I was so shocked when my family member told me wordle is a website and not an app. I never thought that the masses would go for something like that in the package of a website. It really gives me hope for the future.
Why? Publishing an app costs money even if the app is free (which is why free apps usually have ads or some kind in-app purchases). Publishing a website with static content can be free depending on where you host it.
Because the model of apps needs to die. If you have something you want to put out into the world you currently need to write an android app, an iOS app and then any other native formats you want to target. But it’s much better to make it browser based because it’s one and done and it also side-steps all the nonsense with app stores which has been well known lately. If it’s easier and better for the developers then we will have more and better software.
Web assembly and WGPU are coming and when they do it will be the next paradigm after mobile apps. But in order to get to this new glorious paradigm it is necessary for people to be capable of recognizing the value of software even if it’s in the browser and of using it on the scale seen with wordle. It’s just as likely that people would turn their nose up to a browser based software and everything would remain stagnate. So I am glad.
webapps are a privacy nightmare.
No thanks.
Thanks to Hacker News¹, I recently came across Learn systemd by example². The site itself is hosted by Hetzner, a German hosting provider that take user privacy seriously³ and uses Cloudflare as a privacy-conscious CDN⁴. The only third-party resources it uses are Google fonts. Users of uMatrix⁵ or uBlock Origin⁶ can easily block these resources and the web app works perfectly fine without them.
I’d also use Wordle itself as an example of a reasonably user-privacy friendly web application. The only third-party resources it uses is Google Tag Manager (which is blocked by default by uMatrix).
I use Firefox with a number of web extensions (Firefox Multi-Account Containers⁷, Decentraleyes⁸, uMatrix, uBlock Origin, Privacy Redirect⁹). These all provide me, an end-user, much greater control over my online privacy than I’d have with a mobile app. I’ve also recommended Decentraleyes and uBlock Origin to non-technical friends as extensions they can install and not worry about configuration.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071240
2. https://systemd-by-example.com/
3. https://www.hetzner.com/legal/privacy-policy
4. https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/
5. https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
6. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin
7. https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers#readme