alt Hacker NewsI don’t have the right configuration of equipment to use an app like this, but does anyone know why this needs to be a service-driven app? What piece of functionality requires a server to track your health?
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Better revenue model? Pushing some data to the server, serving ads to the app, reselling demographic data, etc all allow for more revenue than just the price of installation.
There are almost certainly other apps in the space that don’t need a server, don’t phone home to Meta, and are lower priced, but they probably aren’t as good at marketing.
From my experience in the startup world, I would wager that this developer probably wanted to track marketing campaign installs (Meta library is required to close the loop on Facebook/Instagram ad conversions after app install) or wanted a feature from some Meta library they integrated but didn’t realize or care about the consequences.
I'm not familiar with this app, but a service lets you do potentially nice things like cross device sync and sharing observations with trusted others.
My partner uses the app this article is about (Flo) and I have an account there too in order for her to share the data with me.
I guess you could do it with some sort of P2P sync with cryptography involved locally instead, and/or E2E for stuff sent via the servers. Kind of surprised me they didn't have E2E already, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore.
Like notes apps, reminder apps, etc, data from almost everything we do on phone is saved in cloud. That data is their business fundamental. Same with this app also.
Not being a women, I've always wondered what insight the app gives regardless of data traveling to a server... does it do anything you can't do with a simple notebook app (like Apple's default Notes)?
If you have an irregular period, does this app help "guess" when it's going to start/end?
If you have a regular period, why do you need an app at all?
It doesn’t? You could easily install the tracker on the client app, no need to do it server side. In fact I bet the app in question (Flo) was doing the upload to Meta client-side.
I have actually been playing around with scoping a privacy first version of these tracking apps that store all the data locally with optional sync. It's technically possible, but there's very little in the way of revenue generation there. So it's same issue as always, capitalism corrupts.
The spying part requires a server.
If you use GrapheneOS, you can enable or disable internet access for each app.