Everyone knows all the apps on your phone • Hacker News Board

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#351

Post by criddell » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 2:41 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #246

xxprogamerxy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple, UX. The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page. You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library ( https://silkhq.co/ ) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a nati…

>I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page. Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism. Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come ba…

On modern mobile and desktop operating systems, you can always copy that portion of the screen to the clipboard and it will recognize the text so you can paste it anywhere.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#352

Post by subscribed » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

hk__2 wrote: post #211

WuxiFingerHold wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhones are less of a privacy nightmare. One of the biggest incentives for creating apps is to scrape all kind of data from the users. Look at how many apps require permission to see you contacts. And how many actually need your contacts to function. That's why I'm still a bit surprised that many seem to be surprised by findings like this one here.

> Look at how many apps require permission to see you contacts. It is so annoying that it’s either "give access to ALL my contacts and ALL their information (yes, even the notes I took on their favorite things for next Christmas)" or "don’t give access". I wish we could limit the number of contacts and the level of information we give.

Check if GrapheneOS suits your needs. It has "contact scopes", ie you cna literally allow the app to see single contact only.

Same with storage scopes: one directory and that's it.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#353

Post by criddell » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

piyuv wrote: post #27

andsoitis wrote: post #26

> everyone knows all the alls on your phone On Android phones. iPhone doesn’t have this privacy deficiency.

Right, only Apple knows, but it’s ok, they’re the good guys

> they're the good guys

In a relative way, they definitely are.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#354

Post by RKFADU_UOFCCLEL » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 2:48 PM UTC

This is to be expected though, a phone platform isn't exactly Tor Browser. The big API as with any platform will have plenty of ways to fingerprint people even without this one example, unless the developers went far out of their way from the beginning to build prevention in. Much like how on UNIX you can see what processes everyone is running and their command lines.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#355

Post by djrj477dhsnv » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

fph wrote: post #313

switch007 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't afaik. Only indirectly through multiple profiles I was kind of surprised https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/13302-query-all-packages-pe... https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/7800-how-to-mitigate-identi... Later For the wider audience: though don't take this as GrapheneOS doesn't care about privacy. I'm sure there are reasons (I didn't read all of the linked threads) and it gives you plenty of other protections…

A rationale from the core developer [1]: > I'm sure there are plenty of system APIs providing this information too, and I don't just mean APIs designed to directly provide the information. > It's not useful to prevent directly getting a list of installed applications without preventing detecting which applications are installed, so this specific feature request has to be rejected. It would have to be part of a larger…

I get what he's saying, but still seems like blocking the easy way of getting a list of apps, while certainty not perfect, would prevent most privacy abuse.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#356

Post by olejorgenb » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

turrini wrote: post #312

I don't know if it is just me but I run every class of app in isolated "islands" (like work profiles) on Android. Browsers, banking apps, social media, instant messaging, tools, etc. Almost everything is isolated from another non related group.

How?

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#357

Post by dbtc » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 3:06 PM UTC

turblety wrote: post #137

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

I agree, mostly, but there are definitely some programs I want running on my phone and outside of the default browser.

- Timer / alarm clock - Camera - File browser - Offline maps - Another web browser

But not 250MB banking app.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#358

Post by miniBill » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

turblety wrote: post #137

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

Access to Bluetooth devices is a good reason to have an app. I definitely do not want a Bluetooth API in my browser (although Chrome does have something in that direction, I think it's a bad idea)

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#359

Post by impossiblefork » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 3:22 PM UTC

turblety wrote: post #137

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

It has the potential to be faster, more private and more efficient.

Absolute absence of lag, glitches, rendering issues, memory use in the kilobytes etc. is possible with native applications.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#360

Post by wodenokoto » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

pasc1878 wrote: post #339

wodenokoto wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, booking hotels and flights is so much better on the web. You get multiple windows for easy flight and price comparisons, within and between providers. I don’t understand people who use apps for this. It is such a pain.

You are comparing desktops to phones. I do most things on my desktop for the reasons you say but on a phone multiple tabs etc is a pain.

No, I’m saying that the booking.com app, or the Skyscanner app or any of their competitors don’t support multiple tabs.

Their websites do (although even on new phones you are at a greater risc of a tab being purged and needing a reload, but still you can multi tab on the mobile website)