this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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native apps have access to the OS and can get stuff like location, messages, etc (if you allow permission, sometimes even without) and can also inject ads.
What do you mean by images not showing in the feed? They work normally for me i think?
Newer versions of Android are fairly well locked down in terms of permissions and access to personal that, and that's just because Google wants apps to use its own proprietary APIs to do it, like the Advertising ID. I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between the tracking a website can do through Firefox mobile and the tracking a native app can do. Also Firefox mobile AFAIK still hasn't implemented full site containers, so potentially there's the extra risk of cross-site tracking.
For images I was just being lazy, I checked the settings and there's the "auto expand media" option which does show the full images. It still doesn't look great to me compared to native apps though.
Theres lots of speculation that apps like facebook listen in on the mic even without permission. I dunno how true that is, but a browser app absolutely cannot do that.
Yeah I've heard that, but I don't really buy it. It would be a massive vulnerability that Google would have every interest in patching. They're good at security when they want to be, and they definitely don't want to give their direct competitor any data for free. The more likely option is that people simply give Facebook permission to use the mic, for stuff like voice messages, and Facebook abuses it. Plus we're talking about open source hobbyist projects, not one of the biggest corpos in the world.