The problem with dedicated apps is that you often have to fight with the OS vendor for basic functionality in your app just to distribute it and these days you don't actually gain much with a dedicated app since modern sandboxing is so aggressive and web apis are relatively complete.

IMO as an end user - aggressive sandboxing is a feature, not a bug

A browser is a sandbox.

Browsers already do this much better. If you don't trust something that's where it belongs, not as a local app.

> you don’t actually gain much

Some of what you gain is pretty important though. For example, well written native apps integrate better with the platform’s accessibility features and they typically consume less power, storage, and memory.

I'd contest the storage point pretty strongly.

Well written web apps can be very accessible too and some companies do actually go out of their way to ensure this.

I absolutely hate this state of affairs. Apps don't allow me to open multiple tabs, as an example.

Some do, MacOS has builtin support to add tabs to any application: https://support.apple.com/my-mm/guide/mac-help/mchla4695cce/...

But they do allow showing unblockable ads and notifications, so some 'people' absolutely love that state of affairs because they benefit from it.

I don’t know what the state is on Android, but on iOS (and macOS) unblockable notifications aren’t really a thing (notifications need permissions that you manage on a per-app basis) and many app ads can also be blocked (1Blocker does it), though it’s not as powerful because it’s essentially domain blocking.

I’m not disagreeing with you, merely providing more context. Companies like Reddit and Facebook definitely push you more to the apps so they can extract more value out of you.

What if you want to see some notifications but not others? But the developers are scammy and didn't separate ads into their own channel?

Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore.

Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.

> Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore.

That's not always possible. There might not be enough quality competition and I don't see others following my example to beat the shitty company into submission and make them change their ways if I do that.

> Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.

Web is very different in that regard. You can pry any app open and change basically anything with a single press of F12. Most of the time, people already did that for you and submitted an ad blocking filter for everyone to use. This isn't even close to the crapware of a typical app store.

Web is the last democratic platform we have left.

All the more reason to stand up against it and choose the web.

It used to be that cli tools were the power users preference but now I feel like that's shifted to web apps (over native). The ability to have multiple tabs/views, load extensions to customize behavior, adjust sizing, etc.

As an example: an absolutely vital tool for me is the Vimium keyboard control extension for navigation, which unfortunately can't be used in dedicated apps.

I'm wondering which of us is the outlier, because I heavily use browser apps on my phone and tablet and ignore vendors' prompts to install their native apps.

(Other than Google apps, that is.)