are you pitching for web apps instead or no applications at all? even useful tools or are you mostly thinking of social media?

Not op, but I think the gist is clear:

- useful applications don't need "gamification"

- native applications push users into addiction and ease privacy violations

Useful native mobile applications exist too. But they are mostly not superior to PWAs.

I read OPs comment as an observation about the market and society and the conclusion is categorization by correlation (there are technical arguments too, of course).

You really took OP’s point and ran with it to make a deeply radical and ideological argument. I can only imagine that the only way that you maintain this view whilst finding HN a palatable community is by drawing fairly artistry distinctions between technologies that you enjoy and those that you have declared “for the kids” or whatever. We were talking about an application for a washing machine, not TikTok. What if TikTok was implemented as a web app?…which it is I must add. Or is this all some deeply impractical RMS-style Lynx fetishism?

The argument is not ideological.

Compare the permission flow of native applications to the one of web applications explicitly opened in any browser:

You should notice some differences.

That being said, I strongly consider supporting arguments as invalid when "ideological" is part of the brief summary of your refutiation and the supporting argument is first in the enumeration of your supporting arguments.

It's just a subset of the infinite set of useless but convincing "ad hominem" arguments, unless you can specifically point out why exactly some argument is "ideological", rather than rational logic or an attempt at achieving this ideal.

I have never considered the idea that native apps can be objectively evil. Thinking about it, it has its merits. Consider a smartphone with only a web browser which doesn’t support WASM and Web Workers, but supports installable PWAs.

* The tasks one strictly needs in a smartphone does not require intensive computing, the kind not possible already with JS. Games do. Banking, govt services, online shopping, messaging applications don’t. Name me one such application.

* Applications would consume far less power without compiled binaries or WASM, and without being able to run in the background. This would greatly extend battery life.

* All applications would be properly sandboxed with a permissions model and source-code inspectable.