Seriously. I don’t want to install something on my phone when the dev is just using a WebView, if that’s what it’s called. When the app is basically just a website with the browser hidden.
What’s the reason for that? To attach the customer? To sell the app for money? Is there more ad revenue that way? Do you reach more people?
(Are there any good reasons for it, too? Security, maybe?)
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Those are actually websites, with embedded site and embedded browser, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
Thats why those are slow, unstable, and huge (in occupied storage)
not on mobile, they generally use the native browser engine. at the very least it’s not electron on ios/android
Still, unless it needs some native api’s could still be a website.
I’ve found most of them work much nicer and load faster.
most apps are just websites wrapped inside a container and made an app.
Why?
Because they dont want you to use the actual website.
why?
Cause your browser gives you a LOT of protection against invasive data mining/profiling/tracking/etc.(Not saying its perfect, We all know about fingerprinting and HTML5 canvas tracking and what have you…but its a LOT better than the information that apps can steal)
Data mining/profiling/tracking/etc that these companies want to do to you, because you are a product to them, not a customer.
And how do they do that with an app?
Permissions.
Ever wonder why your pizza ordering app has to have access to your contacts, data storage, camera, microphone, etc etc etc? Its not because its needed for you to order pizzas. Hell, you can do that on a website with no permissions, so why is it needed for an app on your phone?
So they can steal/mine your data for profiling/tracking/marketing/being sold to others/etc.
Besides the other mentioned reasons: exposure through the app store can be a motivator too.
We had a project once that ran completely fine as a website except for the ability to scan bar codes. That one thing forced us to create an app and the rest of the app was just showing the website.
Can’t you use camera on browser? I actually seen a project that does some complex things using camera [1] and it ran in browser. I’m confident scanning bar codes is possible.
https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/ and whatnot exist. Any reason why such an approach couldn’t be taken?
There are JS barcode libraries out there, some better than others, some free, others paid. A few years back at a corporate job I built just the thing - a web app designed to replace a 3rd party mobile app. The back-end was Laravel + various AWS services, with a responsive front-end made with Tailwind.
The requirements were to make it mimic most of the mobile app’s functionality. There was also location tracking via browser APIs (to track the cargo at all times) and a barcode scanner. I used a paid library for that, and it was quite expensive, but very reliable. So it can definitely be done as a web app.
I cannot speak for them, but I can relate to the idea. There’s one called Nobly that was based on a great idea but eliminated itself due to this.
I would say in some cases, people are conditioned now to expect an app, even if it’s basically a website. I think in a mobile context, most non-techy people don’t normally think to open up a browser and say, browse Amazon or something. Instead they go for the Amazon app on their phone, and browse/shop/whatever there.
I wouldn’t say this is exclusive to phones either. I once worked on a product that was essentially web-native, but they had to ship a desktop app because their market expected it, even though it was only a web-view wrapper to the website. No offline storage, no difference in behaviour, or need for some specific API; nothing. I guess you try explaining to boomers that a web-view desktop app is unnecessary.
The data vacuuming and additional marketing are just added benefits for the app developer, if they go down that path (they usually do).
Some people are missing the forest for the trees here
Having a businesses app on your phone is better regular advertising than anything they could ever pay for.
They just want an excuse to make you look at their logo and think about their business as regularly as possible
Lemmy has a real problem with this. It’s like all of the angry people from Reddit came here and now we just have an angry circlejerk about anything the crowd doesn’t like.
Username checks out
This is true
people tend to develop liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them
and it’s amazing that basic psychological principles have been decoupled from mainstream awareness of marketing tactics (obviously intentionally).
This is not a problem with the olauncher
Thanks I’m trying that
ITT: No good reasons for these apps!
There’s no one single answer to this. Some have been mentioned in other comments, but it’s a combination of a few different things:
- Control: They have much more control over your experience as a native app than a web app.
- Ad revenue: It’s significantly harder to block ads coming through the built in web views, and/or they can just build them in natively which is even harder.
- Integration: it’s easier to do IAPs or subscriptions through native controls, which means less resistance, which means people are more likely to end up doing it.
- Data: it’s easier to hoover up user data via native APIs than through the browser. There’s way more accessible, especially if you can ask for a bunch of permissions and people don’t notice/care. This makes any user tracking they do way more effective and any data they sell way more valuable.
- Notifications: Recently browsers have started adding support for this but it’s not as effective. Push notifications are a huge boon to user engagement and this is a huge money maker. Having native notifications is a huge sell in this equation.
- Persistence: If you have your app on a user’s phone, it ends up in the list of apps, meaning they pass by it very frequently. It’s basically free advertising and living in their head without them even noticing. This is especially true on iOS where basically all of your apps are in your face all of the time.
- Performance: Native apps run way better and can look way better than web sites. If you just use web views this is mostly moot but still may make a small difference.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a few but you get the idea.
Websites are basically just inferior versions of native apps, and even if you use a hybrid/web view approach, you get many of the benefits and have the option to “upgrade” to a real native app later.
That being said, I fucking hate this shit. I don’t agree that companies should do this, but it hands down does make financial sense. In a society entirely driven by capital and profit, it makes sense, but from a consumer perspective, it fucking sucks. I don’t want to have to install the Facebook app to see some small businesses “web site” that’s really just a Facebook page. I don’t want to install reddits shitty native app to read more than 2 comments off a post about a solution to my problem.
It’s legitimately consumer hostile, but company profits are more important than people in our society.
I think there’s a big one that you’ve missed and it’s that most people are not like most people here. Believe it or not there are many people out there whose first instinct is to search their app store for what they want. They walk among us.
If I’m McDonald’s, and a significant number of my customers search for me and instead get KFC and Burger King as top results with no McDonald’s app in sight, it’s seen as a marketing problem.
This is spot on. We recently had to do this to one of our products and I didn’t want to at all, but we could do push notifications reliably that worked for both Android and iOS.
So we had to package it as an official app :(
I believe Spotify did this back in the day in order to hide as much of their AB testing from Apple who is essentially a competitor due to iTunes.
Having much of the UI delivered via web also makes it easier to deploy updates as no software update is necessary.
If they have an app they can gather far more personal data from you (and your device) that they can then turn around and sell
And far fewer people have adblockers that block ads in apps.
Another reason is that they can more easily send push messages to the user.
This exactly. Just ask for some location rights in the app and get access to wifi also.
Most users don’t mind giving an app a large amount of access and in doing so, a lot of personal information gets exposed.
If you have a choice, use a website.
Hell apps can gather a lot of info without actually asking for permissions
For example the accelerometer can be used without permissions
Not on GrapheneOS :)
How do you know? I mean what makes you say that?
GrapheneOS allows you to turn off sensors (accelerometers) by app
Even Google Play Services and other system apps?
Yep!
Sensors permission toggle: disallow access to all other sensors not covered by existing Android permissions (Camera, Microphone, Body Sensors, Activity Recognition) including an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer, thermometer and any other sensors present on a given device.
Very cool. I just checked Lineage OS and it looks like Google Play Services doesn’t let you disable sensors permission. Can you do it on Graphene OS? Lineage lets you control it on all apps except Google Play Services it looks like, which would actually be one of the top apps to disable it on imo.
I just checked Lineage OS and it looks like Google Play Services doesn’t let you disable sensors permission. Can you do it on Graphene OS?
Yep, there’s a toggle to disable by default globally. I also individually checked Google Play Services, Google Play Store and Google Services Framework, and all three can be denied the Sensors permission.
This is due to Sandboxed Google Play: “GrapheneOS has a compatibility layer providing the option to install and use the official releases of Google Play in the standard app sandbox. Google Play receives absolutely no special access or privileges on GrapheneOS as opposed to bypassing the app sandbox and receiving a massive amount of highly privileged access. Instead, the compatibility layer teaches it how to work within the full app sandbox.”
I’m surprised that’s not commons behaviour now, just look at what people are doing in research papers. With enough of that data, they can figure out quite a lot about you and your life.
Also it adds a link to their website right on your phone.
It also has all the UI/UX stuff preloaded making everything feel snappier.
making everything feel snappier.
We use very different apps that could easily be websites.
I always assumed the reason was to get more tendrils into your phone for that sweet sweet data $$$ and allowing themselves more control over shoving notifications in your face.
Do I sound bitter?
Weird I have seen the exact opposite as a complaint on reddit, Renessaince Periodization why is it not a native app and just a webpage
i guess people want different things
I’m sure there are some “data harvesting” reasons, but honestly, the simplest is likely the truest:
Most people aren’t computer-savvy, and having an app is much easier for most users than going to a website (either directly or through a bookmark that they probably won’t ever be able to find again).
One must remember, always and forever: most people aren’t us/you. Just because something is easy for you to do doesn’t mean it’s easy for everyone else.
Is it dumb for me that T-Mobile has an app that just goes to a webview that I could get through my phone browser? Yes. Is it dumb for my parents? Absolutely ten thousand percent no.
The value (in terms of money made/saved/protected) that a company gets from having an app instead of a website only is probably ranked in this order:
1 - ease of use for the majority of customers, reducing tech and customer support calls, angry customers, lost goodwill, bad reputation
2-99 - same as #1
100 - data harvesting
