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from the why-get-the-milk-for-free-when-you-can-buy-a-cow dept.
The Guardian has an article about the usage stats of apps and the Web on mobile devices.
The prediction that mobile web use would overtake apps has been disproved by data from analytics firm Flurry ... The idea that people will shift from using native apps on their smartphones to using HTML5 websites offering the same functionality hasn't played out ...
They don't say where that prediction came from, but I could have told them it was dubious years ago. For most users, apps are simply more convenient. I'd bet that a lot more Android and iOS users know how to find their app list than know how to find their Web bookmarks.
But personally I go to significant lengths to avoid apps that I think should just be websites instead. One reason is security; I don't want to be running someone else's code just so that I can read their text. But is my attitude correct? With web browsers having so much functionality these days, perhaps using a dedicated newspaper app with just the "full network access" permission would be less of a security risk than visiting that same newspaper's website using Firefox for Android, for example? Bear in mind the latter also has permissions for the camera, microphone, GPS, NFC, device accounts, 'run at startup', etc.
Also from the article:
For Google, the indifference of smartphone users to the mobile web in favour of apps presents a problem because in general it cannot follow users' activity inside apps ... The search company has begun an initiative offering links to in-app content for Android developers which it will be able to index.
Is avoiding Google another reason I should learn to love apps instead of the Web?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:44PM
So your mobile browsing is done with JavaScript turned off, then?
If not, your distinction is largely* irrelevant, because you're still running someone else's code to read their text. Not only that, you're also trusting code from every advertiser those sites use, too.
* Assuming a reasonable list of app permissions, versus trusting a browser's JS implementation to be safe
(Score: 3) by bob_super on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:46PM
What is "a reasonable list of app permissions"? Is that a breed of unicorns?
(Score: 2, Informative) by MostCynical on Wednesday April 02 2014, @06:59PM
"reasonable app permissions" are those you set - although you have to have Cyanogenmod installed to have that sort of control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @11:22AM
XPrivacy (via the Xposed framework) does this as well, allowing you to provide apps with false information.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:28AM
I don't know if that deserves +1 Funny or +1 Sad Truth.
However, even with slightly unreasonable permissions (sometimes due to data mining, sometimes due to devs not knowing better), you probably give the app less data than you can (and do) via JS in a browser. The site potentially has every permission the browser itself does, plus access to all the usual tracking tricks like tracking cookies, images, JS link crawling, etc. to learn about your browsing habits.
Which was ultimately my point: you can see what permissions the app wants beforehand, and in theory you also benefit from others testing the app and finding issues, but you're blindly trusting the website and any third parties it uses (including sleazy advertisers that are known to spread malware via their adverts) to run anything they want, with the potential for it to change every site load without you ever knowing it.
What makes that a safer option than running the native app and viewing (or controlling, as was mentioned about cyanogenmod) permissions before deciding to trust the app?