Should you uninstall your social media apps and switch to ‘wrappers’?

The vast majority of smartphones have some kind of social media app installed, be it Facebook, TikTok, Twitter or a combination of all. And yet these apps are known to spy on our activity while drain the phone’s battery. The alternative is something call a ‘wrapper’. — Silas Stein/dpa

The vast majority of smartphones have some kind of social media app installed, be it Facebook, TikTok, Twitter or a combination of all. And yet these apps are known to spy on our activity while draining the phone’s battery. The alternative is something call a “wrapper”.

Regardless of whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or other social networks, you don’t have to install their app to use them on your smartphone.

Instead you can use so-called wrapper apps, which are available for both Android and iOS devices.

“In principle, wrapper apps are nothing more than apps that convert and display the browser version of a social network for the smartphone,” explains app specialist Inga Poeting.

In contrast to other websites, social networks usually don’t optimise their browser versions for smartphone use, Poeting says. Instead they offer their own apps for smartphones and tablets.

One disadvantage of these apps is that they allow social networks to track their users much more effectively than a browser does. That’s one good reason to use a wrapper app instead.

“A wrapper app basically combines the advantages of using the browser with the advantages of using the app,” Poeting says. “The apps feel like normal smartphone apps and are well optimised in most cases.”

They can also offer better functionality than the social network’s own app. For Facebook in particular, there are a large number of alternative wrapper apps because of users’ dissatisfaction with the social network’s own app.

“There are different motivations to use wrapper apps,” says Noah Schlegel, who works in a research group that looks at privacy-friendly apps at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

“Wrapper apps can, for example, provide additional functions that save data volume and storage space, offer better performance or better data protection,” he says.

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