You don’t have to use the platform. Competition is good, and steam taking 30% is massive. I’m a huge fan of steam but the fears of what happens post-gabe should have us all wanting other companies to put pressure on them. Hopefully it’ll drive them to promise continued pro-consumer practices such as proton (let’s gloss over DRM)

There is valid performance based reasons to use an app over a browser based experience. Sure perhaps it’s just data collection, but being able to cache locally and have that information persistent between uses dramatically drops the initial page load time.

But yeah, it’s annoying as hell to be bothered about it, and usually compromising the performance/load time is worth not having to go through the hassle of downloading an app.

Edit: Seems like I was wrong. I remember reading about how in general native apps would make significantly fewer API calls than identical website based experiences, even with the user having navigated to the site before.