what is the advantage to an 'app'?

I'm not even sure how to ask the question.

Many times when I am looking at a site that I would like to add to my home screen on this phone it will only offer to 'install an app'.
These aren't sites I am wary of but I don't see what an app would do for me when I can just as easily save the url link and connect without the app.

Will it use less data?
I have the storage space but don't see the need🤔

I don't use apps though a few have been installed on phone, etc.

I am sure someone more knowledgeable than me can explain.

I, personally would not install app from websites unless I knew they were trusted apps or website and might be useful to me.

I would be afraid a random website app might install something to scam me.

This:

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/mobile-payment-apps-how-avoid-scam-when-you-use-one

Often the app gives the company more insight into your activity (i.e. it's a corporate surveillance bug). Whereas through the browser they only know what you clicked on, what pages you looked at, and for how long, and maybe other stuff you've navigated to in your browser, with an app they can potentially see everything else you do on your phone and also where you go.  (Transmitting all this back to the mothership in realtime definitely doesn't use less data.)

They try to entice you to download the app by giving it more features, or a smoother customer experience, than the website. Most people fall for that.

Judith Browning wrote:I'm not even sure how to ask the question.

Many times when I am looking at a site that I would like to add to my home screen on this phone it will only offer to 'install an app'.
These aren't sites I am wary of but I don't see what an app would do for me when I can just as easily save the url link and connect without the app.

Will it use less data?
I have the storage space but don't see the need🤔

I don't use apps if there is a web page. I save links.   I don't feel the need for anything else.
I'm not the best one to explain them to you, but I am a vote for "I don't if I don't HAVE to"
I have installed 3 on mom's phone, and zero on mine. That's it. And lots and lots of bookmarks on them both.
(The three are X, Telegram, and a standalone program that doesn't exist on the net.)

My personal opinion is that in the vast majority of cases perhaps all of them there are no advantages to you or me but several disadvantages. The only advantages are to the people who made the app. What they are to me is just another little tendril of data collection for someone else's profit but not just that. They also lock up data storage, hog bandwidth and drain batteries on my devices. I didn't buy these things to host other people's software.

I did enjoy one from Cornel University for a bit that lets you identify birds but ended up uninstalling it too. There are others that I'm sure are useful and I have come across websites and such that I would like to see but that refuse access without installing something or scanning this or that QR. When that happens, I generally just take the loss of not engaging with that site.

thanks everyone!!!

That's kind of what I was wondering Ned...that it might be to the company's advantage and even more invasive.

I did uninstall a few apps that came on this phone that I thought I could get away without and would uninstall a few more if I was more confident.

We don't pay bills on line so no apps there.

It just seems more and more often it's offered and I realized I didn't have a clue why.

Mark,
It's interesting that you mention apps being data hogs as this phone uses way more data for the same type of use as our last phone and I've tried to find the culprit....it came with many more apps installed than on our other phone so maybe I need to be more ruthless uninstalling.....

Judith Browning wrote:These aren't sites I am wary of but I don't see what an app would do for me when I can just as easily save the url link and connect without the app.

An app is a program that runs on your smartphone, and "the normal rules don't apply here."

Seriously: companies collect more metadata from your phone through an app when compared to accessing their website. If this is a concern for you, I suggest you do not install the app.

Judith, I also suggest going through your phone’s settings and turning off background data and background permissions on most apps, though there are a few system apps you usually have to leave those things on for, in order for your phone to work properly. Certainly turn it off for any apps you personally downloaded unless you specifically know why it needs background data.

I also find that 90+% of the time, the apps wipe out my battery at about 2x the rate of using the website. In most cases, I see no personal advantage, and loads of disadvantages to the apps.

Just wanted to offer a slightly different perspective, although what everyone says about data farming is 100% true, and for many large companies is the sole objective for creating an app.

This is just from the perspective of someone who works in a company that currently has no app, but is considering developing one due to user demand.

Generally speaking apps "should" provide the most seamless browsing experience for a service, as they don't have to deal with all the inconsistent variables caused by outdated browsers/unpopular browsers, etc. It's far easier to curate a polished user interface when you don't have to account for these. Apps also pre-install a number of assets on your phone (images, etc), so that they don't need to be loaded every time you open the site (less to download, faster speeds) - a browser cache achieves the same objective, but many people install add-ons to prevent data being cached (to prevent tracking).

Large numbers of site bugs are caused by people having outdated browsers/unpopular browsers (E.g. Permies photo uploads not working on mobile when using Firefox). If Permies had an app this would still be a problem for those who didn't download it, but less people would encounter it overall.

It is totally valid to be suspicious of app data harvesting, so I'm in no way saying that you should suddenly start downloading apps from every site that prompts you, but I just wanted to say that there are tangible benefits to developing apps (in the world of permaculture, ethical app development could be its own field of discussion all together. I myself would love to fill my phone with open source app-based plant encyclopedias/planting cycle trackers, etc. if they existed!).

Very long winded comment, sorry about that! I hope this interests some people.

When I'm invited to install an app to use for something I can do on a web site, it has to pass through the filter of: "How would using this app improve my experience compared to using the website?" before I even consider installing. Most fail. What I'm usually offered is a broken browser. A browser that can only visit one website is broken, right?

T Melville wrote:What I'm usually offered is a broken browser. A browser that can only visit one website is broken, right?

I definitely agree with you here. There are a huge amount of apps out there which are just chromium browsers with the homepage set to the company's mobile site. These "apps" have no merit and are purely created to appease people who are begging the company for an app. Unless you feel like having multiple copies of Google Chrome on your device, then there is absolutely no point in downloading them.

Ned Harr wrote:Often the app gives the company more insight into your activity (i.e. it's a corporate surveillance bug). Whereas through the browser they only know what you clicked on, what pages you looked at, and for how long, and maybe other stuff you've navigated to in your browser, with an app they can potentially see everything else you do on your phone and also where you go.  (Transmitting all this back to the mothership in realtime definitely doesn't use less data.)

They try to entice you to download the app by giving it more features, or a smoother customer experience, than the website. Most people fall for that.

Maybe you (or anyone!) can give me some advice: I just had a disturbing experience with my tablet that showed me that Google is reading all my email and tracking me. I can see why they want more data centers; so they can store the fact that I had a dog grooming appointment at Petco at 10am today (WHY do they care?!?). What happened was an alarm went off on my tablet to tell me the appointment was in a half hour. I did NOT set that alarm. I not only never opened ANY email on that device, but I didn't even know I had it on there! We got it for free when my stepmom got a new cable plan, and we use it in the kitchen to watch videos or play games while cooking; that's it. So obviously Google READ MY MAIL (an email *I* didn't even read, and didn't even know I got) and decided to set an alarm for me!  

Does anyone know any email systems that are not connected to that mothership you speak of?

I can ditch Facebook fine (they are making it more & more difficult to use on a browser and I won't put them on my phone). Honestly, I'm ready to ditch it all except Permies, lol, but it seems we all need an email these days. I'd actually like to use a whole system that's disconnected, like Linux was/is? Or Ubuntu? Those are whiffs of names from the past that I tried using. I have a laptop and a desktop I can wipe clean and start from scratch, if it's even possible anymore. The laptop is a Thinkpad from a few years ago and the desktop was refurbished in 2020 and never opened since.

Advice anyone?
I have issues with feeling watched.
I want to feel relaxed, and that my home is a private place.

there's a reason they talk about the 'google ecosystem'. they're huge and everywhere.
probably your settings on the tablet allowed alarms (sometimes there is an update, and of course the default option will allow everything). And of course it's in their interest to know about your dog groomer appointment-- this identifies you as a being willing to open your purse for dog products. That is worth money to advertisers.
there is the old saying: if you can't tell what product is being advertised, that means you're the product. How does Google offer free email/online storage?
I am guilty, unfortunately, because the amount of work it takes to extricate yourself from Google is serious. You can get secure emails and now even better prodocts (like Calendar and Drive equivalents) from Proton, but not all for free. Again, things cost money. There are free options using other calendars, there is a nice free email tier at Tuta (last I checked, anyway).

If you're going to use online stuff, there will be watchers. You can get a cheap/free email and use a desktop program to manage it. You can use a paper calendar. If you like the sharable online stuff (which I admit I do), then probably Proton is worth looking at, but if you spend 5 minutes searching for non-google options you'll see plenty of ideas from people who know a lot more than me.

I don't need a calendar or Drive; I don't need to be connected to anyone else for scheduling, etc. I use a paper calendar on the side of my fridge just fine, and a small book I purchased for keeping track of finances. I don't even *want* email; I dread checking it because the amount of email I get is overwhelming. I get online mostly in Firefox using DuckDuckGo. Hopefully they're truthful about blocking the Big Guys from tracking me; but their search results contain a lot of fake Ai sites, which is disappointing.
I confess I like Amazon's convenience.

I wish my online experience could freeze in the early 2000's. That's the perfect amount for me, so if anyone can put me back in that time frame with minimal surveillance, that's what I'm looking for.

And don't even get me started on my phone and all the apps that mysteriously appear unannounced and can't be removed.

Oh, and about targeting me to buy dog stuff. Funny. I hardly buy anything at all. We're frugal and I tie old t-shirts in knots for toys, lol. We 'inherited' my parent's dog when they passed, and being that he's already 12 and we're not his "masters", he doesn't let us bathe him or cut his nails, and his nails were very long and getting twisty because my parents couldn't do that stuff very well anymore. The Petco appointments are a necessity at this point; not a frivolity. I get ads for a lot of things that I scoff "Ha! You think you know me" at.

It seems like all of the above is about the bad side of applications, which is interesting. I'll go the other way.

When you're writing a web-application, you have to contend with an uncontrolled intermediary -- the browser. Browsers implement web standards differently from one another and so the author of the application can't count on a particular behavior. They have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make the software adapt to a range of possibilities. When they write an application, that's all gone. There is still the device's operating system -- changes to which can pull the rug out from under application authors but it's much less of a wild-west situation to contend with. So the application authors are able to tightly customize and control your user experience and make things (hopefully) more functional and performant.

I don't write software for mobile devices, but I do write both web and Windows applications and I vastly prefer to write Windows apps for the level of control and ease of debugging it affords. And my work is all internal to an electronics factory so I don't even have to contend with a million challenges that public-facing web development does.

I install apps when I value what they give me. I run Discord on my phone, but on my PC I just use the web interface. If some news website wants me to install their application, I don't do that -- they're just looking to hook more strongly into my life and I don't want that. But I'm not particularly worried about the spyware that a lot of people are.

Kim Wills wrote:

Ned Harr wrote:Often the app gives the company more insight into your activity (i.e. it's a corporate surveillance bug). Whereas through the browser they only know what you clicked on, what pages you looked at, and for how long, and maybe other stuff you've navigated to in your browser, with an app they can potentially see everything else you do on your phone and also where you go.  (Transmitting all this back to the mothership in realtime definitely doesn't use less data.)

They try to entice you to download the app by giving it more features, or a smoother customer experience, than the website. Most people fall for that.

Maybe you (or anyone!) can give me some advice: I just had a disturbing experience with my tablet that showed me that Google is reading all my email and tracking me. I can see why they want more data centers; so they can store the fact that I had a dog grooming appointment at Petco at 10am today (WHY do they care?!?). What happened was an alarm went off on my tablet to tell me the appointment was in a half hour. I did NOT set that alarm. I not only never opened ANY email on that device, but I didn't even know I had it on there! We got it for free when my stepmom got a new cable plan, and we use it in the kitchen to watch videos or play games while cooking; that's it. So obviously Google READ MY MAIL (an email *I* didn't even read, and didn't even know I got) and decided to set an alarm for me!  

Does anyone know any email systems that are not connected to that mothership you speak of?

I can ditch Facebook fine (they are making it more & more difficult to use on a browser and I won't put them on my phone). Honestly, I'm ready to ditch it all except Permies, lol, but it seems we all need an email these days. I'd actually like to use a whole system that's disconnected, like Linux was/is? Or Ubuntu? Those are whiffs of names from the past that I tried using. I have a laptop and a desktop I can wipe clean and start from scratch, if it's even possible anymore. The laptop is a Thinkpad from a few years ago and the desktop was refurbished in 2020 and never opened since.

Advice anyone?
I have issues with feeling watched.
I want to feel relaxed, and that my home is a private place.

Hey Kim, i have some background in this. I actualky worked in software on a major email service, but not in the advertising side.

The standard advice of "if you dont pay for it, you are the product" applies well here.  I have taken to paying for email service from proton and its been mixed but acceptable. On a desktop or laptop its as simple as just not installing and not logging into google services. However phones are much more challenging. It may not be possible to avoid google tracking on an android phone at all. Even if you never sign in and never use the google play store, which i do not. I have even heard rumors to the default keyboard application that is part of the operating system sends your writing to google (or samsung...to be sold to google) for analysis to be converted to advertising. I dont know if that's true, but its plausible.

In my opinion buying a fully separate phone operating system is the best practice there.

I didn’t read all the comments so this may have been mentioned, but I find that when you download an app, you start getting all kinds of ads and emails from them. I only use them if I trust…example Amazon.