Native apps eating up battery and slowing down your phone? Switch to Lite Apps.
Android browsers can already add pages to home screen but Hermit takes this even futher.
It has significantly better UX with frameless and full screen modes. You can bookmark pages, so on Lemmy you can quickly bookmark community in specific sorting order. There are user scripts and blockers and loads of customization. You can even add push notifications for changes on the site or RSS feed.
I've been running most Fediverse web apps through Hermit and it works really well! The only exception is that I couldn't figure out how to setup notifications on Mastodon.
Tried it for Kbin, and in that specific case the only advantage it seems to have over Chrome's wep app function is the rotation bug. That's great, but most of the features that might be worthwhile are locked behind a paywall.
I don't really see how this adds a whole lot except for removing the frames of the browser app. But in exchange you lose the ability to use addons and their corresponding scripts & styles, while all the extra features are paywalled.
For lemmy, not a huge benefit, but for other less trustworthy social apps, you can run them sandboxed so they can't track your other activity. Though Firefox also sandboxes cookies now too. But hermit has some other nice features regarding bookmarking, user scripts, etc
Unfortunately browser apps are really buggy and never really cared for by neither Chrome or Firefox. So, it's always like using a beta feature that sometimes works compared to Hermit which is quite polished.
I mean there is no such thing as a free lunch. It has sandboxes, scripts, multi instances, website sync and other stuff. But, I agree most wouldn't find much value in it. I frequent some websites quite a bit and some in rare cases. Managing them in Firefox and Samsung internet isn't that seamless. Hermit is like a launcher for all my lite apps which I can launch when needed which is neat.
It does have the drawback of only being able to be logged in on one account per instance, so if you share a device with someone, or just use multiple accounts yourself, you'll have to switch manually.
It isn't quite as good as a well built app because it's just a browser with tricks, but you have full access feature wise, and it's "good enough"
Counting the default and the additional 5 sandboxes you get 6 account logins for the same site. Sharing your device is not a typical use case but happens. You can send a suggestion to the dev to increase the sandbox count. Perhaps, he can increase it higher to fit your use case.
But, I think better would be to install hermit in a seperate android profile alongside the apps the mentioned person would use. Seperating your and his/her account data would be better.
One thing I don't understand is why when you add a lite app(Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn), go to login on that site and click to autofill with Bitwarden, why does it show as com.chimbori.hermitcrab?
Does this mean the Hermit app can see your login details for each site?
That's a very good point. I'm not sure.
I know Hermit is using system's browser which is known to be leaky (that's what tiktok got in trouble for recently) and not as secure as Firefox. If you need security it's probably best to stick with Firefox imo.
That happens when the browser doesn't send the url of the website in question properly in which case the app name is captured. When I added my instance as a lite app it autofills normally and only associated the site with the login. I use the keepassDX app and I'm on android 13. Which version of android are you on?
Same situation here. Firefox PWAs are already frameless and full screen. Your Firefox extensions remain active within PWAs, so you can use your ad blockers, user CSS or JS, etc. The only feature from that list that Firefox seems to be missing is any way to add bookmarks.