Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)(danq.me)
840 points by MrVandemar 4 days ago | 506 comments
tl;dr: Annoyed that a travel agency required installing a 43MB Android app just to view an itinerary that was really just HTML, images, and PDFs, the author reverse-engineered its API traffic using a rooted Android emulator and HTTP Toolkit. They discovered the app authenticates via a URL containing a concatenated username/password and returns JSON containing all content. They wrote a Ruby script to fetch the JSON and generate a lightweight, password-protected webpage—0.05MB instead of 124MB—stripped of tracking and ads, and shared it with their tour group.
HN Discussion:
  • Companies prefer apps because they're more profitable, enable tracking, and bypass ad blockers
  • Some users and businesses genuinely prefer apps for UX reasons like home screen icons and notifications
  • PWAs and web tech should have been the standard but were sabotaged by platform owners
  • Web development offers advantages like browser extensions, instant deploys, and avoiding app store bureaucracy
  • ~Webpages are not innocent either—they track users heavily too