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Comment by BackBlast | Hacker News Reader

It's not that they suck. Most users probably can't even tell the difference on modern hardware.

It's that you can't spy on your user nearly as effectively with a web app compared to what you get with native. You're limited to web APIs, instead of native APIs. Which is why, I believe, there is a full court press on so many sites to get mobile users away from websites and into their apps.

I'm not alone in preferring to just use a website and not clutter my phone with apps for every online site I may interact with. Yet many sites actively press me to switch to the app including crippling the mobile version of the site. Removing features that work fine on desktop as soon as they detect a mobile client.

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You can definitely tell the difference in battery life when running Electron apps and badly energy optimized browsers (ie Chrome) in Electron apps.

Even on mobile, there is a huge difference in responsiveness for instance with travel apps than the equivalent websites.

I fly and stay in hotels a lot for both business and personal (digital nomadding flying everywhere across the US staying in hotels).

> You're limited to web APIs, instead of native APIs. Which is why, I believe, there is a full court press on so many sites to get mobile users away from websites and into their apps

So how can you both want web apps to have more native capabilities and want to avoid apps because they have too many native capabilities?

And yet I bet you often use "native apps" that are really just repackaged web views put into the app store. Without even knowing it.

> So how can you both want web apps to have more native capabilities and want to avoid apps because they have too many native capabilities?

You seem to totally miss my point.

A native application can do things like sniff local bluetooth devices, track your GPS location, snoop your clipboard. Something a web app can't, because the web APIs have been much more carefully vetted for privacy.

It's this fine grained user tracking that is behind the push towards using the app store. Companies want to know everything your doing, where you are, etc etc. That's much more difficult through a web API as compared to native APIs. This is why they will intentionally cripple their mobile sites and push to use their apps. They want native API level user tracking.

> Something a web app can't, because the web APIs have been much more carefully vetted for privacy.

Depends. Chrome for example doesn't vet these as much as the other browsers do. Someone in a sibling thread linked to this tweet from a Mozilla engineer: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931

"Just a day after shipping an impl to Firefox Nightly, this is the first discovered case of WebMIDI-fingerprinting... Chrome still allows web developers to enumerate attached MIDI devices without user consent or even a notification, btw."

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