The price of an installed downloader, and why none is needed

What an installed downloader asks for before it runs

Software on a phone or a computer cannot do much until you approve a list of requests, and the list for a downloader is longer than most people expect.

It asks to write to your storage, which on a phone is frequently a request for the whole photo and media library rather than one folder. It asks to send you notifications. It asks to keep running while other apps are in front of it. On a desktop, an installer often asks for administrator rights, which is a request to change parts of the system outside your own user folder. Each grant stays in force until you revoke it.

Storage the app occupies before it saves anything

An installed downloader takes up space on the day you install it, and the space grows. The program files are the smallest part. Around them sit a cache of thumbnails and part-finished transfers, a settings store, and log files.

On a phone with a couple of gigabytes free, that footprint competes with the very videos you installed the app to keep.

Updates, and the maintenance they add

An app is not finished when it is installed. It updates, and the updates arrive on somebody else's schedule rather than yours.

Each update downloads over your connection, and on a metered plan that is data spent on the tool rather than on video. An update can also change what the app asks for or alter where files are saved, so the version you approved is not the version running three months from now.

What a page you open and close asks for instead

This is a website. You open a tab, paste an address, press Analyze, choose a row and press Download file. Reading the source page is done on our servers, so nothing on your device is asked to do that work.

Nothing is written outside the file you asked for. No permission prompt appears, because no permission is being requested. No entry is added to your applications list or your extensions list. Close the tab and the only thing that remains from the session is the video, sitting where your browser saves downloads.

• Storage access: not requested. Your browser writes the one file you chose, exactly as it does for a PDF.
• Notifications: not requested. The progress figure on the page is the only status there is.
• Background running: nothing of ours runs after the tab is closed.
• Administrator rights: none, because there is no installer.

The one thing an app does that a page does not

There is an honest trade here and it is worth stating plainly. An installed app can carry on transferring while you use something else, because you granted it permission to run in the background.

A page cannot do that. The tab has to stay open from the press of Download file until the transfer finishes, and putting a laptop to sleep or letting a phone lock its screen ends it. On a large row that is a real constraint, and taking a smaller row so the transfer completes sooner is the answer to it.

Removing an app you decide against

Uninstalling is the part people forget to count. On a phone, removing the app takes seconds, and the account you may have created inside it does not go with it. On a desktop, the uninstaller removes the program and commonly leaves the settings folder, the cache and any scheduled update task behind.

None of that applies here, because there is nothing to remove. Closing the tab is the whole exit.

What free use gives you without an installer

Free use runs to three files a day, each under 150 MB, and midnight UTC puts the allowance back. Pro sets aside the daily count and the size ceiling, and clears advertising from the pages.

Those terms apply the same way on a phone, a tablet and a desktop, because there is one version of the tool. A prepared file sits on a short timer, so start the transfer while the list is on screen.

Related pages

• Which work runs on the server
• Downloads handled by your own browser
• Copying an address without opening an app
• A browser weighed against installed software
• The single thing a download requires