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.
For mobile
I initially thought this was an argument for electron/PWA bullshit. “Why is <app> 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.
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.
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”
That’s fine, I don’t eat from fast food places. One less app to install.
This is it. Don’t need apps. Don’t need overpriced crap food.
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.
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.
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.
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. Not impossible. Just way more effort.
You can absolutely have fancy UI elements that provide additional functionality. Most OSes don’t have built-in 3D visualization widgets but that doesn’t mean you can’t write CAD software for them.
My point is that your custom widgets should make an effort to look and feel as much like native widgets as possible. Any skills the user has in using native widgets should carry over to your custom ones. So your custom text field should look and behave like a native one until the user types two left brackets. When they do, the menu that pops up should be a native menu or one designed to resemble one very closely.
Thanks to web-first development and lazy cross-platform UIs, standards in this regard have deteriorated to near-nothingness. Buttons don’t have to look or even behave like anything else on any platform. It’s perfectly reasonable to expect the user to relearn the UI for any application. Modern UIs spiritually follow in the footsteps of Bryce 3D rather than any Human Interface Guidelines. And that peeves me.
For all their faults, Apple got Mac users to have very high standards in this regard for quite some time, which led to a bevy of good-looking and approachable applications, at least until post-skeuomorphic macOS took care of the “attractive” part. The consistent UI across vendors was something I really liked back when I was a Mac user.
