Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.
They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.
If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker.
And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.
Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.
Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.
You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared.
The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.
After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.
Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.
But... most businesses aren't that complex, and people can usually come up with really good common sense ideas for how to make improvements. Data-science is often most effective when it serves less as a visionary idea-maker and more as translator that helps common-sense ideas become real (optimizing the precise values used, figuring out the best roll-out strategies, building forecasts).
And yes comments like this amaze me too.
They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.
The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.
It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.
(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)
IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.
Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.
Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).
Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.
With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web.
Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).
That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis!
Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads. But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.
The surefire way would be an external application that uses OS APIs to fiddle with memory directly (bye bye mobile content blockers).
But whatever form it takes, it would have to be programmed to operate on every framework available, so it's way less universal than writing a CSS selector or URL regex.
As a simple example: Dark Reader has 5 million installs on Chrome. That's 5 million people who can view a web app in dark mode even if the developers didn't think to provide a native way to do so.
I'm to the point where I boycott apps. I will only use an app if there's a real benefit to me for doing so, such as podcasts and music and offline functionality or those that use hardware features.
I have never looked into this mind
Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to.
Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.
very very easy, no root required
it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface
> Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated
but they can't hide the calls into TrustManager
a small utility could automatically take in the APK, patch out the calls and return the fixed APK for you
(would probably work for 99% of apps out of the box)
Is this required? i.e. do all apps have to use the TrustManager interface to accomplish cert pinning, or is that merely the official way?
well, Java is Turing complete, so you could completely re-implement TLS yourself instead of using the API that comes with the platform
in practice no-one is going to do that
It means the payload is. HTTPS alone doesn't have any special considerations for hiding the domain, which I think is visible so the request can be routed correctly. And since a lot of ad-blocking is based on domain, that ought to work.
Now you've blocked a large percentage of ads on android.
Phone apps delenda est
Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app:
– https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage
– https://revanced.app/download
Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases
No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.
They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more.
They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code.
ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary.
So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.)
Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well.
So ReVanced is a team that maintains:
* A list of useful patches
* An engine to apply them
* A Java CLI frontend to the patcher
* An Android app frontend to the patcher
Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.
Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.
The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.
There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.