Yes, I've been prompted by Reddit to download the app many, many times (to the point that it's basically brainwashing), yet I've closed it every single time. It's annoying actually.

The web app is great, I don't know why they want me to fill up my phone's hard drive with another useless app.

You can collect more data with an app.

What useful data can you collect with the app that you can’t from visiting a website?

The Reddit app happily sucks all kinds of content from your phone. It demands access to your location, storage, and full network access, unsupervised.

It won’t work on Android if you deny permission for location and storage? There is an explicit per app setting on iOS that can stop most apps from running in the background.

This is partially why Android users have to be as careful about downloading apps as Windows users.

The Reddit app for iOS is 55.8MB. Not exactly a bloated app.

For perspective, imagine installing such a low-utility program spanning 39 high-density 1.44MB diskettes... and considering that not bloated.

(Isn't that more than the entire original Linux distributions from the copyfest era?)

That reminds me, imagine installing it on my first Mac with an 80MB hard drive. My entire SoftPC install with a disk image was only about 10MB.

And Windows 95 was only 55MB install.

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1060820-how-big-were-the-...

55.8 mg is bloated. A news reader should be under 30 ideally 20 or less

(I beta-tested it) it started out at around 5mb. It slowly increased to around 20-30mb, and around that time I lost interest.

That's massive. My phone hard drive is pretty full so I often have to delete stuff to make room for other stuff.

And this is the generation gap. I have <10 apps installed on my iPhone and I rarely install new apps. It's a pain in the ass and generally annoying, especially for something like this that should be a mobile-friendly website at best.

Give me a website though? I'll check it out. I also don't keep random tabs open either. Inbox zero applies to tabs too.

To add to this, I trust the sandbox of a browser much more than that of an app.

Browser sandboxing is great but I’d be much more trustful of browsers if they required user permission for more things. As it is they give away far too much implicitly.

Yeah, with web apps and webassembly really gaining traction, browsers should have a per-domain control of permissions.

This. I've been using the webapps for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a few other sites too. They're functional, and takes 0 space of my crowded launcher.

This is ridiculous. Any app that's in use is going to take up space in a tabstrip or other context-switching ui. If you want it to be its own window that's exceedingly easy to accomplish.

In the app centric macOS workspace, a window is better than a tab but not as good as an app. I have far fewer apps in my cmd-tab app switcher than I have both tabs and windows, so if I can elevate most commonly used things to the app level that’s far preferable to a window. This can be done with a wrapper app, but I’d rather not have to do that.

Under a window centric workspace like Windows and most Linux DEs, a window is good enough, but under macOS it’s not.

FWIW, a PWA added to your homescreen doesn't impact # of tabs.

True for mobile, but there’s a good chance that if I want to use it on my phone, I’ll also want to use it on my desktop and in the latter case a tab is unavoidable.

> I’ll also want to use it on my desktop and in the latter case a tab is unavoidable.

False. Chrome Shortcuts[1] turn websites into web apps on desktop. Something similar should be available on other browsers, too.

[1] https://www.lifewire.com/create-shortcuts-in-google-chrome-f...

So what do you expect? A desktop app?

BTW, you can make shortcuts to web apps from Chrome that open in their own window, and works like an app. Basically a single page, but with all browser controls removed. So it's a separate app on your window list, with the site's fav icon used as it's icon.

I do this with Whatsapp.

Just bookmark it. Or use Google to find it when you need it.