[ephbit]

The tactic of pushing users by deliberately degrading ux has been obvious for a long time with mobile websites vs mobile apps as well.

Usability of mobile websites has intentionally been kept worse than that of mobile apps. Probably from not long after smartphones and mobile apps first came to be popular.

Just one example is the local ads service by eBay where the mobile website is usable, but just so much more clumsy than the app.

And all just with the goal of pushing users to the apps because they enable much more valuable data collection.

[HomeDeLaPot]

Reddit's mobile site nags you constantly to download the app. They started restricting the comments you can read without an account. And their site redesign is just bloated and bad. Seems like every social media site gets popular and then starts turning on their users to squeeze out more ad money, more data, more rent and metrics and growth. I'm super glad HN exists.

[jjav]

Everything on mobile is so brazenly user-hostile. The result of a tightly controlled ecosystem (at all levels) where the end user is just something to be consumed. Everything about it is so incredibly unpleasant, that I try maximally to stay away from mobile anything.

[Siira]

And people keep repeating the lie that the app stores somehow created a better experience for end users. Dark patterns and deliberate sabotage of the UX is pretty much only confined to the mobile ecosystem; Desktop-friendly companies also tend to be much more open (e.g., Discord, and Telegram have bot APIs, Tumblr publishes RSS feeds for all its blogs), while the more mobile-first a company is the more user-hostile it acts (e.g., TikTok uses UUIDs in its share links to track the fuck out of you).

The lies about malware are the most laughable. Malware ultimately only matters for business usage (if for that). I have seen (non-tech-savvy) people here use Windows PCs with all its software pirated (completely typical here in Iran, and presumably in most of the developing world), and they are just fine. They needed to install some antivirus software before Microsoft upped their game, or their computer would break after some (rather long) time, but installing a (pirated, of all things) antivirus app isn’t that hard. People could just pay the computer retail shops to do it for them for a small fee.

Note that this is still the state of affairs even for most enterprise PCs in Iran. Malware just isn’t that pernicious for end users. Ultimately, WhatsApp itself is nothing but malware. There isn’t much difference between poor users who are forced to use a malware-injected cracked app, and people forced to use a privacy-invasive app like WhatsApp because of network effects.