@jrm4 @noxypaws @obsolescentsapien @drazraeltod @pluralistic
I already addressed many of those points including addressing the privacy and security one at length in the post you just replied to, and I also spent a lot of time pointing out cons of web applications that balance out in my opinion the cons to Native applications that you are suggesting which means that web applications are in fact not a clear winner.
Let me attempt to summarize my position here, as my final message:
So cons of native apps:
-They take up more space
-more overhead (debatable — what does this mean? They're usually more processor, memory, and battery efficient)
-They're harder to audit (debatable — web applications are typically sent over as highly obfuscated and minified code that's difficult to audit as well and it's a whole problem the FSF has spoken about)
- very frequently they're doing unintended/hidden/unreported data collection on users ( again web applications are just as if not more guilty of this and have structural problems with preventing this as well as I objectively described in my previous reply)
- And they can be limited by device/proprietary in harmful ways. (web applications are also proprietary and often do a lot of stuff on a proprietary server backend that you never see anyway)
Cons of web apps:
- probably collect and phone home with even more data ( I don't know where you're getting the idea that web apps collect less data about you the native apps but web apps are very atrocious about this with the various advertisement platforms and cookies and cross site tracking and Google analytics and whatever else, a lot of which native apps can't even emulate because they don't have their permissions for instance to see what other apps you're using)
- execute in a runtime (the browser) that has to get increasingly more bloated in order to accommodate modern web apps until it basically reinvents the entire native toolkit of whatever phone the browser is running on in order to give applications full capabilities while having fewer resources dedicated to security and a less secure process and execution structure then the operating system it's essentially trying to reinvent (why would you want the overhead of running another operating system on your operating system essentially?)
- built on a technology stack that is from the ground up simply not designed for advanced interactive user interfaces (HTML, the DOM, etc struggle to properly encapsulate user interface elements and reuse them, for just one tiny example) and while it can be contorted to create them the underlying technology stack used to do that (such as react or angular) is typically extremely fragile and insecure (see the various NPM fiascos) and simply does not have the features to properly emulate native app features such as proper touch surfaces or swiping gestures or background processes or push notifications
- requires you to be online to even get the interface at all so there's no possibility of graceful degradation from functionality offered when you're online to functionality offered when you're offline
- requires you to wait for the interface to load every single time
- inherent performance penalties for running on top of a whole nother application instead of running natively
Given how debatable your points are, and that many of them apply to web apps just as much, it's far from clear to me that native apps are a "worse idea all around." You seem to be taking the fact that web apps send over their "code" to your browser in a way that's technically more accessible as an indication that they're actually better when it comes to software freedom and tracking, but that isn't the case and has no reason to be the case. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html
I think in the end it just boils down to your priorities and personal experiences. I've been making objective arguments to explain why the experience of the average web application is always going to be worse than the experience with the average native application, based on my understanding of, and experience with, programming the underlying technologies of both, so it's not like what I've been saying has been purely subjective, but you've just been ignoring or doubting my relevant expertise at every turn and I'm not really sure how to get around that. But in the end, as with all such things, more choice is always better and it really comes down to personal priorities