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Re:Reddit experiments on users, forcing them to install app ... by freedomben on Monday June 12, 2023 @01:10PM (#36297057)
My thoughts exactly. I do lots of "tinkering" with my web experience and have a few open source apps that I build and install, and the barrier of entry on apps is way higher than for websites. Even for an app that is open and friendly, it's still a major undertaking to get a dev env setup and debug/tinker. And once you do, auditing the app to see what it does is further difficult. With the web you don't even need a dev env, and an extension like uMatrix makes it pretty easy to audit the site and see what it's doing/loading.

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.

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