[hombre_fatal]

Somewhat aside:

After discovering mitmproxy, I checked out various apps on my Macbook. Found plenty that at least phoned home to Google Analytics on boot. Some even phoned on every action/keypress.

Not sure why HN has such a hard-on for native/mobile apps. You get performance at the expense of basically everything else. There's no dev toolbar. No extension system. No customization. No uBlock. You take it all or nothing. And you need intrusive tools like mitmproxy or Little Snitch just to get insight into their network traffic.

[kitsunesoba]

Native apps often (not always) get you not just performance, but also efficiency, no annoying browser chrome, adherence to platform UI conventions, and utilization of platform-specific features (no lowest common denominator syndrome).

Electron apps can get rid of the browser chrome at least, but it comes with the cost of a redundant copy of Chromium for each app, which is worse than running in-browser in terms of resource consumption.

Web apps would be great if they could deliver the things mentioned in the first paragraph on top of their security/privacy benefits, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.