Surely we could do this with web apps and cut out google/apple's say in the matter.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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People have been trained to ONLY use apps on their phones. "Websites are for computers."
I mean, websites are often shit on mobile on purpose to encourage people to download the app.
So that the company can access obscene amounts of data from your phone sensors, other installed apps, wifi networks, etc and sell that to data brokers... who then sell that info to ICE so ICE can find you easier 🤔. Wait...
Yep. Our payroll company didn't have a mobile app, just our website, which worked just fine on mobile. When we signed up a new client, the employees didn't know what to do without an app. Told a manager I'd be glad to show them how to put a shortcut on the home screen. "You, uh, don't understand these people, that will just confuse them."
Which was a polite way of saying, "They're dumber than shit." Which was true. A good portion of the staff couldn't read and struggled with the online application forms. Best part? These illiterate folks were newspaper employees.
Why use an interface that can compromise a portion of your personal data when you can compromise all of it! /s
DuckDuckGo app > hamburger menu > Settings > App Tracking Protection > enable that shit. It'll blow your mind how often apps will attempt to sell any and all data they can collect from your online. The DDG app helps block the vast majority of it from getting to their servers.
Also consider switching your DNS provider to NextDNS. It can catch trackers DDG misses (and vice versa) and block ads in every app...except YouTube; use YT ReVanced or NewPipe for that instead.
People are idiots, but some are able to learn.
This is all fallout from the Last Eternal September (iPhone launch 2007).
Before the iPhone you only used the internet because you had an immediate need or because you were a terminally online nerd. The iPhone forced an always on connection into people's pockets, people who had no idea what to do with it. After a very short period of time predatory assholes figured out that they could turn this always on connection into a money mill by releasing apps that rely on remote servers to provide services that COULD be run locally or on a traditional webpage (and collect user data).
It's been 18 years of businesses training non-technical users (>90% of users) to always use their app over a website. In many cases they will actively punish users for trying to use the website over the app (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Imgur) by adding barriers or removing functionality.
People are idiots, it is too late for >90% of them to learn. The other 10% are either raging against this insanity or actively developing the software to make it worse.
Though even Apple were pushing html5 web apps at the time and didn't initially allow 3rd-party apps. The app store later launched on July 10, 2008.
The point still stands that for 17 of the 18 years that modern 'Smart Phones' have been a thing, locked down, data mining apps have been pushed as the default.
some warn of chilling effects
Man, our media has completely failed us. Constant sanewashing of the most insane fascist shit imaginable
Media is a business, nearly every media outlet is owned by a 5 or 6 parent corps, criticizing government gets their taxes hiked and subsidies cut.
And independent news outlets have been totally drowned out by the tsunami of 0-effort, vertical video, tiktok reaction video crap. Nuanced and well thought out reporting get no traction with the 'short form content' crowd.
Wtfomgbbq
In my day we could run any damn .exe file we wanted to, no motherfucker got to say you're not allowed to install it.
We need a better distribution model for mobile apps.
Google is gonna remove the ability to sideload soon 🙃
As much as I can I selfhost and use a web interface, the best case scenario with an app is that it works for a while before losing support.
ICE
chilling effects
I can't decide whether I'd prefer this were intentional or not.