I’m the opposite. If there is a well written app on iOS or iPadOS, I’ll use it for the increased privacy protections, lower battery and CPU usage and (sometimes) lower bandwidth consumption.
IMHO, mobile operating systems have gotten better than legacy desktop operating systems in a bunch of key areas. But of all the platforms, the web is the worst one. The web has tracking everywhere and often uses a lot of CPU, memory, battery, and bandwidth.
> The web has tracking everywhere and often uses a lot of CPU, memory, battery, and bandwidth.
The alternative to using something like Discord on the web is not a well-optimized desktop app that is somehow more respectful w.r.t. tracking than the web version. Same goes for Slack, Zoom, etc. It will still use lots of CPU and memory, and now in addition to tracking you with the techniques available to it in the browser sandbox, it will gleefully list the processes running on your machine, rifle through your files, try to get itself to start up automatically on login, try to get it so that when you "close" it it's still running in the system tray, and generally just make itself at home.
Desktop apps written by devs who first learned to write desktop apps are better than web apps. Desktop apps written by web developers are like demons that have broken through the summoning circle. The browser sandbox doesn't protect you from fingerprinting techniques and the ensuing tracking, but it protects you from a whole lot of other stuff. Take away the sandbox and the shameless data vampires get anything they want.
Webapps have better privacy protections than native. Battery/cpu is a tossup depending on the app. With the example above of chat apps I've found that the webapps use less cpu/memory.
I think you're correct that desktop operating systems are in sore need of a permissions model for non-free apps. It should be possible to build one, and then shame vendors into using it.
A well written native app should use less battery and CPU than a well written web app. Lots of native apps are not well written though and, like Gruber said, many are just a wrapper around a web view showing their website.
Native code should be able to do more work with less power, yes. But in practice, these kinds of runtime efficiencies aren't the overarching factor. Native apps add features and these features in aggregate end up using far more memory, cpu, and being otherwise invasive into the system -- for example, the discord native app attempting to ptrace everything else on the system.
The extra crap -- especially information gathering -- ends up making the native apps slower and buggier.
I can use uBlock on the web, I can't do that on iOS. I'm fairly confident that it gives me more privacy than what I can get on iOS. It's much easier for me to get a vague idea what a webapp is tracking and what it's doing. You can see all the network requests, you can disable javascript, disable access to certain APIs etc.
I bet iOS electron based apps are tracking significantly more than FF + uBlock. It's also why I strongly dislike Electron. It's basically Chrome without uBlock.
Of the two major mobile OSes, one is literally owned by an ad company and the other is increasingly succumbing to the dark side of advertising. Why would I trust Apple not to do nefarious things with all the tracking they do ("privacy" my ass) when I could just use a browser with an adblocker and do even better?
(I'm not an Apple user and never will be because, with the highest privilege level being reserved for Apple themselves, I don't own the device / can use it for general computation. It goes against my principles so I'm not some apple apologist, it just doesn't make much sense to assume what you said. Google wouldn't surprise me at all....when using Google Chrome/-ium. That's a choice. On Android, your data is fully in your hands, even if you have to fight tooth and nail for getting it your way.)
> I’ll use it for the increased privacy protections
Negative. It's actually the other way around. A browser is more controllable, especially with extensions.
An application in a browser cannot do certificate pinning preventing you from inspecting SSL traffic. Nor can you have uBlock origin running for your Discord app.
IMHO, mobile operating systems have gotten better than legacy desktop operating systems in a bunch of key areas. But of all the platforms, the web is the worst one. The web has tracking everywhere and often uses a lot of CPU, memory, battery, and bandwidth.