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DuckDuckGo installs are up 30% as users reject being ‘force-fed’ Google’s AI Search
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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You don't even need the website. I just set the default search engine to DDG in my browser.
A search app makes zero sense to me.
The DDG app is pretty cool though. It has free app tracking protection.
As a tangent, it's kind of insane that the NPR app seems to always have like 10x tracking attempts vs tiktok.
So much, this. My brokerage apps are my biggest offenders for phoning to unauthorized parties, makes me nervous as hell.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, that I miss using Mullvad but that DDG supplanted them as my VPN of choice, just because there are other anti-tracking and adjacent security Services integrated into my life so seamlessly.
Unrelated to DDG, if you sideload on Android I want to shill HARD for this FDroid package, called Hail, , which when powered with Shizuku can fully suspend apps selectively at will.
So I identify any apps that like to phone home regularly, and just tell them to aggressively take naps until summoned, I feel like I only want to allow 10% of my apps to run to the background regularly. This app gives me a toggle for that, and DDG is my lamp light for selecting the most egregious offenders.
Surely that doesn't mean you have the NPR app installed, does it?... 🤢
The reason why companies like to push apps over websites is that apps can gather more information about you. Not saying DDG does this, but it is weird.
For their defense this could be to place search bar on main screen, as looks like Google no longer allows to switch to a different search engine in their default launcher.