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I get some push back from a few tech friends because I avoid using apps (except for things like Chess game apps). I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship, but it can’t hurt.

Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.

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> Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.

It's also frequently just better. If I'm looking for hotels, flights, apartments, restaurants, hiking trails, ect., doing so in a browser allows me to keep dozens of comparable offers open for direct comparison - just by jumping between browser tabs.

Doing the same in the app means endlessly navigating between offers, favorites, and new searches. It's often very obvious that the app was built explicitly to be less powerful.

The main downside to many mobile web sites is the desperate plea to use the app you have to dismiss every time. I feel sorry for the devs who build a great mobile version only to be forced to put a stupid "$SITE is better in the app" banner on it.

There’s also companies which seemed to break their Web experience specifically to drive people into the app. Credit Karma hasn’t worked on a browser on mobile or desktop for me in years. But the app version always works.

I guess it’s my fault for trying to use an Intuit product to begin with when I already know they’re evil.

uBlock can stop those, if your device is allowed to have it.

And copying text. That's such a killer app for the web that's barely supported in native apps.

It's such a killer feature for the web, some of the more egregious websites try to remove it using JavaScript!

Some corporations just really hate their users, and will never understand why

Yeah, both copying text and the search function, IMO.

What is really stupid is when the app is just a web browser limited to one tab like for Amazon. The web site is better on phones because you can open links in new tabs but you can't in the app even though the app is obviously just displaying the exact same web page.

If a mobile app like that supported tabs AND somehow allowed you to see key things between tabs, you wouldn't even reach for the browser. Crazy how much different that landscape could be if they thought about such a critical use case. My guess is non-power users just look at one offer at a time.

> I can’t say for sure that preferring web versions of services helps with censorship

The linked article isn't enough to convince you? Look up Gab or Parler. (Yes, I find most of the speech there reprehensible. No, I don't think they should be denied the right to publish and distribute an app.)

Using a social media app instead of a website, as most people do, means that everything you are seeing has essentially been pre-approved by Apple and Google.

If the tide swings even a little further to the right on X, expect the X app to be banned as well. I was secretly hoping that it would be banned when Musk took over just to remind the right of why centralized app stores are a terrible idea. But with ICEBlock the left has finally been alerted to that fact as well, which might be even more beneficial to the cause of software freedom in the long run, since the left is generally less afraid of the proper solution to this problem, regulation.

In the meantime, keep using web apps instead of native apps.

Parler was also kicked off of AWS…

As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.

They also bent a knee to previous Democratic party administrations and will bend the knee to them again the next time the Democratic party is in power. Large tech companies aren't interested in spending money and poltical capital fighting censorship demands of anyone who is likely to have power within the US government.

AWS isn't the only way to host a website, and his been an obviously bad choice for hosting something controversial since it denied service to Wikileaks.

> Parler was also kicked off of AWS…

Which reminds us of the difference between AWS and Apple -- Amazon Web Services is the web and the web is an open platform. If AWS denies you, you go sign up at any of their competitors or buy your own servers and plug them into the internet. If Apple denies you, iPhone users can't get your app, and if you go sign up at a competitor or buy your own servers, they still can't get your app.

> As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.

That's because they currently control the government. Now think ahead by more than two days and consider the possibility that the other party might win an election again someday. What should you do right now when you're in control of the government to prevent yourself from getting screwed the next time that happens?

I also think that it sends the right signal in terms of "Hey, this really doesn't need to be an app". I don't need an app for my newspaper, I need a shortcut/bookmark to its web page.

And once you start thinking about it, the same thing goes for a surprisingly large amount of apps.

I feel like in the coming years the facade big A and big G put up in order to push everyone into their distinctive walled garden of apps will crumble in public opinion.

It never was "yeah, it needs to be an app because the web platform doesn't have an API standard for it", geez, apple even forced a single web engine. They could have easily allowed access to their APIs on the browser. It just never was in their corporate interest to do so.

Okay, this devolved into an anti corporate rant without it being my intention to... So, go web!

I don't really know how to articulate exactly how I'd classify into one bucket or the other but I think there are two types of "app" and I tend to have differing preferences on whether they should be native apps or web apps as a result.

One is where relatively-static content is the priority, deep-linking is important or essential and the web platform is pretty ideal for those. News articles or blogs or Wikipedia pages or those sorts of things. Things where I might want to be switching between tabs or forgetting about for a while and coming back to later.

The other is where the app is primarily interactive or where the content is a lot more likely to be real-time or ephemeral. Not least because if you're on a low-bandwidth or high-RTT connection, navigating between web pages or having interactivity blocked behind a backlog of XHRs (particularly where caching isn't permitted) is utterly miserable. My experience is that native apps usually continue feeling responsive to input even when the network itself is not responsive but that is often not true with many clickable elements in many web pages.

PWAs might be the middle-ground here but they feel a lot like Electron apps to me: still foreign to all platforms, not responsive in the way that native UI controls are, weird/missing "back" behaviours and still no better support for deep-linking than the average app would have.

I prefer web versions because I trust the browser sandbox more than I trust the developers at Super Store 01.

The recent Facebook scandal of running a service to receive requests for tracking shows the app store sandbox model is far more of a denylist vs an allowlist, it's leaky by design in the name of "developer enablement" or "user experience".

Yes! I meant to also say that, thanks.

Sorry for going off on a tangent, but last week I asked Gemini about security and privacy advantages of running Gmail and Google Calendar using Safari and DuckDuckGo Browser - Gemini made good arguments for using the browser versions: ironic!

I also prefer web versions for similar reasons, and enjoy them while I still can.

It's even funnier when the desktop app is just the web app with a wrapper, but the desktop app is worse.

I also avoid apps. I tell everyone that I meet to avoid apps because the general population is going to drive us right into a future where there are no more web-based options and almost everything must be accessed through a separate app. People are simply not aware of what they're giving up by using apps that would work perfectly fine as websites.

I just wish a culture of quality would become the rule and not the exception in web app development. It's a far more frequent thing for web apps to stutter and make my phone hot (or on a computer, keep an entire core pegged doing nothing) than it is for native apps to do the same. This experience is universal between browsers and platforms, too; I've observed it on Chrome under Android and Edge on Windows for example.

Of course there are plenty of crappy native apps too, but the incidence and severity is comparatively lower and in many cases, there are well-behaved "handcrafted" small dev alternatives to crappy native apps which are much less common (or at least, more difficult to find) on the web.

Need to have standardized native web components for the "culture of quality". Everyone building their own special widget in JS+CSS+virtual DOM Framework does not enforce UX quality.

Totally agree, it's the inevitable result of infinite wheel reinvention; none of the wheels ever receive the level of refinement they need. By the time the first stone wheel starts showing hints of a polished sheen, it's time to go carve a new stone wheel.

I'm a big proponent of browsers including something resembling a traditional UI framework out of the box. It doesn't have to try to be perfect or fit everybody's needs (which is impossible anyway), but it will serve many developers well and give everybody else a solid foundation to build their own (much lighter) stuff on top of.

You should install F-Droid. lmoat every app on there is completely ethical, and there are many (not enough but many).

Many of the ones that require a server side connect to your self hosted server instead of some central server on the cloud, which is a reason they will never get popular, but sounds perfect for you. There are some that use central servers, and this fact will be clearly stated in the antifeatures section. Many other F-Droid apps just work offline. And hardly any have ads.

The problem is that the Web has turned into ChromeOS Platform, the only reason it hasn't yet is iDevices and Safari.

Also Web apps are basically the 21st century version of timesharing like in the good old days, where we had one server for everyone.

Even better for censorship purposes.

In almost all cases, phone apps talk to that same central server as the web browser, just with a different (much worse) client that you have less control over.

If it were the case that phone apps weren't networked and could only sync through another channel like icloud/syncthing, then you'd be onto something.

But right now most apps are "web browser but worse".

Native apps might need networking, Web apps require networking, they might simulate offline to various degrees depending on local storage, which they don't have any control over, and is shared.

The platform that software is delivered through is independent of whether it works offline.

You mean the ISPs, whose permits are controlled by goverment authorities?

Glad to see I'm not alone. I never install apps unless there's no other way, and often remove them as soon as possible. My home screen is a collection of web shortcuts. Amazon, YouTube, X, bank, all web links. But I also use LineageOS with MicroG.

I've been asked why, and it's not really fear of surveillance (although I'm not a fan of it) or making a difference or whatever, just because it's one of the few ways I'm able to give the finger. Sure, noone will notice but it makes me feel better :)

Sont listen to naysayers. There are dozens of us. Maybe hundreds!

Personally I generally prefer the UX of apps for software that I trust, ie, open source software downloaded via F-Droid. I feel the same with native desktop clients. For untrusted software, web apps are the way to go.

I subscribe to the NYT and find it so irritating that they regularly prompt me to download their app from safari on ios I may cancel. I do not want their app ever.

I've been a web/ux guy for a long time now and I don't think I've ever used a single mobile app/site that is better than a proper full screen piece of software. It's always been a compromise no matter how hard myself or my designers try. Maybe quick photo/video edits but that's less because they're good or they have quality user experiences but more because its often overkill to pop open Photoshop just to cut out a dog pooping in the background or whatever. Most times I feel like mobile devs (myself included) don't even utilize the various unique features mobile devices do have.

I'm also old, cranky and turning into a crusty CLI guy as I get even older and crankier. If you kids need more than a TUI, get off my lawn!

There's also PWA, which while not perfect, is supported on iOS.

PWA was an awesome idea and should have been the way forward.

Unfortunately both Google and Apple very early on identified that it was in their best interest to keep the concept around in a half-dead state and ensure nobody really built on it...

I respect PWAs, but they take away so much that I personally want. No address bar, no tabs, no history, no extensions. It's a reversion from the glorious amazing user agency of the web to the sad state that computing had held us victim to for decades.

PWAs are a pain to develop, with tons of boilerplate.

I just will not install an app unless it specifically provides some features not available on the site. I can block ads/tracks with ublock then.

I'm not installing my electricity providers app with any permissions when their website shows the same.

bingo!! web apps solve most of these issues.

let's say for the ICEblock or whatever - pull up a map pin (geotag), that can be done in a web app.

the things most people advocate apps for e.g notifications are nuisances that some of us permanently turned off. My phone is always on do not disturb, I get 0 notifications. The only time I prefer notifications is something actionable - I pay online then the bank says open app to approve in-app notification (pop up) not those things (notifications) that just come to your phone asynchronously and bother you.

I have a smartwatch (if at all) garmin it's not hooked up to my phone for notifications.

unless you're making games / hell now games can leverage webgpu - no reason to make native apps at all for 96% of things. just make a web app - service workers enable offline access for some things.

- my simple take -> do what the porno companies do in regards to tech. simple & effective. but please don't copy their ads thing.

Yep. Not using apps and avoiding the cloud at all costs (e.g. not backing up everything to iCloud, turning off one drive) are litmus tests for having a clue. Using Bluetooth is almost the same but it’s hard to get by without it nowadays. Same for connecting your tv to the internet.

I'm curious that tech friends would push back on this. I'd expect them to be the ones to agree with the idea, oddly.

The standard layman, on the other hand, wants to be able to trust that they can trust people.

"People in tech" has grown so large that the term has become a bit meaningless.

For every person in tech that knows who Stallman is and what he stands for, there's a person in tech that believes that NFTs and AI will bring about world peace and end poverty.

> Using web versions

ahem, heard of cloudflare? web hosters and developers are voluntarily centralizing themselves.

I'm disappointed by the EFF not mentioning PWAs and web apps. Fighting censorship means fighting for those too. Platform owners will always have more direct control over sideloading.

How long before smartphone providers start controlling your web browser?

It's even better to avoid the internet entirely. It's purely a liability at this point.