Our experiences overwhelming align but one counter example is Discord. The chess.com native client is also reasonable.

There are some apps that provide some functionality that genuinely works best and I use the Discord mobile app. Of course, I didn’t instal it based on the pop ups.

Similar, there’s quite a few chat/video apps and games where apps make sense. And none of them prompted me to download the app or show lies like “better in our app” crap.

I've always been on the fence a bit about Gmail's mobile site vs. the iOS app. The mobile site is really great and it has the usual advantage that it uses no data and no battery if you never load it. But many other Google apps are dramatically better or don't even have a web counterpart. Best example is Google Translate, that uses the camera and a bunch of CPU time to do some wild shit.

Everyone should have a computer powerful enough to run vms for compartmentalisation.

If you can simulate 5 different phones it won`t matter if someone gets their spyware onto one of them.

Sometimes we can solve problems with technology and as a HN reader that is maybe more interesting.

But it is always better to address the root cause of the problem. This often means a policy or legal issue rather than a technical, but has the advantage of not becoming a whack-a-mole technical race.

> Are there apps that give superior experience than web sites nowadays?

The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website. Other than that, I agree with the sentiment that most apps for websites are not worthwhile to install.

> The IMDB app is far better (to me) than the dumpster-fire that has become their website

Funny, to me the IMDB app is the perfect example of a dumpster-fire app, with every 3rd tap/action resulting in an “invitation” to sign up for an account.

Works for my use case, which is being signed-in and managing my reviews/watchlist.

It is not necessarily a dumpster fire if one uses something else besides a popular graphical web browser to make the HTTP request and view the text. The "modern" web browser is complicit in creating the dumpster fire. Web developers can provide the inflammable materials, but a "modern" browser that by default auto-loads resources and runs Javascript is required to ignite it. There is no fire unless the right (=wrong) HTTP client is used.

I use a text-only browser and write simple command line "apps" (scripts) to retrieve text from sites like IMDB. It works very well. Opening pages on these sites in a "modern" web browser is an entirely different experience. We cannot ignore the complicity of the "modern" web browser in degrading the "user experience" in cases like this one.

My primary use case for IMDB is to figure out names of actors, for which I need to see the photos. There’s a lot to dislike about the modern web, but images are fairly useful.

1.sh takes an IMDb URL on stdin, saves the page temporarily and outputs a "lite" version, a more minimal page containing only actor photos. Of course, if desired, other film details could also be extracted and added to the output. 1.sh takes a single argument: photo size. Options are 140, 210 and 280. Requirements: curl (or quivalent), grep, sed, cut, sort, nl.

Example:

    # Don't forget the trailing fwd slash else 302 redirect
    echo https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9484998/ | 1.sh 280 > 1.html
    firefox ./1.html

    case $# in 1);;*)echo "usage: echo URL | $0 size";exec echo size options are 140 210 280;esac;
    read x;case $x in https://m.imdb.com/title/*/);;*)exec echo error: URL \(should end with fwd slash\);esac;
    x1=$(echo "$x"|cut -d/ -f5); 
    curl -H"User-Agent" -0 -4o "${x1}" "$x";
    (grep -o "<title>.*</title>" "${x1}"|sed 's/  */ /g';
    echo "<h3>Image size: $1</h3>";
    (exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's>.*href=><a href=\"https://www.imdb.com>;s/?ref.*\"/\"/;s[.*[<p>&</a><\/p>['|nl -s,
    exec grep -o "title-cast-item__actor[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*>//;s/.*/<img alt=\"&\"[^\>]\*/'|grep -of /dev/stdin "${x1}" \
     |case $1 in ---////////////////////////---IMDb-CAST-PHOTOS-ONLY---\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\---)
      ;;140)cut -d\" -f1-2,7-8,15|sed 's[.*[<p>&/></p>['
      ;;210)cut -d ' ' -f1-3,9|sed 's/https:/src=\"&/;s[.*[<p>&\"/></p>['
      ;;280)cut -d/ -f1-2,18-21|cut -d\" -f1-3,8|sed 's/class=\"/src=\"/;s/\.jpg/&\"/;s/ 280w//;s[.*[<p>&/></p>['
      esac|nl -s,;
    exec grep -o "title-cast-item__char\"[^<]*" "${x1}"|sed 's/.*cast-item-characters-link..//;s/.*/<p>\&quot;&\&quot;<\/p>/'|nl -s,;
    ))|sort -n|cut -d, -f2- 
    rm "${x1}" 2>/dev/null;

Just disable scripts in the web browser you crazy cat.