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Re:Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play ... by pmlnr on Saturday January 30, 2021 @06:46AM (#25968321)
Those might be the exceptions, at least for now. Ever since Firefox's crusade against IE the majority of people seem to still know there are different ~programs~ apps to access the internet with. As long as Chrome is not the default in the overwhelming amount of the operating systems, this might even stay like this, which is why I'm extremely unhappy that Android ships with Chrome these days and not with a thin gui on top of the system webview, like it used to.

EDIT: this ties in to the conversation I had on different platform recently, that it's getting arduous to make people understand that an app is not necessarily the same as the system behind it. Choosing an email client used to be a thing (Thunderbird, The Bat!, Outlook Express, mutt, etc; to name some across contrasting needs) not even too long ago. I despise that we came to a world where even the tech moderation fails to understand an app != protocol.

Re:Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play ... by ainar-g on Saturday January 30, 2021 @07:00AM (#25968397)
> As long as Chrome is not the default in the overwhelming amount of the operating systems, this might even stay like this, which is why I'm extremely unhappy that Android ships with Chrome these days and not with a thin gui on top of the system webview, like it used to.

That is also why I was rather sad when Microsoft announced that they won't develop their own browser engines any more. I disliked IE as much as anybody else, but what I did like was the competition. With Edge switching to Blink, essentially becoming yet another partially-degooged Chrome, part of that competition is gone.

Re:Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play ... by ttt0 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @07:14AM (#25968454)
> With Edge switching to Blink, essentially becoming yet another partially-degooged Chrome

Now it sends half of your data to Google and the other half to Microsoft. That's an improvement, they decentralized spyware.

Re:Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play ... by ptero on Saturday January 30, 2021 @08:26AM (#25968861)
Its 75% each way. And they will for many years work to reduce spying by lowering this percentage, to 50% in the asymptotic case.
Re:Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play ... by LocalH on Saturday January 30, 2021 @08:39AM (#25968952)
I would posit that Google has a vested interest in blurring the lines between apps and the protocols that drive them