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I don’t see a lot of people voicing this opinion so I’ll share this:

I like lemmit. It adds value to me as I can keep up with some very small communities on Reddit that I care about a lot, while spending all of my time on lemmy. If it didn’t exist, I’d have to keep visiting Reddit for some communities, and that would make me sad. Yes, I hope I can abandon Reddit completely some day, but lemmit is a great way for certain things to transition across the gap that still exists.

Have to disagree with you here across the board.

native apps have too many permissions on your phone

What permissions are you referring to? On my phone, Apollo was able to send push notifications, and it had restricted access to specifically chosen photos. Otherwise, it can’t read the file system outside its sandbox, has restricted background runtime, and can’t access sensitive shared data like contacts or health data.

It’s not uncommon in this world for someone to make a nice app, another company to buy it and you don’t even realize while your data is being sold.

That’s true, but orthogonal to the question of PWA vs Native. Web apps can let you upload data, access your location, keep track of your accesses, etc. Ultimately, you’re running someone else’s software on your device, and their software can do privacy-preserving things or they can do gross things with your data, and that can happen on any software stack.

PWAs are cheaper (in this case free) to maintain too. Apple charges you $100/year to be a developer . Google is more generous $25/lifetime for android.

Given the overall cost in time (man-hours) to develop an app, I’m not sure the 100 bucks is that big of a deal to be honest.

These operating systems change often and keep deprecating stuff, forcing devs to continuously fix unnecessarily broken stuff. This doesn’t happen with PWAs as they follow the web standard.

That’s not true. Your web app may not break in the same way (i.e., not compile), but OS evolution changes what people expect constantly. A few years ago it wasn’t possible for a web app to send push notifications or support dark mode properly, but now they can and people expect it. Browsers also regularly introduce new features like privacy protections that routinely break web apps that weren’t built with those behaviours in mind. Also, the OSes look and feel completely different now, and web apps that want to “feel” native will need to adopt their designs constantly no matter what.

Native apps break earlier (at compile time instead of at runtime) but both need to be maintained just as much to stay current, because the OSes people are running - and their expectations - are also changing all the time.

Oh, I completely agree. I’ll be dropping it as soon as there’s a suitable native replacement. Sadly, basically all of the other native clients are a much worse experience despite being thick clients. This one at least feels like Apollo until something better comes along.

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