Banks, email providers, booking sites, e-commerce, basically anything where money is involved, it’s always the same experience. If you use the Android or iOS app, you stayed signed in indefinitely. If you use a web browser, you get signed out and asked to re-authenticate constantly - and often you have to do it painfully using a 2FA factor.

For either of my banks, if I use their crappy Android app all I have to do is input a short PIN to get access. But in Firefox I also get signed out after about 10 minutes without interaction and have to enter full credentials again to get back in - and, naturally, they conceal the user ID field from the login manager to be extra annoying.

For a couple of other services (also involving money) it’s 2FA all the way. Literally no means of staying signed in on a desktop browser more than a single session - presumably defined as 30 minutes or whatever. Haven’t tried their own crappy mobile apps but I doubt very much it is such a bad experience.

Who else is being driven crazy by this? How is there any technical justification for this discrimination? Browsers store login tokens just like blackbox spyware on Android-iOS, there is nothing to stop you staying signed in indefinitely. The standard justification seems to be that web browsers are less secure than mobile apps - is there any merit at all to this argument?

Or is all this just a blatant scam to push people to install privacy-destroying spyware apps on privacy-destroying spyware OSs, thus helping to further undermine the most privacy-respecting software platform we have: the web.

If so, could a legal challenge be mounted using the latest EU rules? Maybe it’s time for Open Web Advocacy to get on the case.

Thoughts appreciated.