The fact that you are being down voted illustrates who posts on HN. "Ads allow me to bring you awesome content". "Without ads, the web as it is today wouldn't exist". "Content providers!" This is true in a minority of cases. The problem is everyone who has a garbage app or a garbage site thinks this is the case for them. Most of the time their content is worthless. These are the most vocal. They spend more time on SEO BS than content or making an app that isn't horrific. If you have a good app or a good site, people will pay via ads or subs. The web would be better if everyone used adblock or ublock and these people found a legitimate way to earn a living.
I'd argue that the race to the bottom which has happened in the mobile app marketplace has caused many people like myself to lose faith entirely. I've been conditioned to treat mobile developers with the same distain and mistrust that I reserve for lawyers, politicians, and used car salesmen. My default assumption is that they are a shyster trying to trick me into being a product of their clandestine marketing analytics business.
It really sucks for the honest developers, but as a result, I'm more comfortable using my browser to interact with dynamic content (like HN, Reddit, etc) while reserving local app installs to an extremely limited set of functions which need to operate on my local data where having both contact and networking permissions are a huge red flag.
This is all due to the interface though. Mozilla is a much more neutral party then Google. I'd rather untrusted third parties negotiate with Mozilla's API than Google's. What I'd like even more is good native software which treats users with dignity and respect, but those are few and far between on Android.
>I'd argue that the race to the bottom which has happened in the mobile app marketplace has caused many people like myself to lose faith entirely. I've been conditioned to treat mobile developers with the same distain and mistrust that I reserve for lawyers, politicians, and used car salesmen.
Sorry, but what "race to the bottom"? There are 1.5 millions apps in the iOS App Store. Inevitably a lot of them will be bad. But there are thousands of great apps at any price range.
It matters because people don't want an app for every site they frequent. Furthermore, a lot of apps are simply exactly the same as the mobile site but with the burden of install, updates, permissions, etc. I think users prefer a single point of entry for sites.
