JR Raphael, Foundry
As you can see, aside from the small badge showing its association with Hermit, it doesn’t look any different from any regular app. When I tap it, Amazon opens up in full — looking and acting exactly like a conventional app:
JR Raphael, Foundry
But this is actually just the Amazon website, put into an app-like wrapper that makes it easier to access and use on Android. It doesn’t have the laundry list of data access that the actual Amazon app requires, nor does it run in any way in the background when it isn’t actively being used. Amazon doesn’t know where I am or what else I’m doing, and it doesn’t spam me with marketing notifications. But I still have all the same advantages of being able to access Amazon easily on the go and interact with it on my phone — in more or less the exact same way I could with the traditional Amazon app in place.
You could apply this same sort of setup to almost any website imaginable, be it YouTube, your favorite pharmacy, or even LinkedIn and other social media services. And you can then uninstall the traditional apps for those things right after — thereby tightening up your Android privacy, smartening up your Android security, freeing up local storage, and likely even improving your device performance by cutting back on unnecessary resource use.
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