Companies pushed for us to install their apps on our phones so they could force ads on us and extract (meta)data from us that they couldn’t from our browsers.

Cory Doctorow: How lock-in hurts design

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers.

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not mandatory is forbidden.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

And now this corporate brainworm has infected our desktop environments, even Linux ones. Just say no.