Think twice when installing mobile apps
Think twice when installing mobile apps
I have a powerful smartphone, but only about 10 apps installed. The most used app? A web browser.Even though most functionality provided by apps would work fine in a web browser, companies prompt us to install mobile apps for a "better experience". Most of them actually want to get data about us. There are numerous examples of mobile apps tracking and harvesting data. I'll add my own: A company providing a mobile app SDK offered to sell a specific type of data to my previous employer. Data was anonymously collected from apps such as chat or weather, many made in USA. Do you really need to install an app to find out the weather forecast? I used to write Facebook messages from my phone web browser during commuting. Around 2017, Facebook disabled messages in the web browser. Instead, it asks to install the Messenger app. Guess what? I no longer use Facebook messages from my phone, only more seldom, on my laptop. Inoreader is a news reading app. I asked them to make the the web interface better for a small mobile screen, with one specific request, which would have made reading more usable. They said I should install the free mobile app. Guess what? I'm no longer using Inoreader on mobile, only on my laptop. I'm also open to switching to another provider which provides similar functionality, but usable in a mobile browser.LinkedIn prompts me to install the mobile app every time I visit from the phone browser. Guess what? I've stopped browsing LinkedIn from my phone and limit it to laptop time.Companies will follow their interests and push users to certain behaviors, as long as we accept it. Why does a company which already has a functional website go through the trouble of contracting somebody to implement mobile apps, publish them in app stores and give them away "for free"? If they would have really cared about a "better experience", they would have simply improved the website first.Please, the next time you're about to install yet another app, ask why that functionality isn't provided in a web browser. Do you really need to install that app?