref.*\"/\"/;s[.*[<p>&</a><\/p>['|nl -s,
    exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*>//;s/.*/<img alt=\"&\"[^\>]\*/'|grep -of /dev/stdin "${x1}" \
     |case $1 in ---////////////////////////---IMDb-CAST-PHOTOS-ONLY---\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\---)
      ;;140)cut -d\" -f1-2,7-8,15|sed 's[.*[<p>&/></p>['
      ;;210)cut -d ' ' -f1-3,9|sed 's/https:/src=\"&/;s[.*[<p>&\"/></p>['
      ;;280)cut -d/ -f1-2,18-21|cut -d\" -f1-3,8|sed 's/class=\"/src=\"/;s/\.jpg/&\"/;s/ 280w//;s[.*[<p>&/></p>['
      esac|nl -s,;
    exec grep -o "title-cast-item__char\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*cast-item-characters-link..//;s/.*/<p>\&quot;&\&quot;<\/p>/'|nl -s,;
    ))|sort -n|cut -d, -f2- 
    rm "${x1}" 2>/dev/null;

Just disable scripts in the web browser you crazy cat.

> The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website

Funny, to me the IMDB app is the perfect example of a dumpster-fire app, with every 3rd tap/action resulting in an “invitation” to sign up for an account.

Works for my use case, which is being signed-in and managing my reviews/watchlist.

Everyone should have a computer powerful enough to run vms for compartmentalisation.

If you can simulate 5 different phones it won`t matter if someone gets their spyware onto one of them.

Sometimes we can solve problems with technology and as a HN reader that is maybe more interesting.

But it is always better to address the root cause of the problem. This often means a policy or legal issue rather than a technical, but has the advantage of not becoming a whack-a-mole technical race.

I've always been on the fence a bit about Gmail's mobile site vs. the iOS app. The mobile site is really great and it has the usual advantage that it uses no data and no battery if you never load it. But many other Google apps are dramatically better or don't even have a web counterpart. Best example is Google Translate, that uses the camera and a bunch of CPU time to do some wild shit.

> some of which aren't sketchy

I am as cynical about forcing apps down user's throats as anyone (Reddit, I'm looking at you), but the downvotes are a bit too much when this is a perfectly reasonable point, no?

Some cases for apps are perfectly legitimate, maybe the access to the phone APIs and the native experience is much better for a given product or service. I'm a firm believer in PWAs but as it stands I really prefer Uber or delivery apps to be native.

I really hope the people downvoting the parent comment are not the same people who are staunchly against web apps, though I suspect there will be some intersection. We can't have web apps, but we can't have native apps either... What can we have then, Geocities and MySpace?

we can have privacy, security, autonomy

and it is possible to do it with apps if we shift to apps being a service for the user, rather than a service for the developers sponsors

Without examples I think the downvotes are justified, note they said there are reasons and suggested that those reasons are widely applied. Which is different to 'there could be reasons' and 'it would be good if everyone moved to using those aspects that give justified benefits'.

The expectation is 'everyone wants you to use their app so they can track and advertise better' and the parent basically said 'nuh-uh'. We need more to be able to consider it substantive and benefiting the conversation, IMO.

What are some of the none sketchy reasons for "everyone" wanting us to use their apps. Like for major companies, where the service is deliverable through a website, what benefits does the user get from an app?

I can see why GPS based apps, or camera apps with filters, or networking apps 'need' to be installed apps (I don't know if an easy way to do GPS through a browser; speed and fast access to storage) ... but Amazon, Reddit, newspapers, ... what am I gaining?

Genuine question as a one time web dev I've always considered web sites written as an app, shipped with a browser, to be a negative. What am I missing out on?

Easy access to push notifications (which can be sketchy, but doesn't have to be) and believe it or not: Letting users put a shortcut on their homescreen. Sure, you can place a shortcut to a PWA in the Chrome browser but most users won't be configuring that, even if you guide them through it.

In Brave/FF mobile you open then menu and click "add to home screen", do other browsers not have that? Push notifications are pretty common on the web now, aren't they? (I don't use them).

Both Chrome and Safari have the "add to home screen", but Safari doesn't have push notifications, not even for "installed" webapp.

I remember the time when news were flooding the internet evangelizing iphones as the platform of the web, a platform that would allow websites do anything a native application could.

What a letdown...

> I remember the time when news were flooding the internet evangelizing iphones as the platform of the web, a platform that would allow websites do anything a native application could.

> What a letdown...

The original iPhone demo showed the actual desktop version of the NYT website loading in Safari. Websites were the ones that later optimized for mobile.

And I don’t remember iPhones being promoted as giving websites anything approaching native app capabilities except when Apple tried to sell that line to developers before they had a public SDK. Nobody bought it, even then.

These seem like reason that help the business, not the user. Are there any legitimate reason that help improve the user's experience for having an app? I can see this for some games and things that native access is usable. but a shortcut to the homescreen and push notifications are mostly an annoyance for users.

What? Those are pieces of functionality that some users actively want. The experience of having to hunt for Yelp in Safari sucks vs. having it as an icon. Being able to get push notifications is effectively the only thing messaging apps even do! If these features weren't important then why do they even exist?! The irony is that Apple knows if they provided push notifications to mobile websites then suddenly their catalog of apps would have a lot less value as people would be much more willing to just make websites.

Like seriously; compare your comment to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348626 . You just so happen to be weird: that's all.

Most of the non-sketchy reasons are related to iOS Safari being crippled.

For example, I worked on a rich text editor, and we wanted to put a bar with text formatting tools above the touch keyboard. This is not possible in the browser: your webapp cannot measure the keyboard or the remaining available viewport (and the keyboard's size depends on the input method and the iPhone model).

Another example I experienced is when we wanted to have full-screen dialogs with buttons at the bottom. If you do that, then the users have to tap your buttons twice, because the first tap only expands Safari's browser UI, and your buttons near the bottom of the screen only work while that UI is expanded.

I have an app for most sites, its called my browser. If the app isn't taking advantage of a feature on my phone then it doesn't make sense to package it as an app.. unless they are getting something out of it. Going to make a broad and sweeping generalization here: they are getting money from tracking.

Counterthought: I've been running a popular web-only site for about 5 years now and I get a little under a hundred requests per month for it to be made "into an app". A lot of users just want to be able "to install it" or to "get to it from my home screen" or "to get to it faster" (even after pointing out they can add bookmarks to home screens). It's also tempting from my POV to make an app just for discoverability reasons (e.g. users browsing the app store discovering my site).

I haven't made an app (don't know how!) and I definitely wouldn't add a "download our app or else!" banner/wall, but I've been extremely surprised from the other side of the table to see just how many users seemingly just want an app for an app's sake, even if it's functionally no different from a responsive mobile view.

You can contract out the app development.

Freelancers are cheap if you hire from poor countries.

That is interesting!

There's a reason that they're cranking up lawsuits and rhetoric against the Apple "monopoly" on app stores, too.

Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1174/

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