Researchers publish Android app to save websites as native apps

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created an Android app to package websites as native apps. This allows Android users, for example, to use Facebook as a native app without giving access to, for example, GPS.

The NativeWrap app is on the Play Store as an experiment. Users can save a site as a native app by pressing ‘share’ on a site and then selecting NativeWrap. A screen will then pop up to determine whether the app should have access to read or write data to the SD card. By default, internet access is enabled as permission, because it is a packaged website.

NativeWrap differs from placing shortcuts on the home screen, in that it is not about showing a site in a browser that may or may not be stripped of the interface: native apps are actually apk files that regular apps also use.

The researchers presented that solution in a paper on the subject. They argue that many apps are little more than wrappers anyway, which download HTML and Javascript code and also ask for more permissions than necessary. The disadvantage of NativeWrap is that 3d objects work less well than in Chrome and that the app does not download a site’s favicon as an app icon; all icons of NativeWrap apps are therefore the same and cannot be changed. The apps do not share cookies or other data with the browser; so if someone reads the cookies in the browser, they won’t see the data in NativeWrap apps.