You're conflating browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc) with user applications. User applications are still not handling your bank passwords.
> They're also not collecting data about my consumer behavior with the goal of displaying more ads.
lol? Absolutely wrong here.
This is my original point. They 100% absolutely are. Look at some of the ad and tracking frameworks for native apps. Somehow no one cares.
You have a lot more control over something that's running locally than something running serverside that simply using the client to harvest data.
A native app sits on your device, executing all kinds of code, sometimes without your knowledge. With PWAs, the code is more or less open source - all the JS is there for you to inspect - even after obfuscation, you can see the network requests being made in the dev tools of any browser.
My point was essentially that you can run a native app without internet access most of the time (and can easily block the app making calls out by switching the internet off or blocking the calls its making) but a web app you have absolutely no control over, you just have to not use it.
Instead, the overwhelming web business model is "free to use" (akin to f2p in games). That means ads and other monetization side channels become the priority of the app, not the app itself.
And that is for trusted web apps. Let's not even talk about the fact that you are executing random code every time you visit any webpage. That just does not happen with native apps.
Open source is neither here nor there: both web sites and native apps can be open source. In fact, the web is unique in allowing you to actually inspect the source that is running on your machine, you have no way of verifying that the code in an open source repo is what actually runs inside your iOS app.
To be fair, this is changing with WASM. On the other hand, there are tons of obfuscation opportunities with native executables that don't exist for WASM.
Yes? I haven't claimed there aren't free native apps.
> Web apps tied to subscriptions are also plentiful.
Fair, but most of the ones I know are usually technical apps or they offer something else that is not about software (for instance, storage more than the app).
> the web is unique in allowing you to actually inspect the source that is running on your machine
That is not unique, nor true.
Uniqueness: you have apps made in scripting languages everywhere. Even for compiled languages it is a decision not to give you the code, not a technical one.
Truthness: many webs are obfuscated on purpose like native apps are.
> you have no way of verifying that the code in an open source repo is what actually runs inside your iOS app.
False, you can definitely verify that a binary matches the source code in deterministic builds and even provide debugging symbols etc. The fact that many projects don't care about that does not mean there is "no way", it just means the overwhelming majority of users do not care.
> False: you can definitely verify that a binary matches the source code in deterministic builds
If I want to check an app I have installed from the iOS App Store matches the code provided in an open repo, how would I go about doing that?
>Truthness: many webs are obfuscated on purpose like native apps are.
True. But their underlying behaviour, i.e., what data they send and where they send it, is viewable and blockable by browser extensions.
IMO native apps are capable of far more invasive privacy violations than the web is. But for some reason they're given a very free pass by comparison.