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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

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Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#471

Post by nsonha »

solardev wrote: post #52

Privacy issues aside, it's kinda cool reading about how Indians use their phones, and also how they use English. I'd never heard "beyond the pale" before, and I'm still not sure what the idea of "multiple Indias" means when some of them are Mexico and some are Africa...? I've also never heard of the majority of the apps being analyzed or tracked. Must be such a different world out there.

In some former colonies, the dialect can be a snapshot of the language back in colonial time. Happens to names as well as expressions.

I learned this watching a stand-up routine by Malaysian comic Nigel Ng. He was explaining his first name.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#472

Post by rzz3 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #200
rzz3 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sorry. I really just can’t understand or relate to this at all. Mobile web still feels like such a terrible experience, and apps generally don’t. When’s the last time you tried booking a flight on mobile web? And how do you deal with all of the real estate the browser steals? Having to log in every time when the app can just cache my authentication and FaceID me?

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.

I almost always book via apps. I can compare flights by looking at Kayak (app), then actually book it in the carrier app. I think the workflow just has to adapt to the tools you’re using, and trying to follow the same methods you’d use on desktop just don’t work. I don’t think either particular method is objectively worse than the other for every use case.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#473

Post by jb1991 »

nsonha wrote: post #470
jb1991 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bizarre take. Are you also suggesting there’s no reason to have a native app on a laptop? Because it’s essentially the same question. There are many things which a native app can do that a browser just cannot do well, or at all. I don’t know what your needs are, but for example if you’re doing heavy video or audio editing, accessing heavy amounts of RAM or utilizing GPU compute or doing other things on the…

On desktop you do productive work, your apps need native capabilities. On mobile, apps are primarily consumption, displaying, browsing... no complex interactions.

Lots of people use iPads for content creation. I think your worldview on this topic is a bit narrow. There have also been multiple feature length movies shot on an iPhone, at least two of them by Oscar winning directors! Those weren’t done on a mobile browser.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#474

Post by rzz3 »

whstl wrote: post #277
rzz3 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im sorry. I really just can’t understand or relate to this at all. Mobile web still feels like such a terrible experience, and apps generally don’t. When’s the last time you tried booking a flight on mobile web? And how do you deal with all of the real estate the browser steals? Having to log in every time when the app can just cache my authentication and FaceID me?

> Having to log in every time Sounds like a broken web app. You are currently using a webapp that doesn't do this. It's called Hacker News, and it never asks me to login every time on my phone. > when the app can just cache my authentication and FaceID me Sounds like a broken login form. Hacker News also allows me to login with Face ID on my phone, thanks to my password manager. Optionally webapps can also provide Pa…

Passkeys do definitely make the mobile web experience better, but unfortunately they’re still not widely supported. I’m not saying mobile web apps can’t be good, but a native app allows for a lot of UX optimization.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#475

Post by autoexec »

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…

> The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need.

this is the actual reason why companies push people to install and use their apps instead of their website.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#476

Post by autoexec »

jb1991 wrote: post #473
nsonha wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On desktop you do productive work, your apps need native capabilities. On mobile, apps are primarily consumption, displaying, browsing... no complex interactions.

Lots of people use iPads for content creation. I think your worldview on this topic is a bit narrow. There have also been multiple feature length movies shot on an iPhone, at least two of them by Oscar winning directors! Those weren’t done on a mobile browser.

ipads are designed primarily for consumption not creation. I'm sure lots of people manage create something on an ipad anyway but that doesn't mean it's a good tool for the job. Filming a movie on an iphone is just using the camera. I'd be very surprised if anybody making a full length movie with their iphone edited that film on their phone or an ipad.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#477

Post by schnatterer »

schnatterer wrote: post #320
pava0 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "break open the app sandbox"?

I found this description about the security risks of rooting very eye-opening https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html It also explains the sandbox.

As someone who cherishes the power of root privs, I'd still like to make a point for alternative solutions that came up like distros such as GrapheneOS or CalyxOS or non-root filtering options via VPN. If it weren't for backups I could manage my everyday life without root. For all other cases I would root and later unroot my phone via an OTA update :D https://github.com/schnatterer/rooted-graphene/

Hopefully GrapheneOS deliver on their promise to provide a better backup solutions than seedvault.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#478

Post by schnatterer »

schnatterer wrote: post #320
pava0 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "break open the app sandbox"?

I found this description about the security risks of rooting very eye-opening https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html It also explains the sandbox.

I'd like to add one more finding about the perils of root access: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/my-avbroot-setup/blob/c52e44...

> The term [rooting] generally also includes the functionality for making runtime code patches (eg. with Zygisk) and making runtime filesystem modifications (eg. Magisk modules).

> Out of the many root-enabled apps I've studied or reverse engineered, the vast majority fail to handle arbitrary inputs properly (especially filenames). For example, some root-supporting file managers turn a seemingly benign action like listing a directory into local privilege escalation. This is trivially exploitable, especially with browsers auto-downloading files with server-provided filenames to /sdcard/Download/.

To avoid repeated root access UI prompts, some apps spawn a long-running shell session, write commands to stdin, and rely on parsing stdout and searching for the shell prompt to determine when commands complete. This approach is prone to desync, which can lead to commands being skipped or other inputs being interpreted as commands.

All in all, I simply do not trust most root-enabled apps to not leave a gaping security hole, so I avoid them entirely. There are apps that do handle root access in what I would consider a more proper way, by spawning a daemon as root and then talking to the daemon over a well defined binary protocol. Unfortunately, this approach is the extreme minority.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#479

Post by jb1991 »

autoexec wrote: post #476
jb1991 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people use iPads for content creation. I think your worldview on this topic is a bit narrow. There have also been multiple feature length movies shot on an iPhone, at least two of them by Oscar winning directors! Those weren’t done on a mobile browser.

ipads are designed primarily for consumption not creation. I'm sure lots of people manage create something on an ipad anyway but that doesn't mean it's a good tool for the job. Filming a movie on an iphone is just using the camera. I'd be very surprised if anybody making a full length movie with their iphone edited that film on their phone or an ipad.

> Filming a movie on an iphone is just using the camera.

Not really. And this is why native apps are necessary. You can't use the built-in camera on an iphone successfully in this way, and I don't know any director who has. They use specialized third-party apps which give them the appropriate control.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#480

Post by whstl »

terinjokes wrote: post #316
whstl wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having to log in every time Sounds like a broken web app. You are currently using a webapp that doesn't do this. It's called Hacker News, and it never asks me to login every time on my phone. > when the app can just cache my authentication and FaceID me Sounds like a broken login form. Hacker News also allows me to login with Face ID on my phone, thanks to my password manager. Optionally webapps can also provide Pa…

> Sounds like a broken web app. > > You are currently using a webapp that doesn't do this. It's called Hacker News, and it never asks me to login every time on my phone. Every time I visit Hacker News on my iPad I'm logged out. Apple has decided that if you don't visit a website often enough it will expire all your cookies for the site. In practice that means I can log in to HN while I'm at the cafe one weekend and b…

Are you sure? My iPad has been logged on for months... the only that make it log off on the iPad is when I log off on the desktop.

Apparently HN does it on purpose and kills alls sessions on all devices when you log off.

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