> One thing that puts me off about Zoom is the way it tries to push you into downloading the desktop app when the web app should be fine and is what I prefer.

I'm pretty sure they do that because their web app is garbage, and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app.

Notably, Zoom's native app is truly native; it's not some electron wrapper like Slack or Teams. I don't think it's a coincidence that Zoom is both (A) the only major solution that seem to work consistently with large numbers of participants, and (B) the only one not using WebRTC.

> and they know people will get a much better experience in the native app.

not if I'm a user who is actively trying to not install the native app. for me, and likely many others, security and privacy trump performance benchmarks and UI/UX all day, every day.

And in that case you can use the web app. The grandparent talked about a "dark pattern" and it's really hard to see one if the native client is better than the web version.

This is all well and good when their native app actually works - in my experiences on Ubuntu (using i3, so that could be a factor) it freezes up my laptop completely. I was initially able to get the web version working by using the click-the-meeting-link-multiple-times trick, but now Zoom wants me to make an account to join meetings which I have no interest in doing.

My new strategy is to call in and say "Sorry, I can't see your screen because Zoom doesn't work on my computer," which is a completely unnecessary situation that Zoom creates by intentionally adding roadblocks to their web app.

It's hard to imagine why they'd want to push the desktop app that hard. I don't want to assume anything untoward, but it'd be a lot easier to dismiss the whole sending-data-to-China thing if they didn't try so hard to force you onto the version of their product that's capable of such a thing.