Modern mobile OS’ and apps are quite strictly sandboxed so, with reasonable vetting like Google Play Store and Apple Store, you can reasonably safely install random crap and uninstall it later. It’s a different realm from running random binary executables.
Seemingly innocuous Play store apps get found to be viruses all the time, most recent in my memory being a few barcode scanner apps, farthest back in my memory being flashlight apps back before android did it natively, but there’s been more over the years. Trusting apps “because play store” is horrible practice.
Because play store and OS permissions. Nothing is 100% safe but that’s two layers of defense these apps have that a random exe designed for an OS that gives root perms to every process does not have
That depends on your definition of safe. Everyone wants to be a data broker these days, and the amount of data that can be gleaned from basic app permissions is startling. Not to mention that it’s just annoying. We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser. 90% of the apps out there could be websites, and the world would be better if they were. But having an app gives the publisher a lot more control over what they can do, how they can spam you, and what they can scrape, and that’s why everyone has their own stupid apps now.
We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser.
God, please, no. There’s a really good reason WebOS experiments all, universally, failed, and it isn’t because Big Brother wants your data. They can get it through web apps just fine, anyway. No, the reason is because web apps suck.
Modern mobile OS’ and apps are quite strictly sandboxed so, with reasonable vetting like Google Play Store and Apple Store, you can reasonably safely install random crap and uninstall it later. It’s a different realm from running random binary executables.
Seemingly innocuous Play store apps get found to be viruses all the time, most recent in my memory being a few barcode scanner apps, farthest back in my memory being flashlight apps back before android did it natively, but there’s been more over the years. Trusting apps “because play store” is horrible practice.
It’s reasonably safe. That’s not the same as “harmless.”
Because play store and OS permissions. Nothing is 100% safe but that’s two layers of defense these apps have that a random exe designed for an OS that gives root perms to every process does not have
That depends on your definition of safe. Everyone wants to be a data broker these days, and the amount of data that can be gleaned from basic app permissions is startling. Not to mention that it’s just annoying. We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser. 90% of the apps out there could be websites, and the world would be better if they were. But having an app gives the publisher a lot more control over what they can do, how they can spam you, and what they can scrape, and that’s why everyone has their own stupid apps now.
God, please, no. There’s a really good reason WebOS experiments all, universally, failed, and it isn’t because Big Brother wants your data. They can get it through web apps just fine, anyway. No, the reason is because web apps suck.
You are very wrong about them not wanting your data, and the tracking/snooping capabilities of an app vs a browser.
Did I say they don’t want your data? I said they can get it through web apps too.
Doveryay, no proveryay, except it should be don’t trust, and verify. Web app or native.
Isn’t Discord and Microsoft Teams just a webapp in Electron? My main grievance is that Chrome on Android doesn’t hide that URL bar no matter what