Anyone who browses websites on their smartphone will have encountered annoying prompts to install an app. These prompts should not be followed without careful consideration. Why is that?
Why companies want their app on your smartphone
The reason, to put it briefly, is data – sometimes referred to as the gold of the 21st century. Think about how much information a company can gather about you when you visit its website. It’s certainly enough, but the site’s access to the inner workings of your smartphone is very limited. Not so when you use an app!
Apps enable much deeper integration with your operating system and ultimately with the data on your device. First, it is important to note which permissions are requested when installing the app. Often, the permissions are quite generic and the exact purpose of their use is not clear. Nevertheless, I would like to list a few common examples here:
- Contacts: often used to find ‘friends’ within the app. If you allow access to your contacts, your entire network may be transmitted at once. Without the permission of everyone in your address book, this also violates GDPR.
- Location: Using GPS and even by evaluating the gyrometric sensors within the device, every movement can be tracked with great precision. Websites, on the other hand, can roughly estimate the region or city you are in based on your IP address, but this is far less accurate and each location tracking that goes beyond that requires a new permission each time.
- Microphone: not only used for speaking. Some apps continuously record via the microphone and transmit voice recordings to themselves.
- Installed apps: can be read at any time and used to create more accurate profiles for tracking users.
In most cases, apps do not offer functionality that cannot be implemented in current web browsers. Therefore, before installing an app, it would be wise to pause and consider what added value an app really offers over a website, if any. I would venture to say that in many cases there are very few advantages for the user, but many for the provider.
For me, the decision is clear: I do not install apps, no matter how often I am asked to, and I prefer websites whenever possible.