[HN Gopher] 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are...
___________________________________________________________________
'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly
penalised
Author : zeristor
Score : 696 points
Date : 2025-02-22 09:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| mschild wrote:
| I hate this trend with a passion. Digital can make a lot things
| easier, but frankly speaking for a majority of those use cases a
| mobile website will do just fine as well.
|
| My bank is digital only and doesn't have any local branches. That
| works for me and is fine. It's not like I'm switching banks every
| few weeks. They still have an all phone line access as well
| though. You can call people round the clock to do transfers, get
| your balance, etc. Even my analog grandmother has her bank
| account with them.
|
| On the other hand, you have restaurants and other businesses that
| just over do it. There is a restaurant around my work place that
| I went to once or twice a month. Nothing special but fair prices
| and good lunch menus. Then they went all digital. Want a menu?
| Scan this barcode. Want to order? Create an account and place you
| order with your table number. Want to pay? You can click pay on
| your phone and enter your details. Don't have a phone? Totally
| sorry, we don't have any printed back-ups and our servers don't
| have any card terminals anymore anyway.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > He does own a smartphone - an Apple iPhone he bought secondhand
| about three years ago - but says: "I don't use apps at all. I
| don't download them for security reasons."
|
| Yes and?
|
| He makes a choice and he is being penalized for it. Presumably
| the benefits for him outweigh the costs. For Richard Stallman
| they do.
|
| There is no innate human right to grocery store coupons or
| private parking lots.
| hkwerf wrote:
| I have to install an app to communicate with my child's state-
| sponsored daycare. I'll have to install an app to communicate
| with the teachers at his future school. Is this still fine?
|
| It'd be one thing, if it were just apps. But all of these apps
| are essentially just containers for some web application.
|
| Do you get access to the web application without the app? No.
|
| So what's the point of the apps? So they can send you
| notifications and annoy you with irrelevant updates concerning
| other groups at the same daycare all day long, because they
| don't care to filter?
| froglets wrote:
| Once they get into school you'll need to use separate apps to
| communicate with their teachers, pay for fee/lunches, etc.
|
| The communication apps are out of control since the teachers
| seem to have choice in what is required and so changes every
| year.
|
| My middle schooler needs 3 different apps (and a Chromebook)
| to check/hand in homework and parents need 2 to receive
| communication from the teachers.
| dalke wrote:
| Here in Sweden, it took me about 5 months but I was able to
| get the school to send me info by email. They switched to an
| app-only system, and I have no smartphone.
|
| Setting aside any issues related to privacy or US corporate
| control over my life, I'm one of the people who doesn't use a
| smartphone because the temptation to be online, at the drop
| of the hat, is too much to resist.
|
| I compare it to being like someone who needs to lose weight,
| so keeps all chocolate out of the house, while everyone seems
| to expect me to have a luscious bar of high quality chocolate
| with me all the time, just sitting there, begging me to eat
| it.
|
| There is an ongoing debate about smartphones at school, and
| the addiction and distraction they can be for kids. I think
| my strongest argument is that the addiction and distraction
| don't simply disappear for adults, and there was no way they
| were going to force me to get a smartphone.
|
| I don't think that would work for those with a smartphone,
| but it's a crack keeping an alternative open.
| tuna74 wrote:
| I live in Sweden with two kids in school and can do
| everything through the web (except BankId authentication of
| course).
| dalke wrote:
| In January our city switched from a web portal to an app-
| only system.
|
| Last fall I was working on getting a username+password
| access to the portal, since the students and teachers
| don't need BankID to log in. I was using my son's login
| to read the weekly newsletters.
|
| At the time I warned our skolnamnden that I would not be
| getting a smartphone. They switched to app-only, making
| it impossible for me to get info or let the school know
| about absences or late arrive.
|
| It took talking with the teachers, with fritids, and the
| principal to work out an email-based option.
| timmb wrote:
| The parking lots mentioned are municipal not private.
| rs186 wrote:
| Thank you for pointing this out. However, it seems that HN
| crowd really doesn't like this kind of viewpoint. "If you
| cannot do _everything_ without a smart phone, that 's the
| society's fault, not yours.", as echoed by comments under my
| (also downvoted) comment.
|
| Many people here seem to have trouble understanding how the
| world works. If all you do is complain (which will change
| nothing) instead of adapt, good luck with your miserable life.
| mindslight wrote:
| Because it's dismissive, sophomoric, and can be applied to
| literally anything you might complain about - eg "If you
| don't like how the 'HN crowd' votes, then stop coming here".
| In reality, _Exit_ is not the only option.
| rs186 wrote:
| Dude you seriously need to go out in the real world and try
| to understand how things work.
|
| Complaining on the Internet never does anything. Zero.
| mindslight wrote:
| When and where is the meatspace protest against the
| Hacker News community's voting tendencies?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Privacy is very much a human right and it's being violated all
| the time.
| invalidname wrote:
| That's like saying the tyranny of credit cards prevents me from
| enjoying discounts in some venues. Or that the tyranny of
| educational system prevents me from working as a doctor.
|
| No, I don't like installing apps for every stupid parking lot or
| restaurant. But calling it "tyranny" is clickbait and bad
| journalism. I pay more for my sons bus pass because I don't want
| him to have a smartphone.
|
| That's a choice I made. My solution isn't to make everyone else
| pay more because the same discount can't be given without a
| smartphone. I see why businesses would want to reward me when I
| let them send me push notifications. Again, not even remotely
| tyranny. If anything this is tyranny of bad writing.
| rwmj wrote:
| If the app is required - which has happened already (eg. bank
| apps, car charging) or could happen in the future - then I
| think it's reasonable to call this bad. Maybe not a "tyranny",
| we'd probably want to reserve that for the government doing it,
| but not good news.
| invalidname wrote:
| Why?
|
| It's a tool. Do you complain when the bank requires you to
| sign something with a pen?
|
| We require computers today for many things. Why not force
| websites to provide phone service with exactly the same
| pricing. Guess what the effect will be? Higher prices.
|
| The same is true with apps, some things make no financial
| sense without them.
| rwmj wrote:
| If the pen collected location information continuously and
| sent it to a insecure cloud endpoint, and sent me spammy
| notifications every day, then probably I would.
| invalidname wrote:
| If it does you aren't forced to use it. You can ignore
| the service or use a different service. That's the point.
|
| Apps give discounts and there is a tradeoff. We can't
| demand similar benefits without paying the same price.
| homebrewer wrote:
| It's not always your choice. In my country, you're
| basically cut off from banking services if you don't own
| a smartphone. I lived without one for years and had to
| give in a couple of years ago (second hand but perfectly
| usable -- thanks to LineageOS).
|
| The pain was self-inflicted in my case, but some people
| simply don't have money for one (as there are lots of
| people living on 200-250 USD per month or even less --
| they have nothing left at the end of the month).
| invalidname wrote:
| Any banking or a specific bank?
|
| If any banking whatsoever then sure, this is a problem
| like cashless society. But if it's from a set of specific
| banks that makes sense. I use a smartphone only bank and
| pay lower costs as a result. That makes sense.
| card_zero wrote:
| I guess you're right ultimately, _if_ there 's choice.
| But the alternatives get more expensive. Basically all
| kinds of businesses have figured out they can get us to
| sell our privacy in return for a relatively cheaper
| product - and as this becomes the norm, it no longer even
| seems to be cheaper, it's just that _resisting_ selling
| your privacy gets more expensive.
| card_zero wrote:
| Do apps give discounts, or are prices raised while
| refuseniks are punished? It's all relative.
| invalidname wrote:
| Sure, but that's a different debate. You can see why it
| would be in the interest of the business for you to
| install that app and why it would be worth enough for a
| discount.
|
| We're giving them something that provides value and saves
| on costs.
| card_zero wrote:
| If the pen was somehow of financial benefit to the bank,
| and I didn't benefit, and they won't let me use a
| different pen, I'd still resent it. No, I don't want to
| jump through a hoop to make your business some extra
| money.
| eesmith wrote:
| I would complain if the bank requires everyone to sign with
| a pen as there are disability reasons for why someone is
| unable to sign with a pen.
|
| Eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/250d63/
| was_u... has "We used prints as my partner was dying and
| lost motor control."
|
| Or, think of Stephen Hawking, able to communicate but
| unable to operate a pen in the later part of his life.
| Wouldn't you complain if he had been unable to control his
| bank account because he couldn't use a pen?
|
| The relevant Uniform Commercial Code has a wider definition
| of what counts as a signature than using a pen, SS 3-401,
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/3/3-401 .
| invalidname wrote:
| Accessibility is a great point. In that regard apps often
| exceed pens in their accessibility support and laws such
| as the ADA require organizations like banks to comply
| with accessibility regulation.
|
| Just as a disabled person would have a caretaker sign as
| a proxy for them, such a caretaker could use the app for
| them in such a case.
|
| Better yet. A person who is bedridden or incapacitated
| could use an app from the convenience of their own home
| instead of physically going to a bank. A blind person
| could avoid the walk to a distant location. It's a mixed
| bag in terms of accessibility.
| eesmith wrote:
| > Just as a disabled person would have a caretaker sign
| as a proxy for them
|
| You should likely be more careful about how your use of
| "disabled person" as I'm sure you know most disabled
| people do not have caretakers.
|
| Also, the link I gave says 'agent or representative' - a
| caretaker is not necessarily either of those.
|
| My point is that, yes, I would complain if the bank
| requires everyone to sign with a pen - and so would you,
| it seems.
|
| So why is it okay to complain about forcing everyone to
| use a pen, but not okay to complain about forcing
| everyone to use an app, especially when we know there are
| people who will not use a smartphone including, for
| example, religious reasons. There is a market for "kosher
| phones" which don't let you install apps, or even have no
| internet support at all.
| invalidname wrote:
| You're right, accessibility and disability are large and
| complex subjects with a huge gradient of
| issues/conditions/situations.
|
| One of the banks I use requires an app since it's an
| online only bank. I pay lower rates as a result. Does
| this bar some people from using that bank?
|
| Yes. But as long as other banks exist that shouldn't be a
| problem. Would it make sense to require that bank to
| offer branches, phone access etc?
|
| No. Because then it won't be as cheap. Should the
| regulator make sure banks that provide "full service"
| exist?
|
| Yes.
|
| I didn't say it's not OK to complain. In fact I gave a
| personal example in which I chose not to use an app for
| my sons public transport and as a result am consciously
| paying more. I did say that:
|
| * Calling it tyranny is nonsense and bad journalism. The
| entire article is hyperbole and just silly.
|
| * Cheaper pricing and app specific features make sense
| and are not discriminatory in the vast majority of cases.
| eesmith wrote:
| Take a look again at rwmj's comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137896 .
|
| * I think it's reasonable to requiring an app bad.
|
| * Maybe not a "tyranny", we'd probably want to reserve
| that for the government doing it, but not good news.
|
| You replied "Why?"
|
| Since you and rwmj agree that calling is tyranny is too
| much, it comes across like the "Why?" refers to the
| objection to requiring an app.
|
| When you follow that up with "Do you complain when the
| bank requires you to sign something with a pen?", it sure
| sounds like a statement that you don't think people would
| complain for an app-only requirement. Otherwise I can't
| make it make sense.
|
| > But as long as other banks exist that shouldn't be a
| problem.
|
| So, as long as one bank exists somewhere in the US?
| Somewhere in a 100 mile radius? When is it a problem, and
| what could be used to prevent it from getting there? Is 1
| mile to the nearest non-app parking space a problem?
|
| Would you say that so long as one bank has handicap
| access, the other banks should save money and provide
| lower interest rates by not being handicap accessible? I
| hope not.
|
| The cantons of Geneva and Neuchatel in Switzerland voted
| for the fundamental right to live offline. What's wrong
| with having that everywhere?
|
| > and are not discriminatory in the vast majority of
| cases.
|
| We have Braille on elevator buttons even though not
| having Braille on elevator buttons is not discriminatory
| in the vast majority of cases.
|
| Because the vast majority of people don't need Braille.
|
| More people don't have smartphones than need Braille.
| cesarb wrote:
| > It's a tool. Do you complain when the bank requires you
| to sign something with a pen?
|
| Every single time my bank requires me to sign something
| with a pen, they also provide the pen.
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| My brother doesn't have a smartphone (by choice).
|
| For example, he cannot access his bank account via his desktop
| anymore. He have to go to his agency in person.
|
| Well we all did that for years so it's just annoying, because he
| still have the possibility to do it and it's his choice.
|
| But what will happen if all the brick and mortar close ? When
| will it be mandatory to get a smartphone for his bank app, just
| to have access to his money ?
|
| And it's just an example...
| cenamus wrote:
| I really felt that when I was waiting for a replacement display
| from china for about 3 months...
|
| If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for
| everything, if there's even a branch still open close to you.
|
| Can't even buy bus tickets without an app (tracks your journey
| with GPS of course), without paying more, even at ticket
| machines in the busses.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for
| everything
|
| This hasn't been my experience at all in the US. If you need
| something in-person, going to the bank is the best option
| since they don't charge fees like a random ATM does.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Where is this bank? Are there not other banks that do allow
| access via branches or online?
| em-bee wrote:
| i can't access any of my online accounts without a phone. one
| at least still does simple sms, so it doesn't require a
| smartphone, but it requires a phone nonetheless. the other
| requires an app. the problem is that this is a trend. more
| and more banks switch to requiring apps. if we don't fight
| the trend, then all banks will do it. switching banks now
| does not work because the new bank does not know that this is
| the reason you switched, and the old bank is also unlikely to
| track this detail.
| genewitch wrote:
| In the US: chase bank, us bank, do not require 2FA unless
| you don't have a cookie. I don't have to use an app for any
| of the banks we use.
| doctor_radium wrote:
| You're getting downvoted, but here in a populated but not
| very interesting part of Pennsylvania there must be 15
| different banks or credit unions with brick & mortar offices
| within 10 miles. I lament that not everyone has this degree
| of choice, but it's not a fantasy.
|
| There may be an online-only bank somewhere in the USA that's
| app-only, but I wouldn't know. Every bank I've ever
| encountered has a very functional web site.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| We have an app only bank in Canada called WealthSimple, but
| hardly the only choice.
|
| The problem here seems to be that people want the free
| accounts and low fees of app only banks, but still want the
| costly things they got rid of that make those possible like
| branches.
| sumuyuda wrote:
| The solution is that banks should support any TOTP client for
| authentication and not just their proprietary app. So you can
| use open source software or a hardware key.
| everdrive wrote:
| But they won't. HN is quite good at suggesting a lot of
| genuinely intelligent and valid potential technical
| solutions, but most banks won't even think about supporting
| TOTP broadly. They'll lean into smartphones and apps because
| this is where the bast majority of their customers are. In
| this case the 'tyranny' is the overwhelming preference of
| other people. The masses have spoken, and they want
| everything to be on their phones.
| nkrisc wrote:
| And that's where the government needs to step in order in
| order to advocate for the minority.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Also because ticking boxes. You just provide an app that
| fulfills all the silly security requirements for banking
| apps and then if something goes wrong, the customer has the
| burden of proving it's the banks fault.
|
| I've had my banking app installed on an old Samsung phone
| running lineageos. I only powered it on when I had to do
| online banking. At some point I needed to update the app
| and they started checking for rooted devices, so it
| wouldn't work anymore. Now I've installed it on a much
| newer android device that I also use for a lot of other
| crap and sketchy stuff I don't want on my main phone. Also
| it's powered on all the time. Whether that's really more
| secure than what I did before is questionable.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Maybe not for you, but rooted phones are a legitimate
| risk for users that do sideload pirated games and malware
| etc. I still think the risks are arbitrary, but I can
| understand why banks want to avoid rooted phones
| lucb1e wrote:
| Then they should also avoid rooted Windows machines where
| malware is a legitimate risk and orders of magnitude more
| prevalent than on mobile. Doing one but not the other is
| arbitrary and just pushes people towards having a locked-
| down device that they don't fully control with them all
| the time (can't uninstall tracking software from the
| vendor, for example). A locked-down computer that just
| sits in your office all day would be less worrisome
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| If they could enforce locked down desktops, I'm sure they
| would.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Can your TOTP client show what operation you're approving?
| Because my bank app can.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| A chip TAN generator can. I'm glad my bank is still
| supporting those.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I had a couple of such TOTP clients from different banks.
| For approving an operation, both of them required me to
| sign the amount of money transferred by that operation
| (i.e. they generated a one-time code that depended on a
| hash of the amount of money), so no confusions were
| possible.
| sebazzz wrote:
| The ING has a small Android based single-purpose
| authenticator device they offer to customers without
| smartphones. It can scan the QR code and do the auth.
| ekianjo wrote:
| the solution is to let the market do its work and move to
| another bank?
| em-bee wrote:
| in many places there is no bank that offers an alternative
| derac wrote:
| I don't get why your parent was downvoted. If you live in
| the middle of nowhere without a cell phone, life is going
| to be tougher.
| tmnvix wrote:
| > If you live in the middle of nowhere without a cell
| phone, life is going to be tougher.
|
| I think the issue is that it is becoming tougher than it
| was prior to the existence of smartphones for those
| without them.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. There are numerous online banks
| that can operate country wide, and surely there is at least
| one of them that offer web banking without requiring an
| app?
| bloak wrote:
| I rather get the impression that the market doesn't always
| work like economists would like it to work. But do we really
| need competing banks just for the basic stuff like processing
| payments? It seems plausible that it's a good idea to have
| multiple competing banks for the more complex services but
| perhaps the basic processing of payments could be handled by
| the government, which already has the monopoly of providing
| the currency in the first place. Just a thought. Free markets
| are a tool, not a religion, right?
|
| Some people might insist that a government monopoly would be
| worse but here in the UK I've noticed that government web
| sites are usually less crap than web sites created by the
| private sector.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| Or maybe the people who hate smartphones and technology are
| tiny inconsequential minority that doesn't outweigh the
| billions in savings?
|
| We can't afford to have people doing bullshit jobs at bank
| branches anymore- unemployment is too low.
| teeray wrote:
| Voting with your feet only works if there's somewhere else
| for you to walk to.
| jasdi wrote:
| Good news is we are already hitting upper limits of how many
| people we can reach via apps/smartphone/internet.
|
| Limits that in the past 2 decades (of scaling) the people who
| built these Platforms didn't have to think about. Now they do.
| And they are coming under serious pressure because they have
| built out more Supply than there is Demand.
|
| For example, we got the explosive growth of Netflix. Everyone
| sees that and piles into streaming. When growth slows in one
| country they immediately move into another and they keep
| growing until they run out of countries to expand into. So
| Netflix has been in India (a country advertised as having
| zillions of consumers) for nearly 10 years now but they haven't
| found more than 25 million paying subscribers. Learning takes
| time. And everyone is learning there are limits to growth based
| purely on the online model.
| Yeul wrote:
| By choice. Society doesn't penalize anyone if they decide to go
| off the grid.
|
| Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay
| for that bank office?
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| It's a bad rebuttal because you're paying for the phone, and
| the bank pays for their office with what they gain from
| credits, stock market stuff...
|
| If the bank had no office it wouldn't be cheaper.
| echoangle wrote:
| At least in germany, there are both traditional banks with
| offices and online-only banks and one of the reasons given
| for the fact that traditional banks have worse conditions
| (less interest, sometimes monthly charges for even having
| an account etc.) is that they hvae to pay the offices
| somehow.
| elpocko wrote:
| That's a huge jump from "no smartphone" to "off the grid."
|
| I prefer using laptops and I prefer doing my banking on my
| laptop. I'm online a lot. I do have a smartphone, usually an
| older one, for calls, messaging, playing music and taking
| photos. I even have an old Samsung tablet, for reading
| ebooks.
|
| It should be possible to do your banking from a laptop.
|
| I just don't _want_ apps on my phone, because they will track
| me, I don 't like using apps on the phone in general, and
| banking apps in particular because the bank wants to control
| what I can and can't do with my own phone. Want a rooted
| phone? No banking for you.
| mariusor wrote:
| I have a smartphone. However I choose to use a mobile OS that
| is neither Android nor iOS, why should I get penalized that
| banks don't invest in applications for my OS too?
| briandear wrote:
| It's business. Should a steakhouse be required to have
| vegan offerings? If that's not what their customers want,
| then why would they invest hundreds of thousands on
| building and maintaining an app that maybe five people
| would use?
| mariusor wrote:
| When businesses provide essential services (like banking)
| I feel like they should be held to the same standards as
| government services. Not that some governments don't
| treat users without Android or iOS as third class
| citizens.
|
| So, to clarify, there are banks that have their full
| business value accessible only through mobile, and as a
| person needing banking but doesn't have access to mobile,
| I can make an informed decision and not be their
| customer. But when I create a bank account in a physical
| office, and then the office gets closed in favour of an
| alegedly much more accessible mobile application, I feel
| like there should be some measure protecting me from
| that. Do you find that unreasonable?
| ncallaway wrote:
| They do not have to build an app. They could build a
| mobile website that is accessible from almost any
| computing platform.
|
| For something so core and critical to society (banking),
| I don't think it's reasonable to leave it up to the
| private sector and say "well, if some people get left
| behind--ho hum, thems the breaks"
|
| If we're talking about a florist, then sure. The market
| wants what it wants and if you're not in the majority it
| kinda sucks. Not great, but probably not a place for
| government intervention. Banking, though? There should be
| accessibility guidelines and standards, absolutely.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Look at it this way: should the rest of us with
| smartphones pay for that bank office?"_
|
| To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to
| go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill
| and others--and the many issues that surround utility and
| utilitarian principles. This involves such issues as the
| greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering
| well established moral norms and the fact that the majority
| of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian
| models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before
| workable consensuses were achieved.
|
| Think twice, the obvious solution doesn't always turn out to
| be the most optimal one.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Utilitarian models of ethics are fraught with peril
| themselves. Not the own you think it is.
| atlintots wrote:
| Go on, then. Elaborate.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| So are many other political and philosophical ideas--
| essentially any field involving ethics is fraught with
| perils and consensus is never fully reached.
|
| Just because unanimity is never achieved in respect of
| some philosophical idea doesn't mean it's not worthy of
| consideration and or it's never put into practice.
| Utilitarianism has been the subject of much study and
| debate and it's been widely practiced over several
| hundred years.
|
| I'm well aware of the debates over utilitarianism and its
| ethics, any why those for and against it take the
| (usually) entrenched stance that they do. That ought to
| have been obvious by my use of the word 'consensuses'.
|
| BTW, I could have made the same argument from a different
| philosophical perspective but the previous commentator
| specifically invited a utilitarian-type response by the
| words he used. That said, no matter what philosophical
| argument I'd have used someone would have found fault
| with it.
|
| My main point still stands, which is that obvious
| solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones. Note, I've
| deliberately not used the word 'best' for the above
| reasons.
| ctrlp wrote:
| You could just as easily have cited Aristotle or
| Augustine or Aquinas or any other philosopher who wrote
| an ethics. The previous commentator didn't invite a
| utilitarian-type response. He implicitly posed a question
| about the justification for the ordering of goods in
| society. Nothing about that statement is definitively
| answered (or even satisfyingly questioned) by big-U
| Utilitarianism.
|
| Since you appear to enjoy a little bit of philosophical
| discussion, let's break down what you _ackshually_ said:
|
| > To answer that question with any degree of rigor one
| has to go back to the beginning and study the works of
| Bentham, Mill and others--and the many issues that
| surround utility and utilitarian principles.
|
| The "beginning" of ethics hardly begins with Bentham or
| Mill or even the Enlightenment. Utility is quite a modern
| concept in ethics. The question of what is "the good" is
| presupposed in any system of value. "The greatest good
| for the greatest number" is perhaps one of the more
| perverse interpretations of human good on record.
|
| > This involves such issues as the greatest good for the
| greatest number, greed overpowering well established
| moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern
| states and cities were founded on utilitarian models
| where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable
| consensuses were achieved.
|
| The majority of modern states and cities were most
| emphatically NOT "founded" on utilitarian models. Most
| states predate any notion of such post-hoc
| rationalizations. Cities were largely founded as
| commercial centers along trade routes or ports, or
| sometimes intentionally as colonies. States were largely
| the results of conquest by militarized groups that were
| certainly NOT utilitarian. Quite the contrary. In the
| bronze age, they would have simply been warrior bands
| centered around family/tribal bonds and vassal/suzerainty
| relationships founded on violence. By the time of the
| great early empires around the Mediterranean, formal
| structures of militarism and class privileges won through
| violence were the organizing forms of society, not "give-
| and-take" consensus gathering (unless you mean one group
| giving up the fight and the other either enslaving them
| or killing them outright).
|
| Maybe you could have argued they are founded on something
| like Hobbesian social contract theory (certainly not
| Rousseau's version) but that, too, would suffer from
| being simply "not true in fact."
|
| The main point that "obvious solutions aren't necessarily
| the optimal ones" suffers from being trivial,
| condescending, and a non sequitur. The commenter didn't
| offer a solution as such, but raised the obvious question
| of why they should have to pay for someone else's
| choices. Utilitarianism is the worst of all philosophical
| answers because it entails the most absurdities.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Point proven, your comment just confirms what I said
| earlier:
|
| _...an(d) why those for and against it take the
| (usually) entrenched stance that they do._
|
| I'm aware of those issues and omissions for brevity's
| sake. Also, I would point out that what I said was a
| passing comment on HN and not meant for a paper in a
| learned philosophical journal.
|
| BTW, in case you didn't notice, I never mentioned whether
| I was for or against utilitarianism _specifically_
| because discussion about it inevitability ends in
| arguments that usually remain unresolved. That it was
| just an example ought to have been obvious.
|
| It would be informative to compare the syllabus content
| at your philosophy school versus that of mine.
| ctrlp wrote:
| My philosophy school was a library card. Am I presuming
| too much by your handle that you are a lover of the
| higher mathematics? Although I think it would be hard to
| derive a workable ethics from number theory, I believe it
| has been tried. Descartes and Spinoza metaphysics come to
| mind, but Plato's number magic is probably a more
| entertaining place to start.
|
| As you say, not relevant to you, but do you think
| mathematicians generally have some kind of affinity for
| Utilitarian ethics?
| defrost wrote:
| In _general_ (there are exceptions) most adhere to the
| broader set of consequentialism of which utilitarianism
| is one form of.
|
| A number would say that ethics and morality are
| subjective and not objective and thus an attempt to apply
| a utilitarian metric or measure of "good" along with a
| (partial?) ordering such as "greatest good" is a doomed
| endeavour.
|
| Few would deny that from _this_ , _that_ would follow
| (for some specific values of this 'n that).
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I'd essentially agree with that summary.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" My philosophy school was a library card."_
|
| There's nothing wrong with that, sometimes it's one's
| best tutor.
|
| I'm not a mathematician but I've studied mathematics in
| conjunction with my bread-and-butter subjects science and
| engineering. It's thus fair to say the analytical
| philosophers and their ilk have had a strong influence on
| my thinking--Frege, Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, and
| G.E. Moore--I can even see my copy of _Principia Ethica_
| on the bookshelf on the other side of the room from where
| I 'm sitting.
|
| (BTW, In my world I cannot see any relevant connection
| between number theory (as mathematicians understand it)
| and ethics.)
|
| The analytical strand of philosophy is particularly
| significant for me as formal logic has a direct bearing
| on some of my technical work (they're closely related).
| It also led to me electing to take HPS.
|
| Philosophy is a remarkably broad church and its
| analytical strand is only one section, and in no way do I
| consider myself pigeonholed to just one or two of its
| strands; _Being and Nothingness, The Social Contract,
| Leviathan, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (the)
| Republic_ are just a few titles from the large compulsory
| corpus from which I was trained.
|
| I will not delve further into utilitarianism given what
| I've already said except to say I have neither the talent
| of Shakespeare nor am I an APL programmer, so it would be
| impossible for me to present my rather convoluted views
| on the matter in a short HN post without some part being
| misinterpreted. To do it linguistic justice and present a
| watertight case that precisely and accurately explains my
| view I'd likely require a dozen pages of typed text, and
| clearly that's not possible on HN.
|
| That's not a copout, it's just fact. Moreover, philosophy
| taught me long ago that precising and brevity can easily
| lead to misunderstandings unless one's words are very
| carefully chosen. I was reminded of that again earlier
| today when you came on the attack.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Yes, all good. I appreciate what you are saying and I'm
| sorry to "attack" your comment earlier. I apologize. I'm
| often writing for _the next reader_ that comes around,
| aka the audience. Nothing personal. If you made it
| through Being and Nothingness then you 're a better
| reader than I am. Kudos to you. I did find my
| philosophical education benefited substantially by
| reading outside of the syllabus. The great ethical and
| political books are too often treated as benighted
| artifacts of history until the Enlightenment, at which
| point they are often taught as holy writ.
|
| I took your handle as a reference to Hilbert. Was it not?
| Although it might be difficult to a mind shaped very much
| by analytic philosophy, I do think there is "value", or
| at least entertainment value, in esoteric number theory
| (numerology or number magic) in relation to ethical
| systems. The ancients took it seriously and they were a
| lot smarter than I am. There is even a vein of mysticism
| in Wittgenstein. And what is infinity or the continuum?
| Very strange places to spend much time. Have driven some
| mad. Plus it's fun to consider the significance of a
| number. Often there are esoteric attributes attached to
| familiar and unfamiliar numbers that will blow your mind.
| Not just the puzzling oddities involving primes or
| transposed operations, but relating to ethics and
| metaphysics. If you really want to tempt madness, read up
| on some of the ancient Pythagorean or Kabbalah number
| magic. There be dragons of insanity there.
| Yeul wrote:
| I'm sorry I'm not losing sleep over the life choices of
| weirdos on HN but I will happily pay taxes for universal
| healthcare don't you worry!
| jtbayly wrote:
| > "should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank
| office?"
|
| Yes! There are many things you _cannot_ do without a physical
| bank location. It is worth paying[1] something to have them.
| I used to use an online-only bank, but I realized I wanted to
| be able to walk into a branch at times, so I switched to a
| new bank.
|
| [1] "Paying" can mean a variety of things, including lower
| interest rates on savings accounts, for example.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean I've used an online only bank for years now and
| there's nothing I haven't been able to do. They send
| cashier's checks by mail.
|
| I suppose if I wanted to deposit cash I couldn't but it's
| never come up.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| What are those mythical actions that can't be done outside
| of a physical location? How many of them are things you do
| ~once in a lifetime, like getting a mortgage?
| genewitch wrote:
| I need 100 rolls of quarters. I need 500 $2 bills. I need
| to change my pin on a debit card.
|
| I need to change all these $2 bills and quarters into $20
| bills.
|
| Trivial examples that I have done at my bank. Maybe drbit
| cards now don't need to be put into a machine to change
| the pin anymore, idk.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The PIN thing can be done online at both of my banks.
|
| As for the cash stuff, those are things you may need to
| do if you're a shopkeeper, but I can't imagine a reason
| why I would do that myself. Banks over here will
| sometimes charge fees for changing cash.
| genewitch wrote:
| in the US $2 bills are an icebreaker. There's still a lot
| of people that don't believe they're real. I also used
| them as incentives for my kids to go above and beyond
| with their communal chores. The quarters thing i haven't
| done personally but i was adjacent to for a club, it was
| for a game in a booth at an event.
|
| banks here don't charge, as one of their expected roles
| is to change money in the US.
| adrian_b wrote:
| At least for me, the problem is not the closing of the brick-
| and-mortar branches, though that has happened near me,
| because for the last 25 years I have used those only seldom,
| preferring on-line banking.
|
| What annoys me now is the closing of the on-line banking Web
| sites, which could be used easily and without any problem
| from any computer or smartphone, and their replacement with
| apps, which may force you not only to have a smartphone but
| also to be a customer of Apple or Google, because some banks
| refuse to provide their Android apps otherwise than through
| the Google app store.
| genewitch wrote:
| How is this different though. Infrastructure costs money.
| Apps are the new hotness. The same "well, I don't use it so
| whatever" you bring is what it seems like the online
| banking folks are saying to the brick and mortar people.
|
| Has anyone looked at the world lately and thought "hey
| maybe all these apps aren't the greatest idea"? Amazon,
| Shein, Temu, AliExpress have all but made history just
| visiting a mall and browsing.
|
| I know Walmart loved the pandemic, too, because all the mom
| and pop stores that survived the first 20 years of amazon
| couldn't survive the local and state and federal government
| interfering with their commerce.
|
| JoAnns is closing hundreds of stores. This whole subject is
| on my mind a lot lately.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| What I'm stating below is my general understanding of this
| subject, If I'm wrong and if you i.e the reader have
| investigated sufficiently on the subject let me know.
|
| >Society doesn't penalize anyone if they decide to go off the
| grid
|
| While they don't penalize you, they do make it extremely
| difficult, if not impossible to go completely off grid. Try
| putting up your own 'grid', which in IMO should include your
| own monetary system, and not having to pay taxes.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Then you will need to use an app.
| captainbland wrote:
| In the UK loads of bank branches have closed. They've opened up
| "hubs" which are a joke, some are open only have weekend
| opening hours of Saturday morning and you usually have to
| travel to a different town to get to it.
| morkalork wrote:
| I had some hilariously degenerate experiences with this
| recently. There are basic services that branches won't provide
| at all anymore like cashing cheques, which can be annoying in
| some circumstance. But the real dumb one was being blocked from
| taking a certain action in the online banking with a message
| like "present yourself with 2 forms of government ID at a local
| branch". OK. Fine. Drive there, wait in line, blah blah blah.
| The teller looks at me like I'm crazy when I say that online
| banking sent me there. They figure it out, do the KYC process,
| unblock me and I say great now can you do the thing I was
| trying to do before all this? "No, you must use online banking
| for that."
| SilasX wrote:
| Related issue: how every website seems to migrate to some
| smartphone-optimized version that looks like a mobile app blown
| up to a bigger screen that works much worse on desktop. Hall of
| Shame: Twitter, Facebook, even Vanguard.
|
| What's even more confusing/frustrating is that, despite being
| developed with very elaborate, mature frameworks, they still
| lack basic UI accommodations, like making clickable elements
| detectable by add-ons, or allowing you to open up a detail view
| in a new tab.
|
| I get if Joe Shmoe's cobbled-together app forgets some things,
| but why wouldn't stuff like that be rolled in as a default,
| with all the development hours applied to it?
| mrweasel wrote:
| My bank is developing a new version of their online banking
| solution. They've decided to model in on their app, which I
| refuse to use because it's absolutely garbage. So now I have
| a online banking platform that can't do copy/paste on, hides
| much of the relevant information and is generally much harder
| to use than the old version.
|
| I've provide feedback on multiple occasions, but I don't have
| high hopes for them to fix anything. If I where running a
| business and to use the site every day I'd be pissed and
| threatening to move my business else where.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| My bank used to provide you with a small TOTP device the size
| of a usb key. Sadly they eventually deprecated it and recently
| dismissed it entirely in favor of their increadibly slow app.
| pseingatl wrote:
| With a text sent to your phone for TFA. Which means you can't
| access your accou nt if you travel. You could always access
| it with the TOTP device.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While I have a smartphone, I choose to not have a Google
| account.
|
| One of the banks that I am using has terminated its on-line
| banking service, which I had been using for almost 20 years,
| replacing it with an app.
|
| That would not have been a problem if they would have provided
| the app themselves on their Web site, but they refuse to do
| this and they provide the app only in the Google on-line store,
| which I cannot use because I do not have a Google account,
| despite the fact that the app is free.
|
| Therefore I have reduced a lot the number of operations that I
| do through that bank, redirecting them to another bank, which
| still has on-line banking on their Web site. Fortunately, for
| now the bank that has closed their on-line banking Web site
| still keeps an SMS service, which allows me e.g. to check the
| balance of my account from my phone and which notifies me about
| the transactions on my credit card.
|
| Many years ago, I have closed all my accounts at a bank that
| has annoyed me by updating their on-line banking Web site so
| that it no longer accepted any browsers except Microsoft
| Internet Explorer. At that time I have hoped that it will be
| the last time when I leave a bank because they believe that
| they can force their customers to also be customers of
| unrelated third parties, but now this problem with Google has
| appeared.
|
| I am not a US citizen and the bank is not from USA. I doubt
| that it can be legal for a bank here in Europe to condition
| their services by their customer becoming the customer of a
| foreign entity that is Google. However I cannot afford to waste
| time and money to determine the legality of their actions.
| ajolly wrote:
| Can you use Aurora store? https://auroraoss.com/ (That's what
| I use when I don't want to put a Google account on an Android
| phone)
| adrian_b wrote:
| Thanks for pointing to that.
|
| I was not aware of it, so when I will have time I will
| experiment with it, to see if it works for downloading the
| app I need when logging in anonymously.
| pseingatl wrote:
| The advantage of having to go to the branch in person is that
| KYC is never an issue.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > But what will happen if all the brick and mortar close ?
|
| Hello, it's me from the future, reporting live from Germany. My
| bank is online only and to talk to a person, I need to call the
| hotline and wait (I shit you not) 20~25 minutes for the PIN
| input prompt to repeat itself once too many times and time out,
| handing me off to a _very_ confused human who is wondering how
| I 'm speaking to them unauthenticated (they're very suspicious
| and will not answer most questions; it's a pretty useless party
| trick). Alternatively, you can have the answering machine send
| you an authentication code _by snail mail_ which you can then
| use once in the next few days to call them one time
|
| I put up with it because the other bank account I applied for
| rejected me for not being creditworthy (never had a debt in my
| life, but also no loan, so there is no credit data and
| apparently that's suspicious; on the other hand, students get
| accounts there with no problem, so maybe it's a combination of
| no credit data and age? Or not having citizenship? They're not
| saying of course, I can only assume it's an illegal reason
| because why else not say it). The other bank card I own from a
| neighboring country isn't accepted in most supermarkets, I'd
| need to bring cash into the country or pay extra for using an
| ATM abroad. Single European Market is really lovely, you should
| try it
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I use my phone primarily for messaging. In fact, I often forget
| and have the Anti-Distraction mode turned on, so I only get
| important comms but no app notifications.
|
| SIDENOTE
|
| People need to chill out with the word "tyranny". It's like
| saying that you are being "assaulted" by a different opinion, or
| claiming that ordinary platform moderation is "censorship". You
| are not being terrorized, assaulted, or censored.
|
| There are people in the world who are truly subjected to those
| things, and you have NO idea what that's actually like.
| stavros wrote:
| I think you're in a very small minority if you think that
| someone using the phrase "tyranny of notifications" is implying
| they live under a dictatorial regime. Most people just
| understand the hyperbole.
| dmos62 wrote:
| You say it's just a hyperbole as if the comparison being made
| (dictatorship or violence or whatever) has no meaning for the
| speaker or the listener.
| dole wrote:
| Scary things make people pay attention and click the links.
| I _loathe_ the casual use of the term "lynching" by people
| in the public eye but same rules apply, using exaggerated,
| scary words to sell your weak point. Not saying I agree
| with it, but it's marketing and journalism.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Sure, I understand why people use comparisons. It's just
| that I'd like to encourage conscious use of language.
| yallpendantools wrote:
| I agree on two points in your sidenote. The first is that
| online moderation is rarely, if ever, "censorship". The second
| thing is that the majority of us have no idea what it's
| actually like being terrorized or assaulted.
|
| That said, words can take on different meanings depending on
| context. We can only imagine the tyranny of being a prisoner of
| war but we can also complain about the tyranny of noise
| pollution in modern cities; that doesn't mean I think they're
| equal. I know some people suffer assault domestically but I can
| also label some perfumes as an assault to the senses; it
| doesn't lessen the gravity of the former. And yes, Calvin, you
| are allowed to think your household is a den of censorship and
| oppression (https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fprev
| iew.redd....).
|
| My problem with gatekeeping words is that it is performative.
| We can indeed chill out on using these words save for their
| most extreme interpretations but it doesn't really help anyone
| suffering from these things and just makes language less
| colorful for the rest of us. And, once more, nor does their
| usage dismiss the extent of any of these situations because you
| don't need to be a genius to know that words can have subtle
| changes in meaning depending on context.
| mathverse wrote:
| In my country the same reason is used to make things more
| expensive and give contracts via nepotism to allow for
| "alternative use without apps" to companies to make the whole
| thing through SMS or physical office while making the whole thing
| expensive for everyone and inefficient.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It is not "unfair". We _choose_ to resist technofascism.
| underseacables wrote:
| It is unfair. A close friend of mine has brain damage, is low
| income, and he can't really use a smart phone. He just has a
| simple flip phone and it's all he has. It has been isolating
| for him with working and managing his life.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Tell your friend what good company he is in, as one of many,
| many of us, who do not fit a fleeting mythical stereotype.
| There are hundreds of reasons why people can not or will not
| use smartphones. Eyesight. Dexterity. Poverty. Location
| tracking by hostiles. Privacy. Poor memory. Security needs.
| Environmental concerns...
|
| We should not play the victims. Being without one of those
| cursed things is a blessing. We get good mental health. We
| get focus and calm. We get a profound sense of freedom, time
| to think, to create, to talk to real people, to see the world
| go by. We learn to enjoy being bored. We interact with other
| real people. We willingly pay more for freedom and privacy.
|
| What we lose is being tied up in pointless abusive
| machinations of an already dying "online" culture, one that
| is over-extended, fragile, dysfunctional, and we dodge much
| of the abusive enshitified corporate hell that every living
| being now hates.
|
| Please, big-up your friend instead of painting him as a
| victim.
| everdrive wrote:
| People are writing this off, but it eventually becomes impossible
| not to own a smartphone; an expensive device, with an expensive
| monthly plan, and an absolutely terrible privacy record.
| Eventually more businesses will require smartphone usage just to
| use their services. There could even be a time when government
| services require it.
| xandrius wrote:
| Can't say they are expensive anymore, you can get an updated
| android phone for less than $50 new or less second hand.
|
| Can't say about monthly plans, as that depends on the country.
|
| Privacy is a different matter and always dependent on the
| technical literacy as opposed to hard costs.
| deadlydose wrote:
| It's still an additional 'tax' on individuals.
| xandrius wrote:
| Anything can be a "tax", if we want it to be.
|
| Is the requirement of wearing clothes in public a tax?
| Maybe.
|
| But today definitely someone can still live without owning
| a phone, if they have access to a computer nearby (e.g. A
| library or friend).
| wccrawford wrote:
| As I noted in my other comment, you don't even need a cell
| plan. You can just use wifi. Your own, your neighbor's, a
| nearby coffee shop, etc.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| This isn't necessarily the case; many services will require
| a registered phone number.
| everdrive wrote:
| I think that ends up pretty nuanced. A cheap $50 Android will
| receive security updates for one year if you're lucky. So now
| you have a choice between buying a new cheap phone yearly,
| forgoing security, or being technically savvy enough to put a
| 3rd party OS on your phone. With regard to privacy, smart
| phones really don't have options for privacy unless you go
| with a 3rd party OS. And, if you do so, you might not even be
| able to run the various apps which the various businesses
| require. I just don't see this as a valid alternative.
| nehal3m wrote:
| The larger point is that to use the mainstream apps you would
| buy a smartphone for, you are forced into a contract (or at
| least to agree to terms of service) with one of two third
| parties, Apple or Google.
| wccrawford wrote:
| A landline phone is about the cost of a cheap smartphone, and
| the landline itself costs about as much as the cheapest cell
| plans.
|
| But you actually don't need either of those. You just need the
| cheapest Android cellphone or tablet you get, and access to
| someone's wifi, which is freely available at many coffee shops,
| or from neighbors.
|
| I still agree you shouldn't _need_ it, especially if you
| already have a computer. But it 's only "expensive" if you
| choose the higher tiers.
| fsflover wrote:
| > You just need the cheapest Android cellphone or tablet
|
| So no security updates and any app can stop working any
| moment. And all your data are at Google, too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
| ale42 wrote:
| A landline phone doesn't spy on you, and has often better
| audio quality (unless you're in an area with great cell
| coverage). And you can also use the mobile network with a
| "feature phone", like those that were around until
| smartphones arrived, they're still around.
| squigz wrote:
| > But you actually don't need either of those. You just need
| the cheapest Android cellphone or tablet you get, and access
| to someone's wifi, which is freely available at many coffee
| shops, or from neighbors.
|
| The cheapest device you can get will be unusably slow - good
| luck doing anything out and about without inconveniencing
| everyone else while you wait for your device to load and pray
| the app opens in a timely fashion. Oh, that is, if your
| outdated device can even download and run it.
|
| Access to wifi isn't really as ubiquitous as you make it seem
| either - what if the business you're needing to use the app
| for doesn't have wifi? Run down the street to the coffee
| shop?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Depending on where you live, a smartphone can be bought for 100
| bucks and a basic line (voice, messages, 2GB of data) for less
| than 5 bucks. It's not ideal but it's not a sacrifice anymore.
| derac wrote:
| You can also use wifi. Even free wifi. You can get a very
| nice used phone with many years of updates for 100 dollars.
| You can find a worse phone for much less if you really want
| to.
|
| edit: You can even get a free phone from your community.
| Possibly a better one than the a53. Most people have a phone
| or several in a drawer.
|
| https://swappa.com/listings/samsung-
| galaxy-a53-5g?carrier=un...
| agumonkey wrote:
| Quite true, to the point that my data plan is not used much
| (I'm way below the 2G threshold) because I'm mostly indoor
| when I fetch a lot.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, but you need to be lucky for free wifi to be
| available for apps that you need to use in specific
| locations, like the parking meter app.
| derac wrote:
| A parking spot that requires an app is certainly onerous,
| even for a smartphone owner.
|
| A good point, but also a parking spot like that which is
| also not in range of city wifi is pretty rare, I'd
| reckon.
| AAAAaccountAAAA wrote:
| If having a smartphone and a cellular plan will become an
| absolute requirement to partake in the society, carriers
| certainly are going to hike prices. Here in Finland, cellular
| plans used to be very cheap, but now the prices have been
| soaring after the society has become more and more reliant on
| the phones.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Hmm yeah, usual free market trickery. In France one telco
| operator forced a 2euro/month minimal plan so everybody can
| get minimum access.
| jdietrich wrote:
| The UK is an incredibly competitive and well-regulated market.
| If you're in receipt of welfare benefits, you can get a tariff
| with unlimited 5G data for PS12 ($15) per month. If you're a
| light user, you can get a tariff with a few gigabytes of data
| for as little as PS5 ($6.50) per month.
|
| https://smarty.co.uk/social-tariff
|
| A cheap but perfectly useable phone costs less than PS100 new
| from a brand like Xiaomi, Motorola or TCL; on any high street,
| you'll find a shop selling second-hand phones for as little as
| PS30. I cannot think of any object in human history that
| provides so much utility for so little money.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| This is actually something the US does pretty well, actually.
| The Lifeline Assistance Program (colloquially known as "Obama
| Phones") gives low income people (basically anyone who
| qualifies for food stamps) a phone, with calling and
| internet, at no cost to the individual.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on that being around much longer, because
| for some reason it makes a lot of conservatives absolutely
| seethe. Many of them convinced themselves poor people were
| being given the latest luxury model iphone out of taxpayer
| funds.
| ale42 wrote:
| Totally true that smartphones are useful. But people can
| decide they don't want one for many reasons, including not
| wanting to accept 20-pages-long T&C just to turn them on, and
| surrendering lots of personal data. If you're a lot into tech
| stuff, you might go around that by blocking most data
| collection, but most people don't have the competence for
| this, or have better things to do with their lives.
| 4k93n2 wrote:
| if only i was that simple. you will still need to swap it for
| a newer phone every once in a while when the OS stops being
| supported, and have to transfer the apps and auth to the new
| device which is not always straight forward
| brainwad wrote:
| This has always been the case though. Before the smartphone, it
| was computers and internet; before that it was landline phone
| service. Both of the latter were far more expensive than a
| modern smartphone, so we are actually making progress in
| reducing barriers to social participation.
| ale42 wrote:
| Landlines didn't spy on people. Computers and Internet, well,
| depends on which OS you are on, but there are options that
| don't. What about smartphones? IMHO that's the big issue, not
| what they cost.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Internet browsers exist for many OSes. To use a web-based
| service, you don't need a mandatory account with a platform
| tech giant.
|
| Almost all mobile apps today are Android/iOS only and require
| an App Store/Play Store account.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Before that, government services required phone calls, or fixed
| addresses to receive mail, or a free public transit program to
| get people to government buildings. Comparatively, it's a lot
| easier and cheaper to just give the needy smartphones and data
| plans. Hence the Lifeline Assistance Program (Obama phones),
| which does just that.
| ponector wrote:
| You can get a cheap 100$ smartphone with cheap prepaid plan.
| greazy wrote:
| Which phone costs $100 that isn't a POS? Honest question
| because even my discounted mid range motorolla is starting to
| struggle with some apps.
| kpmcc wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated to the piece, but this is the second website
| I've seen in two days that appears to not have properly merged an
| edit?
|
| " The RAC's head of policy, Simon Williams, says many people are
| overwhelmed by the multitude of apps they have to use, "when in
| reality you want one that you like and you're happy using and
| that you can use everywhere".
|
| Six years ago the Department for Transport started developing a
| "national parking platform" (NPP) designed to enable drivers to
| use one app of their choice to pay for all their parking. It has
| been trialled by a number of councils, but a big question mark
| hangs over its future as public funding for the project looks
| likely to be withdrawn.
|
| The RAC's head of policy Simon Williams says many people are
| overwhelmed by the multitude of apps they have to use, "when in
| reality you want one that you like and you're happy using and
| that you can use everywhere".
|
| Six years ago the Department for Transport started developing a
| "national parking platform" (NPP) designed to enable drivers to
| use one app of their choice to pay for all their parking, and it
| has been trialled by a number of councils. However, a big
| question mark now hangs over its future as public funding for the
| project looks likely to be withdrawn imminently."
|
| I think the other one was an npr piece posted on HN yesterday? Is
| there a bug with wordpress or are people just getting sloppy?
| aspect0545 wrote:
| I doubt the guardian and npr use Wordpress
| nooneisanon wrote:
| Typos and editing bugs are pretty common on The Guardian
|
| [source: grumpy Guardian Weekly subscriber]
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| The Guardian is also known as the Grauniad for their lack of
| detail to grammar, spelling etc .
| rs186 wrote:
| Very weird logic. As the article points out, this is an
| intentional choice for many people. So you shoulder the
| consequences, that seems fair to me?
|
| I don't currently drive a car, and to be honest, I have anxiety
| about driving. I could bitch about how US is hostile to people
| who don't drive, to the point that it's difficult to go to
| places/get things done, but that's useless. I can 1) move to NYC
| and never leave the city 2) get a car, work on my anxiety, and
| start enjoying life or 3) talk to Guardian and complain all day
| long. 1) is not actually a bad choice, and literally millions of
| people choose that, but I am working on 2) because that's the
| sensible thing to do. If I intentionally choose not to drive, not
| because of a physical disability or not being to afford a car, I
| bear the consequences.
| like_any_other wrote:
| We all shoulder the consequences of slowly sliding into a
| society of lock-in and surveillance, which is what
| unnecessarily requiring smartphones advances. That there are
| choices along the way doesn't make it fair - if I let you
| choose which of your fingers I cut off, am I being fair? Wait a
| few years, and the "choice" will be between living in the
| woods, and carrying an always-on telescreen with you at all
| times.
| rs186 wrote:
| > if I let you choose which of your fingers I cut off, am I
| being fair?
|
| That's not what we are discussing here.
|
| You can't use whatever irrelevant analogy you like to prove a
| point that doesn't exist.
| like_any_other wrote:
| It is not an analogy, it is a proof by example that
| 'choice' alone does not make something fair, contrary to
| your assertion.
| tim333 wrote:
| I do drive and the having do download a bunch of parking apps
| is a pain the arse. And for each one you have to spend five
| minutes entering your address card number etc.
| kome wrote:
| I didn't own a smartphone until 2022. Now, after three years of
| carrying this dopamine-slothed brick, I'm ditching it--but first,
| let's autopsy the "security" demands forcing ownership.
|
| Peak security theater: banks (at least in Europe) mandate
| smartphones as "safe," yet the device itself is the ultimate
| attack vector.
|
| - 2FA apps? Single point of failure (SIM-jacking, zero-days,
| bricked phone = locked out of life).
|
| - Mandatory apps? Swapped phishing for supply-chain attacks +
| 24/7 location leaks.
|
| - Biometrics? Your face now lives in a corp database that will
| get breached.
|
| The irony? A YubiKey was objectively safer: no GPS, mic, or app
| permissions. But we've normalized "security" as surrender to
| surveillance capitalism. Banks want your data, not hardware
| tokens.
|
| Smartphones manufacture threats:
|
| - AirTag stalking requires... a smartphone to detect.
|
| - Signal/encrypted chat? Tied to a phone number (- ID -
| surveillance graph).
|
| - "Find My Phone" = backdoor with a UX polish.
|
| The system isn't securing you, it's securing access to you. Every
| forced 2FA method is another node to map, monetize, and
| manipulate.
|
| btw. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41310150 - old ASK NH
| of mine, i still welcome ideas.
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| Not only do I need a smartphone for "everything" in my
| live.(managing my local gym membership for example) I also only
| have the choice between two us companies: Google or Apple. I had
| an ubuntu smartphone at some point but it's practically useless.
| If I want a appointment with my doctor in Germany living in the
| same street as I, the Californian Company Google has to be
| involved for some reason.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| It is not even about privacy and safety or freedom of choice
| really. Besides very soon - in this duopoly you really will not
| be owning phones or even access to apps would be
| limited/controlled to more draconian measures than it is today.
|
| Anyways. I took an auto ride few weeks back and an old gentleman
| picked me up. He did have a tattered smartphone. But he didn't
| have the UPI app or a QR code (QR is the way here; UPI the
| instant payment thingie in India). He was not agitated but really
| looked embarrassed and helpless and told me in broken English he
| tried a few times but he forgets many kinds of PINs and messes up
| and his bank account gets blocked and then he has to run around
| with documents to get it unblocked and then again. I had some
| cash and I was able to pay him. But it's horrible. There are
| people for whom cash is the ONLY way. Even going to the bank (or
| ATM; which anyway is still a difficulty for me) means sometimes
| half to one day's work gone. Just like that. This has a lot to do
| with political climate changes. So many people get trampled over
| without any check and balances because they have the vote without
| a voice or any real power.
|
| I think a lot of us, and for many of us who tap and pay at a
| Starbucks as if it's bill there lowest currency denomination in
| our consciousness, never stop to try and understand this and
| realise this. This is not merely inconvenience in huge part of
| this planet - it's a real life pain. I don't think even this
| article considered such a case/life struggles due to smartphones
| and everything getting tied to a SIM et cetera.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| ok - but despite this well-meaning story.. the answer IMO is
| still cash; use it, support it, continue it. The alternatives
| are not stable over time -- not a joke.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Those without smartphones _and_ those who do not wish to install
| trash on their smartphones, _and_ those who do not wish to use
| Android (or an Android build blessed by the corporations) or iOS.
| yallpendantools wrote:
| I had a tangential experience to this phenomenon lately. I moved
| continents a few years ago. Eventually I had to switch my Play
| Store country to where I moved. That restricted my access to
| certain versions of apps but my downloaded apps continued to
| function anyway.
|
| Then, a few months ago, I finally bought a new phone. I quickly
| found out that there was no way I could get this one banking app
| from my home country on the new phone (other than switching my
| country setting again, which isn't worth the potential hassle
| right now). Fortunately, I could still do online banking with on
| my browser...right?
|
| I try to login to my online banking. They say they will send me
| an OTP on my registered mobile number. Makes sense, and, thanks
| to the wonders of roaming, I will be able to receive it.
| Except...instead of just sending me the actual OTP like any sane
| platform would do, I had to first confirm that I was, indeed,
| trying to sign-in to online banking by replying "YES" to their
| SMS prompt. And due to the wonders of SMS roaming protocol,
| though I could receive their messages, I simply could not reply
| to them no matter which gods I invoke.
|
| Security design by committee. I curse the manager who though this
| was a necessary and valuable addition to the whole OTP scheme.
|
| It's not so much a "convenience tax" as in the article but, I
| guess, a penalty for moving countries. I have no choice now but
| simply to just settle this when I go on vacation to my home
| country. There is probably no convenient resolution to this even
| when I am in the correct geospace.
|
| PS. I have two banks from home country and I was able to install
| the other bank's app in my new phone without a hitch. I try to
| avoid cynicism but this simply has the stink of Managerial
| Software Engineering Best Practices all over it.
| doctor_radium wrote:
| > And at the bakery chain Greggs, you can collect loyalty
| "stamps" for free food and drink and get "exclusive app-only
| gifts". You currently get a free hot drink just for downloading
| the app.
|
| > McDonald's is running a high-profile promotion called Deal
| Drop, where it offers items at "bargain" prices, such as a
| classic Big Mac for PS1.49 (normally PS4.99) and a children's
| Happy Meal for PS1.99 (normally PS3.59) - but all of the
| discounts are available exclusively with the company's app.
|
| The article paints a painstakingly detailed photo of the UK's app
| culture, but fails to explain exactly why app users are entitled
| to such discounts. What exactly is McDonald's doing with your
| data that is worth a whopping PS3.50 Big Mac discount, and more??
| Why is the app so important?? I have never found an article that
| does more than scratch the surface on this topic. Any
| suggestions?
| cue_the_strings wrote:
| I think such discounts are not as much because of the data,
| they're a way to tier your customers, similar to coupons.
|
| That way you both get to take the full price from people whose
| time is expensive enough that they won't bother with the apps,
| and also those who wouldn't pay the full price but have enough
| time to use the apps.
|
| I never eat McD's, but I see the pattern everywhere. If you
| make between the minimum and average wage in Slovenia and don't
| own property, you practically can't get by without dedicating
| 6h per week to grocery shopping in various different 'discount'
| chains (Lidl, Hofer AKA Aldi Sud, Euro Spin), keeping up with
| the weekly discount catalogs and using all the app discounts
| (more recently).
| tim333 wrote:
| As a user of Greggs and McD (UK) I can maybe offer some
| insight.
|
| Fairly obviously the discounts are to encourage customer
| loyalty so you keep going to McD rather than somewhere
| healthier. Also to get you to come back - if you haven't been
| for ages they may offer a 99p big mac to get you back in.
|
| As to why apps rather than paper coupons, my closest McD has a
| typically had group of about 20 people waiting for the 50 items
| they ordered with new stuff ordered every 30 seconds or so. The
| last thing the low wage rushed staff need are customers going
| can you explain this coupon to me an is it valid for extra
| fries on Friday etc.
| owlbite wrote:
| I've also seen it explained that it's part of their toolset
| in extracting maximum "value" from a customer.
|
| Richer customers self-select to pay higher prices without the
| app as they can't be bothered faffing around to find the
| digital coupon/deal/whatever combination (you can, of course,
| only use one of the wide range of deals at a time). Poorer
| customers will invest the time in finding and using a deal.
|
| They both get the same sandwich, but McD got them to pay
| different prices for it.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah probably that too. I can't actually be bothered to use
| the McD app although the Leon one with free coffee for
| PS25/mo is good.
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| Most forms of direct marketing require unambiguous consent in
| the UK (likewise for data collection used for direct
| marketing). Culturally, many Brits are relatively suspicious of
| authority and will not consent to the use of their data 'just
| because'. Loyalty apps are a great invention: they give
| advertisers a direct channel to the consumer, and the consumer
| a way to receive something of value in exchange for their
| deliberate engagement.
| echoangle wrote:
| I think the idea is to get as many people as possible to
| install and set up the app, so they then have more incentive to
| become repeat customers. Theyre probably making some loss on
| new signups and hope to get it back later on.
| eesmith wrote:
| Market segmentation through user profiling and individualized
| discounts based on the entire order, making it hard for people
| to tell if they are being treated "fairly."
|
| Get more people to use McD's app. When they order, give them a
| personalized coupon giving you a discount. The discount is
| different for everyone. Use the response rate, plus information
| about your buying habit (always buys a family-sized order on
| Fridays) to optimize the discount.
|
| Raise the non-app prices so the people using the app think they
| got a deal ... while the overall price is on average higher
| than if McD's had flat rates for everyone.
|
| People tend to think flat rates are more fair when the services
| are identical, and get pissed off when they find it isn't.
| computerthings wrote:
| So, what's this story getting unfairly penalized for? It's been
| bumping around between page and 2 and 3 after it had more than 80
| upvotes and not even half the comments; meanwhile there's a story
| with not even half the votes, that is also _older_ , which is
| firmly near the top.
| doctor_radium wrote:
| I was in a full service restaurant a few months ago, and they
| were steering everybody to scan a QR code for their menus. Had
| eaten there several times before and this was new. I demanded a
| physical menu, even though the waiter said it might be outdated.
| Wanted a beer, but the drink menus were no more. I stared the
| waiter down and snapped, "WATER!" You must push back or else
| they'll think their lazy changes are fine. Maybe next time
| they'll expect me to bus the table?
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| App store monopoly hurts us way more than it is talked about.
| Suddenly, not only we are not to chose which devices to use to
| access what could be a simple website. Now unrelated third party
| decides if we have access to it based in, for example, country of
| residence. Or at all. Apple routine forces censorship on our
| phones as if it was it's property.
|
| I still believe it was a tragedy that Microsoft folded their
| attempt into mobile. To explain my level of desperation, I feel
| our next best hope here is China.
| fsflover wrote:
| Our next best hope is GNU/Linux smartphones. Sent from my
| Librem 5.
| nicce wrote:
| They can't handle the masses, unfortunately. That needs alot
| more money and infrastructure.
| fsflover wrote:
| Not yet, but it's achievable, just like my relatives are
| using GNU/Linux on desktop without problems.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I for one will never ever do any kind of banking or monetary
| transaction on a Smart Phone.
|
| As for other apps, I just have a couple of simple games and
| Firefox, which I only use when in waiting an office for am
| appointment. So far where I am, it is not an impediment.
| harrisoned wrote:
| I have a big issue with this, and the truth is that the majority
| of people simply do not care and/or do not understand the
| implications.
|
| By tying your service to a smartphone your are basically refusing
| to provide service if the costumer doesn't agree to Apple's or
| Google's TOS. If the app doesn't complain about emulation or
| something different than Android or IOS you are in luck, but
| that's not the case with most banking apps. And that's only
| talking about people who don't have it by choice and have money
| to buy one.
|
| For me, once, it went beyond: I took my first dose of the Covid
| vaccine, and the second dose's date would still be announced. I
| asked where it would be available to the nurse, "On the Instagram
| page of the <local health body>". "But i don't have Instagram" i
| said, and the nurse shrugged. It requires both a phone and a
| social media account with your real info, but since absolute
| nobody complains about it they just do because it's easier.
|
| This will continue as long people are complacent with it. In some
| places the government is required to provide you services, by
| law, by any means available and not depending on 3rd party
| service, but they do require apps anyway and people stay quiet.
| Phones as an alternative is fine, it's a tool, but should not be
| an obligatory device for you to be considered an human being.
| zevv wrote:
| Yes. This.
|
| Sure, I own a smartphone, it runs just plain android but
| without any google accounts or services because I do not agree
| to Googles terms of services. I never did, and as an European
| citizen especially with recent developments I feel that has
| been the right choice.
|
| The thing is, without google account there is no play store,
| and without play store I am not able to install the majority of
| apps - no banking, no parking, and all the other services
| people complain about in these threads.
|
| This is my choice, and I stick to it. I'm also pretty vocal
| about it and complain when needed. Doctors office informs me I
| only can get medicine with the app? Apparently they _can_ make
| exceptions when you complain, because I 'm allowed to get
| medicine with a simple phone call. My bank tried to force me to
| use their app, but apparently they still _do_ have an
| alternative login method when you complain. Sure, I know it 's
| a fight I will lose in the long run, but I enjoy it while it
| lasts.
| gs17 wrote:
| > if the costumer doesn't agree to Apple's or Google's TOS.
|
| Or if Apple or Google arbitrarily decide that they don't like
| that customer. You don't have to have done something wrong,
| they can decide that you're likely associated with someone who
| did.
| dalke wrote:
| When people ask for examples, I point to a NYT report of a
| man in San Francisco whose young son had redness on his penis
| and complained about it feeling sore. The pediatrician asked
| for some photos to make a diagnosis online. Google flagged it
| as child porn and notified the police. The police said it
| wasn't, but Google declined to restore service.
|
| "A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor.
| Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.",
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-
| surveil...
|
| In India, Google locked an engineer from Gujarat out of his
| Google account because it contained explicit content
| potentially involving child abuse or exploitation. The
| engineer believes it's because the account contain images of
| him as a child being bathed by his grandmother.
|
| "HC notice to Google India after engineer loses access Gmail,
| Google Drive, and more over childhood photo labelled 'porn'"
| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-
| news/hc-...
|
| I use these examples specifically because many in my
| government want "Chat Control", where snitchware scans
| messages for child porn and the like, and notifies the
| police. It will be full of false positives like these,
| especially if the scanning software continues to be built by
| puritanical American companies.
|
| Another class is people who the US deems to be a security
| threat. How long will it be until the US extends its
| sanctions against the ICC by ordering Microsoft, Apple,
| Amazon, Oracle, and Google to shut down the accounts for the
| ICC and anyone involved in their genocide investigation, work
| and personal?
| pbalau wrote:
| Did it occur to you that a nurse is a nurse because they are
| good at nursing sick people and not because they are good at
| customer support?
|
| I want my nurse to take care of my health, not to know where I
| can find stuff. You are misplacing your anger...
| alabastervlog wrote:
| The entire history of technology is our becoming dependent on one
| invention after another, such that anyone with any interest in
| the area(s) that invention touches no longer has a realistic
| choice not to use it. They may technically be able to, but only
| through outsize sacrifice that leaves them worse off than they
| would have been before the thing was invented.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Hi Ted.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I was channeling Burke's show _Connections_ , actually, but
| sure, that too.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| I too was thinking that...
| tdeck wrote:
| One thing not mentioned yet is what happens when you've got a
| cheaper phone filled with photos and videos. At various times
| I've had to spend a few minutes deleting things just to download
| some stupid 100 meg app that I need to use for a total of 5
| minutes to complete some basic task.
| philipov wrote:
| Is your cheaper phone unable to interface with a computer? I'm
| no advocate of an app-based economy, but your phone shouldn't
| be the archive for your photos.
| tdeck wrote:
| I back my photos up using adb backup, but I don't keep them
| in cloud services.
| layer8 wrote:
| That doesn't solve the problem of having to spend time
| deleting photos and later restoring them back from the
| archive.
| philipov wrote:
| plug in USB cable, drag and drop entire directory from one
| drive to another with file explorer, is the only reasonable
| way to manage photos. Get everything off the device at the
| end of each day. Why would you ever put things _back_ on
| the phone?
| tdeck wrote:
| And then if I want to look at my photos while I'm out, or
| show them to someone, I don't have them on my phone
| anymore?
| genewitch wrote:
| I hear you; in practice I can use my nextcloud server for
| this, or if I have tailscale turned on in the phone I can
| even use the synology photo app.
|
| Being forced to upgrade phones... Ugh.
|
| I don't have a solution if you're not me and you're not
| paying me, though.
| layer8 wrote:
| Because I want to be able to search for and show or send
| photos to other people on the go.
|
| A smartphone is like a little computer you can use on the
| go, in case you weren't aware.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If only phone vendors didn't try to break this
| functionality.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Yeah when was the last time image capture got an update?
| 2010?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Ah yes, let me just walk home for 20 hours instead of
| taking a train because I need to first transfer the
| pictures I took on a trip to my computer before I can
| install the local transport company's app to get home now
| that they removed ticket machines from platforms and are
| telling people to use their app to buy tickets...
|
| I can think of various solutions (from companies not
| requiring an app in the first place to inserting an SD
| card) but suggesting that people simply not store user
| data on their phone is a new one
| zulban wrote:
| If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your
| belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside.
|
| Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your
| media.
| tdeck wrote:
| Perhaps I can be patient and explain the underlying concepts
| here, since they seem to be unintuitive to a small minority
| of very condescending commenters:
|
| 1. I like to have access to my photos and videos while I'm on
| the go. You never know when the subject of some trip or
| experience from 2 years ago will come up in conversation, and
| I'll want to show a photo of it to someone I'm talking to.
| Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my
| phone, it's no trouble to carry them.
|
| 2. I don't like to give cloud services all my photos and
| videos. Despite the extremely dark pattern in Google Photos
| where it tries multiple times a month to trick me into
| enabling cloud backup, I've kept it off. Some of my photos
| may be sensitive things like personal documents, I'd rather
| not have to think about what's in the cloud and what isn't,
| and what is deleted where. These services also often aren't
| free and I'd prefer not to pay for them.
|
| 3. I back up my phone regularly to my personal computer, so
| losing my phone doesn't mean I lose all the media on my
| phone.
|
| 4. And since I know someone will ask, I lock my phone. Not
| with a fingerprint; with a passcode. It's not perfect but I'm
| comfortable with the level of security.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my
| phone, it's no trouble to carry them.
|
| But in your example they -do- weigh something, measured in
| megabytes. So there is an obvious tradeoff in terms of what
| you can fit on your phone with some spare empty margin,
| similar to physical goods that you need to fit into a
| backpack when you know you might pick something else up
| along the way.
| kxrm wrote:
| No, they don't "weigh" anything.
|
| Digital storage is so far removed from this concept. Let
| us not excuse poor business practices by trying to
| offload a piece of their business systems on to their
| customers' devices.
|
| I shouldn't have to provide space on my property to
| conduct business with another organization.
| tdeck wrote:
| To extend the already poor and tortured analogy, imagine
| if a paper train ticket were the size and weight of an
| 800 page textbook that you had to lug around, and 799 of
| the pages were filled with some boilerplate copied from a
| different company's train ticket book, that nobody ever
| needed to look at.
|
| But if you have a problem with the train ticket textbook,
| people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that
| you're not managing or carrying your belongings properly.
| I should get a bigger bag, or I should carry fewer of the
| books I actually want to read. Why am I carrying around
| so many things anyway? It's irresponsible! Sure I've got
| room for a piece of paper, but that's not enough these
| days. Don't I know that I'll need space for the train
| ticket textbook?
| zulban wrote:
| If your phone's storage is at 99.994%, you can't blame that
| on pointless 100mb apps in 2025.
|
| Have fun with that.
| kxrm wrote:
| > If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your
| belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside.
|
| I really don't like this analogy. These are entirely
| different concepts. A backpack has weight, dimension in real
| space that impacts the real world. A phone full of videos has
| no extra weight or volume in the real world.
| zulban wrote:
| Clearly, they are facing very similar physical
| restrictions. Not in weight but in bytes. If they want to
| carry many TBs on a phone in 2025 but then complaining that
| they can't install a 100mb app, yeah, they are carrying too
| much in their backpack.
| tdeck wrote:
| > If they want to carry many TBs on a phone in 2025
|
| What are you talking about? Only the most expensive
| flagship phones have a terabyte of storage space. There
| are no phones that have "many TBs". Mine certainly
| doesn't.
|
| Regardless, none of the following functionality needs an
| app. It all works great on a website, and doesn't take up
| any space permanently on my device:
|
| - Buying a ticket - Checking transit times - Receiving
| notifications (not only does email exist, but websites
| can send notofications) - Joining a loyalty program
|
| I don't have any problem with people who want to carry
| these apps around, but as an infrequent user of many
| businesses, it's death by a thousand cuts. I resent how
| what were once perfectly workable mobile websites are
| slowly being degraded in order to force me to download
| hundreds of megabytes of copy-paste support libraries for
| what half the time are just wrapped webviews anyway.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| How other people choose to use _their_ phones is not _your_
| business.
| zulban wrote:
| This is a public forum. If they don't want to talk about it
| then why are they talking about it?
| shipp02 wrote:
| A lot of suggestions ask the poster to not store photos on
| their phone, but this takes away the functionality from their
| phone that they actually want in service using 1 app for 5
| minutes.
| flocciput wrote:
| I feel your pain. I managed to use my first smart phone, an
| iPhone 6s, for almost 10 years. In that time the system data
| took up more and more of what little space I had on there (16GB
| I think? So unthinkably small to most people that they think
| I'm confusing it with RAM) to where I was basically dealing
| with a few mb of storage to use for photos and work-critical
| apps like Authenticator. I also refuse to use iCloud on
| principle (tried it once, and realized when I wanted to
| download all my photos onto my computer that it would only let
| me do 1 at a time, or low quality versions, or something scummy
| like that).
|
| It got so bad I had to do things like delete my Internet
| history if I even wanted to copy and paste something! And I
| would do everything I could to not have to pick which photos
| and conversations I needed to delete forever just to download
| some fucking app I would only use one time to order food or
| park somewhere or do first-time router setup.
|
| Finally I had to give in and get a new phone, because managing
| phone storage was making my life much more difficult than it
| needed to be. But I'm still so mad that I had to, because daily
| living seems to demand more and more storage space. And people
| accept it!! Ugh. The dang thing didn't even have a scratch on
| it either. Would've used it for 20 years if I could.
| pimlottc wrote:
| > Some of the best savings rates are offered by app-only
| providers - made up of banks and "electronic money institutions"
| (EMIs), which do not have their own banking licence, but put your
| money in a bank that does.
|
| Okay, this wins for euphemism of the week. "We're not a bank,
| we're a money institution!"
| robocat wrote:
| "Bank" is a highly regulated word.
| jebarker wrote:
| When visiting the UK last summer we tried to go to a train
| museum. There were three public parking lots around with
| different app based parking systems. We were unsuccessful in
| using any of them due to various issues relating to poor cell
| service, lack of UK phone number etc. In the end we had to leave
| without visiting the museum. It was farcical.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| As a North London resident, the parking app situation is just
| as farcical for me.
|
| There are at least three different apps for parking around me:
| RingGo, PayByPhone and JustPark.
|
| I went to East London recently to visit the Velodrome, and
| discovered yet another one: Evology.
|
| It's always great fun, standing around in the car park trying
| to wrangle your cards whilst creating yet another account to
| pay for 30 minutes of parking.
|
| Then, of course, there's the 50/50 chance that my iPhone has
| decided to offload the parking app you need because you haven't
| used it in the last month or so.
|
| And occasionally RingGo will decide to log me out, and when I
| go to log back in for some reason the last password I have in
| my password manager doesn't work, so now I also have to reset
| my password.
|
| Agreed, paying for parking has turned into a total farce.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If people just stopped paying for parking en masse, things
| might change. I'm in the US, so maybe my attitude is
| different, but if I parked in a parking lot that didn't let
| me pay without installing some weirdo app, I would just park
| without paying and let them come after me if they can find
| me. If they send me a bill, I can refuse to pay. If they send
| it to collections, collections will probably not pursue over
| such a small amount. And if the debt collector does pursue, I
| can send them a dispute letter, forcing them to prove I have
| a debt obligation, which 99 times out of 100 will make them
| go away.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Yeah yeah yeah.
|
| They sell the debt at lower price to companies specialized
| in debt collection, the longer you wait then to pay them
| the more they are allowed to collect from you.
|
| If you try not to pay at all, they put you in court against
| lawyer working for the company whose only job is to collect
| debt, so he knows his job pretty well and the bonus is that
| you end up having to pay the lawyer fee.
|
| Of course you could still refuse to pay that, get cops to
| show up at your house and then you have to shoot to get
| them to leave.
|
| At some point of course you would think it's a bit much for
| a parking ticket.
|
| If you don't like it, just don't use it, like everyone else
| does.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Nobody takes you to court to collect small amounts. They
| only do that if the amount is sufficiently large and they
| have good documentation and they believe they will be
| able to collect a judgement against you (ie either you
| have assets or you have stable employment so they can
| garnish wages).
|
| Mostly nothing will happen except daily phone calls for
| years plus the hit to credit score.
|
| And cops aren't showing up unless aforementioned judgment
| happened, you ignored it, and the court eventually
| authorized physical seizure of your property to recover
| funds.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Thanks to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA),
| those phone calls should be able to be stopped with a
| simple Debt Validation Letter. No need to even get an
| attorney involved. Demand that the collector provide
| proof that you owe the money. Debt collectors will
| frequently just give up at that point if it's a tiny
| amount of money like a parking ticket.
| genewitch wrote:
| Is this like US fanfiction?
| acdha wrote:
| This is like the people who think "admiralty court" is a
| magic phrase to get out of paying taxes. What actually
| happens is that your car gets towed if you ever park
| anywhere affiliated with the same company (hope you never
| need to go to the same place twice), or you get tired of
| dodging collectors and having that mounting debt affect
| your credit and employability. Not liking how a business
| runs doesn't give you a right to use their services without
| paying, your choice is still to pay or not use them.
| genewitch wrote:
| Okay, but if everyone or a plurality of people did that
| because they disagreed with the business practices?
|
| An individual may not be able to do much in all
| circumstances, but a lot of people might.
| acdha wrote:
| Yes, boycotts can be effective but they work by not
| buying things rather than pretending theft is noble. Most
| people have a moral objection to that.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The thing is they can tow your car away potentially. At
| which point your little protest is over as you are now
| being extorted for hundreds for something you can't ignore.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Even those having phone and app have trouble in the form of
| hefty penalties when cell service does not allow them paying in
| the hard 5 minute mandated. There was a little 'scandal' (more
| like the usual random weekly media article pick for traffic
| increasing annoyment from among the thousands of similar f ups
| not getting any traction) recently provoking thunderous and
| colorful statements from officials. Regualation change may come
| in some form sometime perhaps that solves something possibly,
| but change something for certain, perhaps.
| jfengel wrote:
| It feels on a par with illiteracy. The motives and circumstances
| are different, but it's got a similar level of assumption. It's
| kinda rare and requires significant adaptation, so it's just way
| easier to assume it doesn't happen.
|
| I don't think that a law to help people get smartphones is the
| answer, the way we made literacy education mandatory. But it's
| rapidly going to be seen as a handicap.
| mindslight wrote:
| Literacy skills increase monotonically though. If you learn to
| read adult novels while in grade school, you can still continue
| reading grade school books as well. Whereas if you learn tech
| to the proficiency of understanding how corporate apps are
| attacking you, or if you simply take administrative control of
| that computer you carry everywhere, then you can then find
| yourself unable to engage despite having _higher_ than the
| basic skill level.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I don't think a skill is the same as a leased possession
|
| Literacy is something the state funds for you to acquire and
| that can't simply be taken away
|
| A smartphone is something you need to acquire and manage
| yourself, and it furthermore needs to comply with the rules set
| by an overseas corporation: you can choose between Apple or
| Google services but neither of them needs to take you as a
| customer while they're gatekeeping access to certain government
| and most transportation services
| Glyptodon wrote:
| My city has parking meters that I can't use because the website
| has a broken credit card form and the app "isn't available on
| your version of Android." And of course they don't accept cash.
|
| It's a farce.
| joshdavham wrote:
| You're in Vancouver, too?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| City of Vancouver parking meters _have_ to accept cash still.
|
| If you try putting a quarter in and it doesn't work (as is
| often the case because of tampering with the coin slots), I
| believe you don't have to pay for parking.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| going back to pre-smartphone but still true, in the US at
| least, it is generally illegal to park at a broken meter
| and you can get a ticket -- because otherwise there would
| be incentive to break the meter so you could park there for
| free.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > because otherwise there would be incentive to break the
| meter so you could park there for free
|
| Never in my life would I have thought of that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You must not be a security researcher or QA tester :)
| rangestransform wrote:
| This is only an issue because the US somehow became
| allergic to enforcing vandalism and property crime laws
| aggressively
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Unfortunately, people have bought into the idea that
| enforcing laws which are disproportionately broken by the
| socially disadvantaged is tantamount to oppression.
| Vandalism and property crime tends to be committed by the
| poor underclass, often by racial minorities to boot. So
| people don't want to enforce laws against those people,
| whose lives are already kinda crap, because they think
| it's just oppressing them further. Unfortunately, while
| this thinking is well-intentioned it has really cost
| society in general dearly.
| greycol wrote:
| I've bought into that idea (with caveats case by case,
| i.e. evaluated by judges with discretion), but it only
| works when those kind of crimes are feeders into social
| support agencies. Without effective social support to
| either rehabilitate behaviour or remove the need for that
| behaviour you're either going to need to remove the
| offenders or accept repeated crimes.
|
| The cheapest cost per prisoner in the US is $23,000 per
| year (Arkansas with other states costing more). That's a
| lot of support you can give a person before it makes
| sense to send them to prison, especially if the prison
| doesn't actively work towards rehabilitation.
|
| Problem is MVP prisons for your criminal population is
| viewed as needed while spending the money more
| effectively doesn't really have political consensus.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Uh... I don't think so. These laws have been in place for
| decades, and _are_ a way of preventing vandalism to
| property meters.
|
| We don't yet have a surveillance state capable of
| observing every time someone puts gum in a parking meter
| while pretending to pay it, so they can park for free,
| it's not that we are "allergic" to enforcing this so
| choose to prevent parking at vandalized meters instead,
| it's that it's not realistic to catch that. Although I
| guess we're getting closer to that surveillance state
| now, but certainly weren't when these laws were first
| implemented, their motivation was that it was not
| feasible to catch most people vandalizing parking meters,
| instead the reward for doing so had to be removed (which
| honestly seems a lot more effective anyway??)
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| You can park at a broken meter in SF:
|
| https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/drive-park/parking-
| mete...
| crusty wrote:
| Are you extrapolating experiences from a small area or at
| of municipalities, because I've never been ticketed for
| parking at a broken meter in the US.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I haven't been ticketed for parking at an expired meter
| for years either! Laws may have varying levels of
| enforcement, is one thing.
|
| Google AI agrees that it's generally illegal. I can't
| look up every single municipality of course, but here's a
| few. It certainly may not be universal, but it is not
| unusual, I don't have figures on how popular it is, maybe
| not as popular as I thought, but it's not at all unusual!
|
| Rockville MD: "If a parking meter is not registering time
| with the insertion of coins, debit/credit card or
| ParkMobile, you must either park elsewhere or pay with
| another payment method available"
| https://www.rockvillemd.gov/274/Public-Parking
|
| Chicago: "Overstuffed meters wouldn't accept quarters,
| leading to broken meters and tickets for the parkers who
| tried to use them."
| https://www.governing.com/archive/chicago-parking-
| meters.htm...
|
| Bellingham Washington: "City code prohibits parking in a
| space if the meter is broken." https://cob.org/wp-
| content/uploads/parking-meter-info.pdf
| bsder wrote:
| > If you try putting a quarter in and it doesn't work (as
| is often the case because of tampering with the coin
| slots), I believe you don't have to pay for parking.
|
| Huh? That's the exact opposite of most municipalities I
| know of.
|
| Normally it is "If the meter is broken, you cannot park
| there. It's an automatic ticket."
|
| Otherwise, everybody just jams something in the slot and
| all your meters wind up broken.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| I avoid apps too if I can. So rare that the app does anything a
| website can't. Indeed most apps are implemented with embedded
| browsers.
|
| It's about tracking, and push notifications. Full stop.
| jampekka wrote:
| Cue HN's anti-PWA brigade.
| genewitch wrote:
| I wanted to make one but I wanted it to work without
| networking but be able to trigger notifications on a timer. I
| don't know anything about cellphone development or JavaScript
| so I gave up and made a discord bot instead.
| Zak wrote:
| If I'm forced into using an app when a website would have done
| just fine, I give it a one-star review.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Embedded browser with a 450mb app size of course. I wish you
| can sort by size on app store. It is a signal for quality when
| you find a 4mb app that does the same thing as a 450mb app.
| elric wrote:
| > It's about tracking
|
| That's exactly what it is. That is the only real reason. More
| tracking, more data harvesting, more control for the publisher
| at the expense of user agency.
| fifticon wrote:
| My doctor/'s office was just forced to switch to app-instead-of-
| website for patient interation. Ironically, the old and this new
| software came from same megacorp I work for (different
| department, same story). The old web interface was rather good
| and rather sensible-practical-sane. It was almost as if someone
| had asked a doctor what he actually needed for his patients, and
| then understood his answer and also managed to actually implement
| and deliver it. The new smartphone app.. Not so
| much. It looks more like some MBA types managed to solve "what is
| the cheapest thing we can get away with, lawfully?"
|
| Internally, I know it is because the original dev team has been
| gutted, development outsourced to india, and just a skeleton crew
| from the original team manages the chinese-whispers process with
| the huge indian team.
|
| As a result, the use case flow (IE the only way you can operate
| it..) of the app, goes as follows:
|
| 1 close the app 2 launch the app and sign in 3 do ONE action 4
| enjoy the result of the action 5 repeat from 1..
|
| You might wonder why that is.. Well, that is because your
| software is not allowed to display any errors - because that
| might indicate there were bugs.. So instead, whenever an error
| happens, you just display the '... still loading..' animation...
| forever. So, technically, there are no errors, no bugs.. "IT IS
| JUST TAKING TOO LONG TO RESPOND". (spoiler: it will NEVER
| respond, because hidden behind the screen, is a series of
| unhandled web api errors..)
|
| But again, as an "internal" employee, I have seen our management
| claim all this is a huge success (client paid/pays).
|
| Back to using it: When I have to interact with my doctor, I write
| the texts on my PC, and mail them to myself. Then I cut/paste
| them from gmail into this wonderful app.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| At what point does this constitute a hostile action against the
| user and what degree of retaliation is appropriate? Open
| question for everyone.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| what retaliation are you imagining and against whom? who is
| even "the user" here?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Do a little reverse engineering/analysis on the app, to
| parallel-construct the claims of 'fifticon (as to not
| require them to leak internal info or become a
| whistleblower). If it's as bad as it sounds, go to press.
| Or just dump an expose on Twitter/X to maximize public
| awareness.
|
| > _who is even "the user" here?_
|
| The doctors _and_ their patients. If it 's as bad as it
| sounds, it actively degrades the ability of doctors to
| provide care, so it _quite literally hurts actual people_.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| People should instead just vote with you feet and
| dollars. That'll be inconvenient, but if it bothers you
| enough, you'll make the effort.
|
| A crucial part of this approach is to let your doctor
| know exactly why you're leaving. If they're losing
| business over it, they'll look for alternatives. And if
| the EHR company loses money, they'll look to make
| changes, too.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I wouldn't put up with a doctor that required me to
| interact with him through an app. I'd switch doctors, and
| hopefully find a way to let the old doctor know why I'm
| switching. That's often the hardest part--actually
| finding an owner who is harmed when a customer leaves.
| azemetre wrote:
| Usually when people say vote with your wallet, it means
| those with more money make the rules.
|
| What recourse does an individual have if they live in a
| rural area with 1 or 3 doctors that all use the same
| hostile software?
|
| Should they suffer because they don't have money or the
| ability to go else where?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Most people don't have 3 doctors let alone 3 which all
| use the same niche/bad customer facing software.
|
| Those that do should organize to make their displeasure
| known. Senior decision makers are probably incompetent
| boobs rather than compete assholes.
|
| If they live somewhere with 1 doc they should vote with
| their feet by leaving before the town finishes dying
| around them.
| azemetre wrote:
| So we should condemn large swaths of the rural population
| to not only abject poverty, but remove health care access
| too?
|
| Is this what you're seriously arguing? That people should
| be forced to have a worse quality life, die earlier; all
| because they committed the crime of not living in a
| metropolis?
|
| Do you not see how people read this as completely
| heartless and devoid of empathy towards their fellow man?
| genewitch wrote:
| Yeah I should move out of the subtropical rain forest and
| move back to urban asthma and traffic and crime, and
| noise.
|
| The idea that my neighbors and I are gunna go picket the
| only person within 20 miles that can write a prescription
| is ludicrous.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| >Be forced to have a worse quality life, die earlier; all
| because they committed the crime of not living in a
| metropolis?
|
| Literally already the case and more so care isn't cheaper
| unlike land so your lesser dollars buys lesser care and
| no realistic access to specialists
| Neonlicht wrote:
| Reminds me of how the CCP pays doctors extra money to
| work in rural areas. And I read an article on how
| gynecologists are fleeing the American South. And even in
| my own country there is lack of GPs in some provinces.
| janc_ wrote:
| Most such bad software is provided by a small number of
| very large companies, so none of it is "niche".
| autoexec wrote:
| > Senior decision makers are probably incompetent boobs
| rather than compete assholes.
|
| It's not some coincidence that just about every company
| in every sector is screwing over more and more people.
| This is all extremely calculated. We've decided that
| making the most money is all that matters and we're
| seeing the inevitable results of that choice everywhere
| around us. If shareholders got richer by providing people
| with quality healthcare and well designed websites and
| the freedom to use or not use mobile technology we'd
| already have those things. No one cares how shitty they
| make our lives or even how many of us they kill as long
| as they keep the ability to stuff more money into their
| pockets this quarter than they did last quarter. The
| people doing this shit to us aren't incompetent. What we
| want from them isn't what they're optimizing for. Maybe
| you haven't noticed the massive amount of consolidation
| in every industry going on, but consider that voting with
| your wallet gets harder over time. Consider how many
| companies you're personally giving your money to right
| now while wishing you had an alternative that better met
| your needs. Voting with your wallet is not a real option.
| The fattest wallet will always win.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Surely it's not a well-functioning market, when the
| client (the medical organization) had accepted and paid
| for a clearly dysfunctional software that harms their
| operations. Yet, they somehow survive and continue to
| function despite it.
|
| And thus it's questionable whenever voting with wallet
| would work. It works in healthy, free and competitive
| markets with rational actors, and we probably aren't
| looking at one.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| My PCP once apologized for a system upgrade (he had
| joined a larger medical practice) which "forces me to
| look at this laptop screen instead of you, My Friend"
|
| And he was well aware that I'm a guy whose mental illness
| can mostly be traced to escaping into screens since the
| first Family Cathode Ray of 1974 and Clarke Monolith of
| 1968
| j-bos wrote:
| I imagine legal retaliation as the perpetual loading could
| be framed as blocking access to medical care.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I'm gonna punt on the question of where the line is for
| hostile actions and use some past legal justification of "I
| know it when I see it" and I see it clearly here.
|
| The second part is the more interesting question to me:
|
| Appropriate reactions would seem to include:
| - finding a new doctor/practice/provider. Super hard in
| practice as they seem to be geographical monopolies a la the
| cable networks - providing appropriately hostile
| feedback to your current doctors -- but this is likely only
| to garner empathy as the docs have little say over this
| - stop using smartphones and claim hardship -- not sure how
| this would pan out. Probably not well? - channeling
| Luigi and murdering the people responsible for our ongoing
| dystopia
|
| Seriously what other options are there? You can either
| complain to the ether and it goes nowhere. Or you can take up
| violence and it still likely goes nowhere and you fuck up
| your life.
|
| This is why so many people are content to let the world burn.
| It ain't for us anymore anyway.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Is stupidity instead of hardship a legally valid claim? Are
| cognitively disabled people, unable to operate a
| smartphone, a protected class?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| If the entire world requires smartphones to take part and
| you are unable to use a smartphone you deserve some
| protection, yes.
|
| If you see other options I'd be happy to hear them?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| My question is can I sue based on that?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| If you're a protected class I would assume yes. IANAL
| this is not legal advice and this is _not a real
| situation anyway_
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| That's my question, am I a protected class for not being
| able to operate a smartphone? I think many of a typical
| doctor's constituency fall into that category.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think "person who is unable to operate a
| cellphone" is a protected class. There might be some
| overlap between those people and people in other
| protected classes. But it is hard to say just based on a
| hypothetical, right?
| mrandish wrote:
| > a typical doctor's constituency fall into that
| category.
|
| My 95 year-old mother can't use apps on her iphone
| because she can't figure out the navigation and various
| modes. Because of this her phone usage is limited to
| answering incoming calls, making calls to the six icons
| we've preset on her home screen, receiving texts and
| replying to the last text she received (because it's
| still on the screen). Anything else is iffy. And she's
| not cognitively impaired. She's actually quite sharp for
| her age and lives on her own within an assisted care
| community.
| mapt wrote:
| No. You're not.
|
| Blind people are. At least, insofar as we still have the
| ADA.
|
| One thing these companies are doing is charging blind
| people extra. Phrase it that way and you can maybe move
| some policy levers.
| meristohm wrote:
| They are protected if we collectively-enough (laws, or
| culture, religion, ethics, or...?) agree to provide
| equitable access to people with disabilities. Human
| rights are made up (the local deer that spent the night
| in the woods near where I spend the night have no rights,
| they just exist in a mix of cooperation, reciprocity, and
| some competition. Actually, I don't know if they afford
| each other rights in the way we do that. Likewise, I
| don't know if deer focus on "productivity" as much as so
| many of us do...), and for good reasons (?). I wonder if
| rights were codified back when we were far less numerous
| and living so much closer to the land, amidst so much
| more abundant life.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| wcag has provisions regarding cognitive issues, I have
| been thinking about writing an article arguing that dark
| patterns being liable under accessibility laws - but have
| not really shopped it around.
|
| Of course one thing is nobody wants to sue someone
| because they don't understand something, because they
| think it means arguing they are stupid.
| joquarky wrote:
| On a similar note, I think the inability to pause all
| animations on a website seems like a kind of WCAG
| violation as well.
| dleink wrote:
| If anyone needs a test case, I consider myself a
| reasonably intelligent human who is absolutely too stupid
| to use modern technology and would be glad to proclaim
| that to a court. (executive function, working memory
| issues. latency is a killer for me.)
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| You have forgotten sabotage or whistle blowing. If i would
| work for such a crappy manager, i would let upper
| management know.
|
| Feeling helpless is the moment you loose.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| This is all downstream of consolidation of ownership in
| private equity of clinics, community health centers,
| emergency rooms, veterinarians offices, end-of-life care
| facilities, etc.
|
| This is what happens when you let the bean counters and
| MBAs a quarter turn around the world with no on-the-ground
| experience or institutional knowledge make decisions from
| their spreadsheets to "optimize out inefficiencies".
|
| Let's call it what it is: strip mining.
| creer wrote:
| > downstream of consolidation of ownership
|
| No, if anything, people buying and running multiple
| offices are exactly in the business of optimizing the
| last few percentage points of efficiency and that include
| amortizing better software across all these offices to
| make them run with fewer humans in the loop. Causing more
| people to talk to more humans is NOT what they do.
|
| The issue is lack of care, incompetence, stupidity -
| exactly the things that will get you fired from these
| operations. Eventually.
|
| The problem is "eventually". Unfortunately it will take
| too long for that to happen, compared to the rest of our
| lives.
| kortilla wrote:
| VOTE MOTHERFUCKER
|
| Local government politics work. State politics even kinda
| work.
|
| The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind
| boggling.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| I vote. I am 50. I have voted in every election I was
| able to. In my life my preferred candidate has won
| exactly twice: Obama's second term and Biden's first.
| This includes local, state elections, and national.
|
| To quote George Carlin: " _If voting mattered, they
| wouldn't let us do it_ ".
|
| Trump lost in 2024 but took the win because his cronies
| disqualified enough voters in enough states to win.
|
| So, please, spare me. We're up to violence already.
| You're just well behind the times unfortunately.
| gxs wrote:
| Don't mean to be antagonistic here, but do you have a
| source for the claim that trump took the win?
|
| Would be really curious to see how this could be proven
| or at the very least convincingly induced.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Go look for how many ballots were disqualified in the
| swing states?
| TheDong wrote:
| I googled around, but I couldn't find an authoritative
| source showing either the numbers disqualified, the
| reasons, and that those ballots were majority not-trump
| ballots.
|
| Can you provide a source for that data for a specific
| swing state of your choice?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Contra Carlin, if voting didn't matter they wouldn't be
| putting so much effort into making it harder.
| lukan wrote:
| Your argument is, violence is an option, because your
| preferred candidates don't win as much as you like?
|
| I would see a point in saying voting is pointless,
| because no matter who you vote for, all end up on the
| payroll of the people doing enshitification. But not
| because your side always loose. Because this then won't
| likely change when you turn to violence - your side will
| be still the smaller one and we tried the whole voting
| thing, to not have all arguments solved with bloodshed.
| kortilla wrote:
| "My preferred candidate only one twice" is the hallmark
| of a "only the federal govt elections matter" midwit. The
| federal government is the least effective way to lead on
| regulatory change. California has demonstrated leadership
| this way repeatedly.
|
| >So, please, spare me. We're up to violence already.
| You're just well behind the times unfortunately.
|
| There have been nut-jobs saying this and inflicting
| violence since the beginning of the country. Then there
| are people who actually affect change. Pick a side.
| rixed wrote:
| Ok, maybe something less desperate than voting but
| appropriate in this case: create a competitor to disrupt
| the suckers? Maybe using the same API?
| TheDong wrote:
| The users of the sub-par app are captive, the hospital or
| insurance company is mandating it, and neither the doctor
| nor patients are free to choose a competing app.
|
| If you create a technically better app for the users,
| people still won't be able to use it unless you also are
| chosen by those higher up, and since there's likely
| already a strong existing relationship between the
| executives at the existing company and at the medical
| compan(ies), that means creating a competitor also will
| require building a lot of social capital with the
| decision makers, taking them to dinner and on golf trips,
| and so on.
|
| It will take years of your life, millions of dollars
| (since a 1-man company will never be seen as legitimate
| enough to provide a medical app, you'll need a large
| company with many employees), and the chance of success
| is minimal.
|
| I don't see how this is an "appropriate" response to a
| bad app.
| rixed wrote:
| I was just thinking of a better front end for the same
| API that trifticon mentionned. Still a lot of work of
| course, but may not require as many approvals.
|
| I wish we lived in a world where all these APIs were
| open, regulated, and everybody could compete on the
| implementation on both sides... One day, if capitalism
| survive technofeudalism...
| autoexec wrote:
| Even avoiding the problems with getting a foothold into
| this space any start up that tried to do the right thing
| would get bought up by someone else and enshitified until
| it was just as bad if not worse. There's more money to be
| made by screwing over the public than by not screwing
| them and our entire system is centered around making the
| most money at any cost and placing money over every other
| concern.
| TheDong wrote:
| Where can I vote for "Medical establishments should have
| an accessible-friendly browser-accessible no-javascript
| webpage for all functionality"?
|
| I see the "democrat" and "republic" checkboxes, but I
| don't see the magical third "Good apps, and also health
| insurance companies have to cover medical claims without
| questioning whether my doctor is competent, denying each
| claim once, and requiring 3 months of arguing on a phone"
|
| I've been voting, and as far as I can tell every option I
| have ever been able to vote for has been fully in support
| of crappy apps and crappy healthcare.
| TylerE wrote:
| Democrat is the only sane choice if you want a
| functioning government. Republicans have departed
| reality.
| autoexec wrote:
| There are no sane choices. We're only stuck with
| republicans now because democrats were happy to maintain
| a status quo that was keeping them rich but wasn't
| addressing the needs of the people. The dems might throw
| us a bone now and then, but they weren't willing to make
| the kind of meaningful changes that might threaten their
| power or the interests of the corporations and industries
| bribing them. Now we're left with folks who just want to
| pillage everything they can and burn the rest to the
| ground.
| kortilla wrote:
| >Where can I vote for "Medical establishments should have
| an accessible-friendly browser-accessible no-javascript
| webpage for all functionality"?
|
| Get off your ass and start a ballot measure. If you want
| to literally vote for a direct regulation that's the way
| to do it.
|
| Alternatively, start talking to state legislators and get
| them to support a bill doing it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is
| mind boggling._
|
| It's not. Unlike voting, it has a nonzero chance of
| improving the app situation.
|
| In this situation, instead of anything on the list above,
| I recommend going to press/Twitter and stressing the
| angle that this bullshit actually ruins people's lives
| permanently (or kills them prematurely).
| autoexec wrote:
| > The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is
| mind boggling.
|
| for hundreds of years our government and the corporations
| who bribe them have worked to limit the influence of the
| average person on the laws and regulations that we live
| under. After seeing our broken two party system, the
| gerrymandering and voter suppression, the open bribery,
| the lack of integrity or accountability, the
| inability/unwillingness of congress to do their job, and
| the growing list of laws and policies most Americans
| support and problems we want solutions for that get
| ignored time and time again while laws are being passed
| to appease corporations and industries, I really don't
| blame people for thinking that their ballot box is not
| the solution to their problems.
|
| When people feel they don't have a way within the system
| to get the things they need they'll look for ways to get
| them outside of the system. Our government used at least
| put in the effort to give the appearance that working
| within the system could be successful, but these days
| they barely bother to do that.
|
| Personally I still like to hold onto hope that voting can
| make a difference, especially at the local level, but
| it's a hard sell these days and getting harder all the
| time.
| kortilla wrote:
| You're talking about national elections. California has
| demonstrated time and time again that it's able to
| regulate businesses and impose environmental regulations
| beyond the federal government
| autoexec wrote:
| > stop using smartphones and claim hardship -- not sure how
| this would pan out.
|
| This is basically what I do now. When someone tells me to
| install their app or give them my cell phone number I tell
| them that I don't have a cell phone. Sometimes I do it
| while holding a cell phone in my hand.
|
| I've told employers that if they make using an app a
| requirement they'll need to buy me a cell phone.
|
| If people really push on why I won't use an app I'll tell
| them all about how my buying a phone doesn't make me the
| owner of one since multiple people at multiple companies
| have privileged access to the device I paid for far beyond
| my own level of access which enables them to
| access/add/remove/modify files and settings at any time and
| for any reason without my permission or even without making
| me aware that they've done it. Why would I use a system
| controlled by an unknown number of others who are only
| interested in enriching themselves to keep highly personal
| information like my medical history or banking information?
| Cell phones are inherently insecure and adversarial devices
| designed to collect and leak our private information while
| stealing our attention.
| creer wrote:
| - Call the office and ask them to read the message that
| they couldn't be bothered to put in regular email.
|
| - Switch to paper mail notices
|
| (Here, health insurance "improving" their web site - again
| - to a useless two-factor auth that loops indefinitely.)
| meristohm wrote:
| I tend to push back against this nonsense pretty firmly, and
| would go so far as to request paper documents be sent, as "I
| don't have a device up to the task" (which sometimes is true,
| as I use old hardware until I luck into a handmedown or the
| thing breaks). I get that paper and postage and time are
| costs. So is user time and stress level.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| It will be an uphill struggle for you to claim
| obsolescence.
|
| The general public are currently being trained with
| administrative assistant/clerical skills in order to do
| this labor for companies unable to support a workforce.
|
| Your card transactions are now your responsibility, not a
| cashier's. Your menu ordering is in your hands from the
| cloud, not a waitress you can harass. Your vehicle's vital
| functions, safety mechanisms, and accessories are all on
| you, in motion or at rest. All your paperwork is cloud-
| assisted but you're the secretary and they're going
| paperless so you'd better have a nice printer, too.
|
| Your mobile apps are living rent-free in your home/pocket
| and you've got limited authority over their resource usage,
| especially if a coin miner or botnet is part of your
| package deal.
|
| Currently I'm struggling with my ISP because apparently the
| providers in USA are segregating/unbundling Mobile Wireless
| service and moving toward stricter metering/throttling of
| data and bandwidth, so it would seem that this Mandatory
| Smartphone also demands an Unlimited 5G plan to match.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| when the functioning of the app means that people with
| disabilities, including cognitive disabilities, will be
| denied medical access, and the retaliation is probably a
| lawsuit appropriate to your jurisdiction, if your
| jurisdiction does not support accessibility legislation then
| you're probably out of luck.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| At the doctor's office I'll just ask for paper if there is no
| real website. Apps freaking suck. I probably won't be able to
| do this forever though. Example of enshitification #456249
| reaperman wrote:
| I often can no longer ask for a menu at restaurants that
| expect me to scan a QR code. Well...I can ask, but they don't
| have any to provide.
| null0ranje wrote:
| I just leave restaurants that have gone to the online-only
| menu. It's usually an indicator that there are other
| terrible cuts in service and quality going on as well.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I leave because I go to a restaurant to enjoy a meal with
| my family and friends and to connect. Forcing everyone to
| stare at their phones for the first five minutes is a bad
| start.
| dwedge wrote:
| It makes it easier for them to regularly increase pricing
| without printing new menus. I wonder if any restaurants
| are doing A/B testing with pricing
| mopenstein wrote:
| I'm not generally evil, so I never would have thought of
| doing this. Therefore it must be the correct answer.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I've thought of this - if there's no paper menu
| available, to avoid tracking, I always just search for
| the restaurant and navigate to the menu from their
| webpage rather than using a QR code.
| gamedever wrote:
| > I just leave restaurants that have gone to the online-
| only menu
|
| I would if I'm by myself but if I'm out with friends I'm
| not comfortable making everyone leave.
|
| > It's usually an indicator that there are other terrible
| cuts in service and quality going on as well.
|
| I've seen no such correlation.
|
| Most I see restaurants switching to card only, pay in
| app. I can seem some benefits from them.
|
| * they don't need cash to make change * they have no
| money to be robbed * employees can't pocket any money
|
| Most of my friends like going cashless so they see it as
| a benefit too.
| 42772827 wrote:
| I ask the waiter what's good, and usually end up going back
| forth a few times. It's not as efficient, but it keeps me
| from reaching for my phone, which is covered in germs.
| ponector wrote:
| And in case of paper menu? It is also covered in germs.
| Do you read it or refuse and ask a waiter?
| 42772827 wrote:
| I'm banking on the assumption that a paper menu has fewer
| germs than my cell phone. Life has risks.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| I've seen this trend regressing where I live, most
| restaurants I go to have done away with the QR codes
| (unless it's a brewery/distillery kind of establishment).
| janc_ wrote:
| "Online menus" are fine; they allow quick updates without
| requiring the restaurant to re-print menus, and allow for
| just one copy/version of the menu to be used everywhere.
|
| But then they should also display them publicly
| outside/inside, and/or have a bunch of tablets ready for
| visitors to use.
| athenot wrote:
| Tell them you can't use your phone for whatever reason, and
| then ask them to just tell you what they have. I think
| enough people must have done this already because I've seen
| paper menus return in many places.
|
| (This fall under the general pattern of "make it their
| pain")
| steelframe wrote:
| There's a restaurant my parents take me to when I come to
| visit that requires you to scan a QR code to get to a
| website and then order and pay for your food on your
| phone. You are prompted to provide a tip up front before
| anybody has even done anything. Then when the food's
| ready your phone alerts you, and you have to get up and
| grab the food from a shelf outside the kitchen. So if you
| do tip, you end up tipping... the management, I suppose.
|
| It's just about the most cynical dining experience I've
| ever had the misfortune of enduring.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| I've stopped submitting all electronic forms for medical
| purposes. I simply don't want to chatbot my health concerns to
| anyone. So I don't.
|
| I also stopped signing anything in the waiting room.
| otterley wrote:
| What are you going to do when they refuse to provide care
| because you won't fill out or sign forms?
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| they took an oath not to refuse.
| otterley wrote:
| Doctors take an oath to do no harm. With few exceptions,
| they are not required to treat patients.
|
| If you were correct, you could get cosmetic surgery for
| free and with no prerequisites, assuming it wouldn't harm
| you.
| cess11 wrote:
| Why shouldn't they?
| otterley wrote:
| That would be called "slavery."
| cess11 wrote:
| You equate doing things for other people without money
| transactions, with slavery?
| otterley wrote:
| If it's mandated by law, yes.
|
| What would _you_ call it if you were required to work--
| paid or otherwise--under threat of criminal punishment?
| undersuit wrote:
| Make it so I can pay without using an app and a new login
| to keep track of and you'll get paid.
| otterley wrote:
| That's not a condition you are entitled to create or
| enforce. If you want that to be enshrined in law, speak
| with your local representatives.
| undersuit wrote:
| Then I can't pay you for the services you rendered.
| genewitch wrote:
| > this note is legal tender for all debts, public and
| private.
|
| I've heard the arguments, so if you're thinking you're
| going to win an argument with me about whether this means
| anything or not, you're not; but supplemental information
| about why what's printed on our money doesn't mean it's
| legally money to pay a debt to a doctor, go for it.
| otterley wrote:
| I don't think you understand how the system works. Or
| perhaps you do, but fantasize that reality were
| different.
|
| First, in a non-urgent situation, you're going to be
| asked about payment prior to service, and they may refuse
| to treat you if you can't pay.
|
| Second, in an emergency situation where you're unable to
| provide affirmative assent, you'll be liable for costs
| under the doctrine of quantum meruit (quasi-contract). If
| you don't pay, the provider can sue you, in which case,
| the court may force you to pay on their terms.
| undersuit wrote:
| I do understand the situation, thank you for the light
| insult, but I do go to the doctor in the US and in the
| both your first and second examples I've had my own
| different experience than you.
| cess11 wrote:
| Is the threat of criminal punishment the only incentive
| that works on you? You never do things because it would
| make someone happy or you a better person?
| bluedino wrote:
| My hospital system has a surprisingly decent web app. I can log
| in and see my appointments, pre-register for office visits,
| view lab results, medications, request appointments, do virtual
| visits...
|
| The amazing stupid part is when I have to sign in at the actual
| doctor's office.
|
| They have an iPad which does some sort of remote/citrix setup,
| resulting in a frustrating experience that is full of lag where
| you interface with what might be their actual EMR system.
| zo1 wrote:
| Oh I think the only reason they did that is because that was
| the "hip" and "schnazzy" UX flow that everyone signed off and
| loved because "oh this will be amazing for users".
|
| So apps, and even websites, have just become ways to market and
| push to users. It's not about functionality or enabling the
| user.
|
| Another, maybe smallish, manifestation of this that I've seen
| is that devs, UX, and everyone involved is so downright hostile
| to direct "links". Devs because it forces them to think about
| what stupid react/angular router they want to use, devops has
| to do URL-rewrites, PMs are worried about the "additional
| scope", and UX folks' brains absolutely explode that there is
| no "flow" to the entity (it just pops up, omg). Instead you, as
| the user, are forced to click through the search UI or to type
| the right thing, to trigger the flow or whatever, before you
| get to that entity you want. You can't just create it as a
| link, and thereby enabling users to have "emergent" behavior of
| sharing links or emailing them, etc.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The perpetual spinner thing happened at my last job too, and I
| developed the opinion that putting a spinner into your site at
| all is a sign of incompetence. For any normal CRUD app, it
| should take milliseconds to do whatever task. Even with network
| delays, 150 milliseconds is a reasonable upper bound for end-
| to-end processing. If you have an animation at all, then your
| thing is either ridiculously slow or broken. Either way the
| animation is a crappy attempt to paper over a bad job.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds to do
| whatever task. Even with network delays, 150 milliseconds is
| a reasonable upper bound for end-to-end processing
|
| This is only really true with stable, high speed internet
| connections. We still cannot take for granted that everyone
| has that, especially not in rural areas and double especially
| not on mobile devices
| maximilianthe1 wrote:
| Also, inside buildings in very urban areas
| rapind wrote:
| Also in my house in the first world because our telcos
| are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Hello fellow german
| nayuki wrote:
| > my house in the first world because our telcos are an
| order of magnitude worse than third world telcos
|
| Hello fellow Canadian
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Where I used to live, in NY (not NYC, but close to _a_
| major city), I had to go out onto my front porch to use
| my cell phone. It wasn't a great signal out there, but it
| was better than the _no_ signal inside my apartment.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| At least on my mobile, I get ~100 ms ping to most things.
| Admittedly I don't use it very often so it's hard to have a
| real world feel for how frequent things like dropouts are,
| but that's mostly because data costs a lot. That kind of
| also ties into developers doing a bad job though (e.g.
| sending me 10 MB of who knows what when the task (like
| paying for parking) fundamentally should be doable with a
| few kB, most of which are the TLS handshake). If they
| didn't do that, their thing would be instant with 3g
| speeds. Most CRUD generally just doesn't need a lot of data
| to actually accomplish the desired task.
|
| Satellite Internet will be slow, but should still be well
| under a second? I'd still expect that even extreme cases,
| you wouldn't expect a spinner to complete a single
| revolution. So it still seems unnecessary.
|
| Anyway, I'm generally on a reliable 300 Mbit/s connection
| where my pings are more like 20-70 ms, so I suppose you
| could alter my statement to "if I _see_ a spinner, I
| interpret it as incompetence ".
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| So many places in apps just wait for no reason. Let's take
| a hypothetical situation:
|
| Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two
| customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You
| drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the
| app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered
| before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next
| customer until the app moves along. Why can't it just take
| the photo, take the text description, and hold that until
| service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload
| the other stuff when you can.
|
| I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every
| user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip
| to the server before the app moves to the next step.
| There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep
| its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive
| teensy data updates.
|
| But all "the best" software development employees (that
| they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies
| can't seem to work that out.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's bizarre. The whole point of having an app instead
| of a website is to have more processing occur locally,
| right?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > The whole point of having an app instead of a website
| is to have more processing occur locally, right?
|
| One would think this is the case. I agree it should be.
|
| > That's bizarre.
|
| Unfortunately, it's not. It's normal operation.
| ponector wrote:
| Why is it so?
|
| The whole point of app is to gather your info from the
| phone and to send you tons of notifications.
|
| And don't forget mandatory updates, when you open an app
| and cannot use it without updating to the latest crappy
| version.
| roughly wrote:
| The whole point of having an app is to collect data, show
| ads, and "engage the customer with the brand." Any
| additional capabilities beyond that are incidental.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Don't forget bait and switching with updates so you can
| do all that later, possibly after you sell your quality
| app to someone else and cash out.
| thwarted wrote:
| The delivery driver is not the customer, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if some MBA bonehead thought showing ads to
| workers was a win. "They have to use the app to schedule
| and do the work, so it's a captive audience!"
| roughly wrote:
| Hell, I got shown an ad after I paid for a ride on Lyft
| the other day. Even if you're the customer, you're still
| the product. If there's not already ads in the drivers'
| views, I'm shocked it's taken them this long.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Why do you think only MBAs have the idea to insert ads?
| It's not exactly specialized thinking. Plenty of startup
| founders with technical chops decide to insert ads
| because they desperately need the revenue.
| graemep wrote:
| Because "MBA" has become a generic derogatory term for
| greedy and short termist management, because its easy to
| blame a group of people than face the fact that the
| problem is a wider one of incentives and ethics that
| pervades the whole of western society.
| edwinjm wrote:
| And send push notifications
| TylerE wrote:
| History has shown over and over again that you cannot
| trust the client.
| dartos wrote:
| No, the whole point of apps is data collection,
| background tasks (when the device is closed) and push
| notifications.
| simonmales wrote:
| Many apps are shortcuts. They live rent free on people's
| home screens/launchers.
|
| Plenty could exist as a web app.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Why can't it just take the photo, take the text
| description, and hold that until service is better? Just
| give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when
| you can.
|
| The obvious answer is because asynchronous workflows are
| brittle, and require intervention from the end user to
| correct if they break
|
| Then most end users aren't going to care to fix it when
| it breaks, or be able to fix it when it breaks for a
| variety of reasons
| TylerE wrote:
| Relevantly, in this specified case, the picture of their
| delivered food is shown to the customer immediately. This
| is more than a nice to have (imagine a large apartment
| building, where your food could be dropped in any number
| of locations).
| genewitch wrote:
| it's shown when the driver gets a network connection
| again, was the way I read that.
|
| Because "[driver] doesn't know where to go till it
| confirms the upload"
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| And what should one do if the network is down? Stand
| there indefinitely hoping it comes back up?
|
| Recall the driver can't continue without an address.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Better they can't continue than they do the last order
| wrong, amirite?
|
| There's some strong "Seeing Like a State" vibes here. I'm
| pretty sure these apps are intentionally designed as
| tools to force the users (here, drivers) into a specific
| flow, a flow that minimizes complexity _for the vendor_ ,
| reality be damned.
|
| Another way to look at it: the job of the driver side of
| a delivery (or taxi) app isn't to be useful to the
| driver; the job is to be a remote control with which the
| business can control the driver like they were an
| automaton.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| So the automaton can't deliver to the next customer
| because the app can't phone home.
|
| I don't see how this benefits anyone.
| lmm wrote:
| For the control system, no delivery is better than a
| delivery that they can't track.
| avidiax wrote:
| Lots of delivery jobs are effectively paid by the piece
| or paid by the route. The driver is not paid hourly.
|
| This is one reason that package delivery drivers often
| will say that they've attempted delivery when they at
| best drove past the delivery point. Marking the delivery
| as attempted gets them off the hook for that delivery,
| and they can finish their shift that much faster.
|
| Having a broken app that forces the driver to 100%
| complete every delivery before moving to the next one
| thus costs the company relatively little, but saves some
| complexity, missing proof of delivery, etc.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| You can still queue the upload client side and let the
| worker move on. Don't consider the delivery complete
| until the upload happens, but allow the next leg of the
| job to start. The client workflow can require taking the
| picture and clicking submit, but it can accept queueing
| the actual upload.
|
| In any case, if the network is down, a spinner is a lie.
| It's pretending to be working on something when it's not.
| It should show an error at least.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| It's dispute resolution in a low-trust environment.
|
| When a customer shows up saying something went wrong with
| the delivery, the CSRs will need evidence and if the
| driver did their job then they can be exonerated.
|
| The logistics are a bit more complex than a restaurant
| where customers are eating at tables in the same
| building.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| If the network is down it really doesn't matter if your
| app does synchronous or asynchronous operations because
| both will fail?
|
| I'm not entirely sure what your point is at all
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Asynchronous operations can be retried until the network
| returns without blocking the UI.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Not when they require user validation like making sure a
| photo updated correctly
|
| If you drive away from the delivery before that photo is
| uploaded, then you risk not having the proof that you
| delivered the package successfully
|
| That is actually worse for the driver than having to wait
| for the upload so they can retry immediately
| joquarky wrote:
| I'm proficient in optimizing these UX flaws, and have
| been unable to land a full time job in two years, even
| after hundreds of applications.
|
| Nobody cares about quality anymore.
| wwalexander wrote:
| While doing Instacart deliveries here in Maine, I dropped
| off a leave-at-the-door order which requires uploading a
| picture of the shopping bags at the entrance. However,
| there wasn't any service in the rural area I was
| delivering to, and the app required a connection to even
| open the camera interface. So I had to drive away down
| the road until I had service, open the camera, drive back
| to the delivery point, take the picture, then drive away
| again to upload the picture and complete the order.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Same thing with paypal.
|
| They require a mobile phone number now. If I give them
| one, they'll enforce SMS as a login path.
|
| I live in an area with excellent cell service, except for
| a few miles around my house. I'm not going to try to log
| in, while buying something, then drive down the road and
| wait for the SMS.
|
| Sheer stupid.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Then it should give explicit status information like
| uploading to server (xx%)...OK waiting for
| response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes.
|
| Not as cool, but at least somewhat informative. Engineers
| have a responsibility to push back on this kind of thing,
| because marketing people frequently do not think about
| failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's
| shoes.
| kristianc wrote:
| > marketing people frequently do not think about failure
| modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes
|
| It's literally the job of marketing people to put
| themselves in the customer's shoes. If engineering isn't
| looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is
| too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage
| deeply with product usability, things fall through the
| cracks.
|
| But that's a company culture issue, not a marketing
| deficiency.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It should be, but it isn't in my experience. Marketing
| people care about onboarding and engagement numbers, and
| are a major driver of dark patterns - everything from
| popups to moving the 'close dialog' icon to unintuitive
| places like the bottom left of unasked-for video embeds.
| brookst wrote:
| Massive over-generalization.
|
| I'm sorry you only worked with terrible, unethical,
| incompetent marketing people. There are good ones, just
| like there are bad programmers who do all sorts of
| terrible and dumb things without creating universal
| truths about programmers.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't think so; I said marketing people frequently do
| bad stuff, which is not the same as saying they're all
| bad. I stand by 'frequently', because just look at how
| much terrible adware, clickbait, spam etc there is on the
| web. It's a Gresham's law-type situation.
|
| _Of course_ marketing people do a valuable job in terms
| of figuring out how to sell things and minimize the gap
| between producers and customers. But - just like
| engineers - there are lots of cynical and amoral people
| who work in that industry who make things worse for
| everyone else. By contrast, I can 't think of any society
| that is suffering because they don't have enough
| advertising.
| kristianc wrote:
| Effective marketing (not just comms, but real positioning
| and messaging) is why people can find the right products
| and services, why small businesses can compete, and why
| entire industries grow. It's unequivocally a good.
|
| If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is
| absent--because that's when bad actors fill the void with
| misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is
| absent--because that's when bad actors fill the void with
| misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics._
|
| Except, marketing too is a market for lemons. Scammy
| marketing _outcompetes good marketing_. Simple as that.
| kristianc wrote:
| Scammy marketing can sometimes be effective in the short
| term, but the problem with it it's inherently self-
| limiting.
|
| Deceptive brands burn their audiences, lose customer
| trust, and either get regulated out of existence or
| collapse under their own churn rates. Meanwhile,
| companies that invest in clear, honest positioning,
| strong customer relationships, and long-term brand value
| consistently outperform in the long run. Apple,
| Patagonia, and Tesla aren't winning because they spam
| pop-ups.
|
| If marketing were purely a race to the bottom, all
| successful brands would look like clickbait farms. They
| don't.
| mihaaly wrote:
| It sucks to live with a dial in nowadays.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| And when your users are in the same continent as your
| backend.
| mark-r wrote:
| Some things in the real world simply take longer than
| milliseconds; this is not a failing. I'm working with a
| system that takes over 10 seconds to get a list of wifi
| access points, and you bet we throw up a spinner while that's
| happening.
|
| Now of course if the spinner is merely cosmetic and doesn't
| represent any actual work going on, that can be a problem
| especially if the process you're waiting for dies.
| wayvey wrote:
| Monitor the process if it fails hide spinner, show the user
| an error and provide a Retry button to restart the process
| :)
| andai wrote:
| >150ms
|
| Server in Australia?
| worik wrote:
| > For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds
|
| For _most_ CRUD apps
|
| Sometimes wheels within wheels can slow down even modern
| computers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Nah. We have a spinner, but I also have a timeout handler.
|
| The reason is that the app's backend (and many of the servers
| on which it depends) can be hosted on the lowest-tier-
| dogshit-shared-hosting plan. I would love to have a better
| backend server, but we are a nonprofit, and can't afford
| better. This app would be a _lot_ faster, with a more robust
| backend.
|
| But error handling/reporting is a true art, and should
| _never_ be an afterthought. In my experience, I need to start
| thinking about error management, as soon as I start planning.
|
| In my experience, the best error handling is to not have
| errors, and, quite often, good UX is the answer to that. If
| the user doesn't do something that might cause agita, then
| they don't get an error.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > I developed the opinion that putting a spinner into your
| site at all is a sign of incompetence
|
| This so much. If your site is so slow that it can load what
| is usually a video file (non-SVG animated graphics) before it
| can load the _text_ on the page, then you have failed at
| making a website
|
| Looking at Discourse(r) here, and iirc Google AMP did
| something similar except it was a blank page for 8 seconds
| (until it hit a timeout) if you blocked their tracking
| noduerme wrote:
| I think it's an art, not a science. The alternative to a
| spinner is to show some sort of error to the user; a
| connection error or something specific that went wrong that
| they can report. Sometimes this is useful.
|
| I frequently put spinners just in the individual components
| that need loading. I tend to use them more for large data
| loads that will hang around awhile, so I have to do fewer
| round trip transactions. Loading a list of a customer's last
| 1000 transactions? I'm going to bring on all that data at
| once, not keep calling the server as you try to scroll
| through it.
|
| I want user actions to have an INSTANT consequence, not 150ms
| latency. So even if not a spinner, that button needs to gray
| out and something should affirm that they tapped it.
|
| Also, spinners are very useful for me in tracking down bugs.
| When a few customers report stuck spinners in the same day, I
| can almost immediately determine if some particular action is
| failing or whether it's a server issue. Even better, they can
| send screenshots helping me isolate the problem. If no stuck
| spinner and the app just freezes, they reload it and forget
| what exactly they did to trigger an error. And endpoints do
| go down, nothing has 100% uptime. I want to FEEL how long a
| call is taking on a heavy operation on a busy day.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Not sure if it counts as CRUD but, when downloading files, it
| can take a while to prepare the files. If that while is long
| enough the user may thing something isn't happening, and a
| "I'm working on it" signal is not unreasonable.
| strken wrote:
| As an Australian whose parents have 300kbps internet, please
| continue to add spinners to your apps. The round trip time to
| US west is 270ms for a good connection here. That 270ms
| doesn't include any processing (maybe 60ms or so) and the
| wifi tax (another 20ms). Then your round trip time gets
| doubled by HTTPS, which goes up to tripled if you're sending
| more than 14 KB of data.
|
| This means it takes a full second to load most websites or
| apps, and this is further compounded by slow server code,
| daisy-chained sequential calls, living further away from the
| undersea cables, and bad infrastructure.
| olowe wrote:
| Imagine the entire UI of an email client becoming
| inoperable, diplaying "loading..." and a spinner every time
| you send mail. We don't do it now nor did we do that when
| 300kbps connections were more common. Spinners are a crutch
| for undercooked, bad software.
| wayvey wrote:
| Keep in mind that spinners can also be used (as well as
| other indicators) that something is being processed
| client side, e.g. rendering a video and if the total time
| can't be estimated a spinner is reasonable.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Spinners don't have to replace the entire UI or make it
| inoperable. Classic email clients did indeed have a
| losding indicator when doing things like a "send and
| receive" operation.
| strken wrote:
| From what I remember of Thunderbird and Outlook, they
| both showed a visual loading indicator somewhere in the
| UI.
|
| Am I missing a detail of terminology here? By "loading
| spinner" I meant it in opposition to "do absolutely
| nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the
| page with the network tab open." I didn't mean to suggest
| any particular indicator of a pending network request,
| only that there should be an indicator.
| toast0 wrote:
| You didn't use email software with a blocking send and
| receive button? Usually with a somewhat informative
| progress bar, but still.
| bhaak wrote:
| Spinners are a lie. Nowadays, you hardly encounter a
| spinner that actually shows the progress of the action you
| started.
|
| For this reason, they are mostly useless. Even worse than
| useless if errors aren't even propagated to the user.
| nicoburns wrote:
| It's pretty useful to indicate "network requests are in
| progress". I agree they lose their value if you don't
| handle errors.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Processing should be more like 6 ms though (assuming basic
| CRUD), not 60. The TLS/TCP latency can be solved with a TLS
| terminating proxy in the region. After that, unless you
| want spinners on every data fetch (a miserable experience),
| you probably want a read replica if you're actually trying
| to serve the region. If you're a big company, you probably
| want a full read/write setup in the area (which is
| something for big companies to figure out anyway with newer
| data protection laws).
|
| Slow server calls and daisy chained sequential operations
| are both people doing a bad job. My last job had backend
| calls that took over 1s to do basic CRUD on a low traffic
| service (bouncing around a dozen micro services on the
| backend). That should never happen.
| silon42 wrote:
| 150 ms is really bad... in mid 90s, 50 was considered the
| upper limit before some "busy" indicator was to be shown...
| these days, I'd consider 20ms to the limit of "good".
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| I used to work with a web developer in state govt who
| purposely coded a couple seconds delay before data was
| displayed so that the spinner would always show. He was
| actually one of the best developers on the team ironically.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| It's kind of annoying the article burns up all the space
| talking about various discounts and benefits you get from Apps.
| Aka far less of a problem as they're optional quid pro quo and
| doesn't talk about the creeping enshittification of those
| functionalities. Im fine with a council making an option to do
| important things through an app. But I'm not fine with it being
| compulsory and I'm even less fine with it being some non
| functioning trash made in a software sweatshop that doesn't
| provide a contact number when it goes wrong and noones ever on
| the hook if it's dysfunctional. It rarely if ever actually
| improves functionality or makes important things self service.
| It more often reduces what I can actually do but with a
| flashier interface for "computer says no".
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Companies need to be held accountable for their negligent
| behaviour
| Henchman21 wrote:
| How? What do you propose?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Holding C-level executives criminally liable for the
| actions of the company would be a start.
| fsckboy wrote:
| eye-for-an-eye, any time a company's app is showing a
| customer a spinner, the c-suite's phones should also be
| showing spinners
| joquarky wrote:
| Substantial dilution of shares rather than monetary
| penalties.
| kraussvonespy wrote:
| Feels like this well written piece by Atol Gawande is relevant
| if you haven't seen it. I showed it a couple of years ago to my
| very competent and conscientious doc and she got PISSED. She
| talked about how she spent literally half of her doctoring time
| working through poorly designed menus in {epic, cerner} to
| carefully document everything she could about the patient, only
| to discover that most doctors don't pay attention to any of
| that info.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
| amarant wrote:
| I was really expecting your personal usage of the app to
| involve invoking developer privileges, and inserting your text
| through the much more user friendly UX of DBeaver..
|
| I can't decide if I'm disappointed or relieved
| arp242 wrote:
| The annoying part is that website can just be used as an app.
| For a booking app we don't need native performance; just a
| webpage-inside-an-app is fine. In most cases, it should be
| fairly straight-forward and cheap to make this work.
|
| What happens is they hire some contracting firm and they go
| "whole thing will have to be redone" so they get more work, and
| that's how you end up with a "solution" like this. Basically
| the software equivalent of:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq6WME576ZE
| koolba wrote:
| What's even more asinine is the website can be updated
| without publishing to an app store. You always have the
| latest version and all these apps are just a thin veneer on
| some CRUD endpoints anyway.
| yurishimo wrote:
| This is the entire philosophy behind all of the apps run by
| DHH/Basecamp. The web should be the default and native apps
| should only be used for software that just isn't possible
| through the web (yet).
| brookst wrote:
| The problem is that users much prefer native apps. The
| idiomatic UI, the use of OS specific capabilities (even
| if the same result _could_ be done without), the
| appearance of better performance because the app launches
| before a network connection is made.
|
| We can opine all we want about how things should work,
| but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user
| satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want
| other than development cost/non-customer concerns.
|
| It's very hard to tell users they should feel differently
| than they do, no matter the technical or philosophical
| high ground.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| people here is web biased, people forgot that mobile
| world exist and I can tell you navigating web in mobile
| vs native mobile app is like heavenly different
|
| if people commenting from web dekstop perspective I can
| see that point, but from mobile?? where hardware
| processing power and network is sometimes unreliable???
|
| huft
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > The problem is that users much prefer native apps.
|
| I imagine there is some data on this, but it goes against
| my observations of me and my circle.
|
| I have maybe 4 apps that I use heavily and another 10
| that I use when I have to. I actively avoid installing
| another app when the web version is sufficient. I don't
| need the weekly updates to clog up my storage. I don't
| need notifications going off at all hours. And I don't
| need creepy unfathomable permissions requests.
|
| Is there some 500ms delay if I click a button on the web
| version? Maybe. Honestly, I'm not so busy to have
| noticed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it goes against my observations of me and my circle_
|
| Your friends are probably tech savvy. That means your
| browser is well configured (or configured at all),
| running an ad blocker and on a modern machine. You
| probably value the privacy attributes of using a browser,
| versus most of the population than will trade privacy for
| convenience.
| brookst wrote:
| I've worked on a few native apps for large companies
| where there was already a decent web app but we were
| losing to competitors' native apps.
|
| User feedback was loud and clear: many users see web apps
| as cost savings efforts that are inferior products and
| only exist so a lazy / cheap company doesn't have to
| invest in native.
|
| Remember that permissions and notifications can also be a
| problem in web apps; that's one thing the "make web apps
| as good as native" crowd has gotten us.
| arp242 wrote:
| For a GP booking app that most people only use once in a
| blue moon it really doesn't matter much. And most users
| will absolutely prefer a well-designed webapp vs. a
| crummy semi-working native app, as the previous person
| described. In short, this is just boring thoughtless
| repetition of a cliche with no consideration for context.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| > We can opine all we want about how things should work,
| but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user
| satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want
| other than development cost/non-customer concerns.
|
| No way / at most, HIGHLY context dependant.
| Facebook/Insta/social media slug of the year? Yes,
| probably app is desired.
|
| My bank? Maybe, at a strech, if it's good.
|
| My local doctor? The real estate agent im trying to rent
| a house from? Amazon/AliExpress/Shopee? A movie theatre?
| My council street parking system? My university? Fuck no
| i dont want your shitty apps on my device.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| My bank has been fine as an app. My main nitpick is that
| it makes it very hard to fully detach from the app store
| since none of the banks publish elsewhere (I can easily
| ditch social media on the go or use a website, in
| comparison).
|
| I went to college early enough in the smartphone era that
| they didn't have an app as a freshman but did by senior
| year... I don't miss it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| part of that is old perceptions that have long went away.
| And the other part is the huge push against PWAs,
| especially from Apple. Web-based app development has come
| so far but Apple is showing off its control freak
| tendencies as usual to make it not seem so.
|
| Hearing the story above about infinite loading to hide
| crashes really boils my blood and shows that it's simply
| a matter of care these days (and not hardware/bad
| middleware) that determines how smooth something feels.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Ideally, Web is either for thin clients or text/visual
| focused content with minimal interaction (i.e. anything
| more than basic forms). Apps are for when a user needs
| more control (i.e. important or sensitive data that
| persists on their hard drive or account) or access to
| your hardware for proper function (aka, games or other
| resource-specific/intensive tasks).
|
| In reality, you want to push everything to an app that
| you can or one day want to monetize. Web is to be avoided
| except to advertise the app. I hate it with a passion.
| Easily my least favorite shift over the 2010's. We
| advanced past flash to make proper use of HTML5, and can
| now start blur the lines with aspects like Webassembly
| and PWAs, but corporate is angry that the WWW never
| properly optimized itself to monetize easily.
| m463 wrote:
| I had kaiser permanente and had google/doubleclick tracking
| through the entire website, including investigating conditions,
| doctor communication, and test results.
|
| I complained, they played dumb, but eventually they came up
| with "the website is a convenience". I stopped using it.
|
| The app was much worse.
|
| A couple years later, other people must have complained
|
| https://www.classaction.org/news/kaiser-permanente-shares-we...
|
| https://www.classaction.org/news/data-breach-lawsuit-says-ka...
|
| I believe the same thing happens with apps and websites
| provided by other health care providers, but nobody
| investigates and nobody cares.
| donatj wrote:
| Xfinity sent me a new cable modem this week.
|
| Came with zero instructions for set up, just a QR code. Scanned
| the QR code and it took me to install an app. I begrudgingly
| installed it.
|
| The app had me hit next a few times before scanning a different
| QR code on the bottom of the modem. That was the entire process.
|
| I guess you just have to pay for installation if you don't have a
| smart phone? It offered for $150+ when I agreed to the new modem.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there will be more of this.. This has to be regulated IMHO
| ryandrake wrote:
| Do your best to make these decisions cost them, even if it's
| only a few pennies. Call their customer support up and tie up
| one of their representatives as long as possible. Who knows, if
| enough people do that, and they log the reason, then maybe,
| _just maybe_ these SuperUltraMegaCorps have a chance of
| changing their mind.
| jmholla wrote:
| You also have to pay them monthly to not use their equipment.
| It definitely isn't a racket.
| jampekka wrote:
| > The consumer group is among those to have highlighted Lidl's
| loyalty scheme, Lidl Plus, as one that is only accessible via an
| app, with an email address also required.
|
| At least here in Finland Lidl Plus is one of the few which can be
| used by just entering a phone number.
|
| That said, all "loyalty programs" should be outright banned. They
| stifle competition, make pricing less transparent and
| discriminate against the less well off.
| robocat wrote:
| > loyalty programs" discriminate against the less well off.
|
| The opposite: supermarket loyalty cards are often designed so
| that the well off pay more: i.e. it is the well off that are
| being discriminated against. The barriers are designed to allow
| poorer people to pay less. The topic is called price
| discrimination.
|
| All the poorer people I know use loyalty cards because they
| judge them to be valuable (despite the extra hassle).
|
| The less well off often get lower prices (plus valuable
| rewards) because of the loyalty programs in New Zealand.
|
| I often use my friend's loyalty accounts: so I get the item
| discounts but they collect the loyalty rewards/cash. Also I
| like to screw the data surveillance up - I don't get tracked so
| much and my friend's account is spammed with higher cost items.
|
| Coupons are designed for the same purpose. Allowing poorer
| people to choose to trade their time/hassle for savings
| (according to their values).
| jampekka wrote:
| In loyalty programs the benefit percentage often increases as
| a function of money spent, disproportionally benefiting the
| more well off who spend more. I've yet to encounter a loyalty
| program that would do the inverse (probably there are some
| that cap the benefits, which could be interpreted to be to
| this direction). Neither have I seen a loyalty program that
| would only accept poor people.
|
| Price discrimination is anything where the same product is
| sold at different price for different buyers. All loyalty
| programs are price discrimination.
| robocat wrote:
| > disproportionally benefiting
|
| Only if you think a $50000 discount on a Lamborghini is
| disproportionate compared with a $500 saving on a Kia.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I think this article is city-centric. I am in a rural area _in
| the US_ and I have only had a _smart_ phone for 2 years and have
| never installed any apps beyond Mumla that I use for my own self
| hosted uMurmur server. I have never browsed the web from the
| phone. My life today is just as it was in the 1970 's in that
| regard. All the businesses here have printed coupons. There are
| local printed newspapers. I have zero dependency on any _"
| smart"_ features of phones unless one considers texting to be a
| smart feature given that was not a thing in the 70's. I do not
| expect any of that to change. The people here like keeping things
| simple. With exception of Amazon _to get things small shops here
| do not carry_ I could even kill my internet connection and life
| would go on just fine. I would probably even get healthier. All
| the local businesses know me by name so I guess that makes up for
| a lack of cookie tracking.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I think this article is city-centric.
|
| It's an article about the situation in the UK. If your "rural
| area" is in the US, it is not surprising that it's a bit
| different than anything in the article.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| That makes sense. I think the US tries to mimic big city
| behavior in the EU so it's probably just a matter of time for
| big cities in the US to have the same problems. Maybe that
| means I have a few more decades for any of that to find it's
| way to me. Curious how prevalent this behavior is in the
| rural parts of the UK.
| crusty wrote:
| I realize this might not be a kosher comment for HN, and i
| aphid for that. But you seem to have imagined some inherent
| divide between the mechanics of urban and rural (and
| apparently foreign and domestic) lives or at least
| governance. With this imagined division, you are free to
| ascribe whatever outcome that affects cities to whatever
| cause, since you live in a different state of existence.
|
| I'm not saying that as an insult, but rather because I
| don't think there's an inherent difference, I just think
| rural communities are harder for companies to monetize, for
| multiple reasons - think density and average income.
|
| But like Amazon, they will get there, and unlike cities,
| rural communities have less ability to resist and less
| ability to support a diversity of options. Think about the
| takeover of Walmart and Dollar General/Tree.
|
| I don't think there's anything special inherent to your
| rural community that protects you from all this "progress".
| You're just living through the time before it catches up to
| your community. And i bet if you think about the effects of
| the arrival of changes like Walmart's rural expansion, you
| might find that they upset rural life as well, reducing
| wages, extracting money from the local economy instead of
| allowing it to continue to circulate locally, and then
| investing driving distances, and the associated costs in
| fuel and time among others.
|
| My guess is that you will go from blaming cities for their
| problems to blaming cities for your communities problems
| once they reach you.
|
| But maybe if you reevaluate your perspective, you could
| help your community prepare to resist those changes while
| you still have time.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| All of this could come to pass. Should that be the case I
| can always move to a smaller community or to a very
| remote location. I've always wanted to build an
| underground home or build a cave home to reduce my carbon
| emissions for really real. That might be the time.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| In the US large companies in rural areas also often use apps in
| the same way as they do in the city (at least they did the last
| time I visited) and at least all the people I know in rural
| areas have had smartphones for a long time and use apps a lot
| (though maybe the fact that the area I know well is near a
| major university has made it a bit techier). The smaller local
| stores don't use apps so even in Chicago most places I actually
| went to didn't. I just went through my phone and the only app
| like that I have is for Taco Bell
| LinuxBender wrote:
| People here do have smart phones and I'm sure some have apps
| installed. What I am saying is none of that is _required_
| today. Nobody here is penalized for not installing some app.
| kxrm wrote:
| Unless it's McDonalds. Then you pay more for not having the
| app.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I would have to pay more regardless. The closest
| McDonalds is a 2 hour drive each way and going up steep
| mountains on the way back. The burgers at the local
| restaurant are much better and healthier _... well ... as
| healthy as a burger gets._
| qingcharles wrote:
| Practically every store now significantly subsidizes
| their products through their apps. Especially all the
| fast food chains. But even my local rural gas station
| does. Need that juicy, juicy data and those
| notifications.
| realo wrote:
| Don't worry... The 21st century should reach you too,
| eventually.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| No worries. This troglodyte will bury his head in the sand.
| There will be a documentary about us and even the Amish will
| be shaking their heads. People in the 25th century will look
| back in envy after the machines take over and they had to
| reset civilization with EMP's back to agrarian or hunter
| gatherers. All of that pales in comparison to what happens
| from the years 201 BG to 108 BG during the Butlerian Jihad.
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| I had never heard of Mumla and just looked it up -- looks like
| it needs some help. [1]
|
| Curious, why do you use it?
|
| [1] https://github.com/quite/mumla
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Amazing audio quality. Text chat. No censorious behavior. The
| server is ultra light weight in terms of memory and CPU.
| cheschire wrote:
| Well, not so much city-centric as it is population-centric.
| Cities are population centers, so there is correlation.
|
| The scale you are thinking in is comparable to a small web
| forum being sustainably moderated by the owner of the site,
| while the majority of the world exists in a place like reddit
| that has more _moderator_ users than even large web forums have
| in total. Reddit would not be sustainable if they had to pay a
| moderation staff, and similarly rural living cannot be scaled
| up to support cities without becoming city-like.
|
| So assuming you accept all that, why even read this article or
| post a reply in the discussion?
|
| I'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't see
| why you find this topic interesting? It's like replying to a
| thread about how life in Afghanistan is really difficult, and
| you're saying "I think this article is not about America
| because of all the American things I experience."
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _I 'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't
| see why you find this topic interesting?_
|
| My ulterior motive and secret agenda is to let people know
| they can escape that nonsense. Many rural areas are getting
| faster internet but are much more chill. There are pros and
| cons people can research themselves. For me most of the cons
| are pros.
|
| If I can save even one person per year from the social,
| government and store apps that have massive teams of
| marketing psychological warfare experts manipulating them
| then I have done my hero's doodie.
| andelink wrote:
| I for one very much appreciated your response. I am
| pleasantly surprised to hear life like that still exists in
| the US
| genewitch wrote:
| I have never had any of the apps people are talking about
| on my cellphone since I moved to Louisiana. I just rarely
| eat fast food anymore, once I realized that I was paying
| nearly double for my app-free lifestyle. I didn't notice
| because of inflation at first.
|
| The nearest fast food place to my house is 25 minutes
| away. Same with Walmart, Kroger, my bank, and nearly
| everything except dollar general and gas stations.
|
| No ubet, Lyft. There is the food delivery, but only "in
| town". So far I have never been able to convince anyone
| to deliver food to my house.
|
| I could use digital ID/license but I don't.
|
| "Reward cards" are just phone numbers, at least the two I
| use (Kroger and horror fright). Oh and 1 gas station
| rewards.
|
| I grew up in Los Angeles and spent 33 years there.
| crusty wrote:
| I don't think it's a natural urban/rural division. I suspect
| that that division is more an artifice of capitalism. These new
| services want to grow, so they target places with the most
| potential customers. If the pitch to the municipality is that
| they can take the cost of coin collection and meter maintenance
| out of the budget entirely, and switch the enforcement from a
| human walking around, checking meters and wiring tickets to a
| car that drives past with license plate readers and a sass
| subscription, then it will come for anywhere with meters, and
| may eventually come for everywhere, because the original pitch
| for meters required justifying the expense with projected
| revenue. And now, if the expense of a few signs and a
| subscription are low enough, and the license readers are
| already on police cars, then that evaluation changes.
|
| Of course, as with all of it, local jobs disappear from the
| local budget, and that money gets shipped off to Wall Street.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I live in very rural America. The only thing within 25 miles is
| a gas station. If I didn't have the gas station's app I would
| pay a lot more for a lot of the items I buy as they are
| discounted/on offer/free only on the app.
| joshdavham wrote:
| I'm fascinated by this phenomenon of apps proposing solutions
| that are far worse than the previous existing solutions.
|
| For example:
|
| 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| 2. Tinder is worse than IRL speed dating.
|
| 3. Duolingo is worse than language classes.
|
| 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding
| pass.
|
| 5. Etc
|
| It really makes me frustrated as someone who builds software and
| generally thinks it improves the world...
| pqtyw wrote:
| > 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money if
| I get back early).
|
| > 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding
| pass.
|
| Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just export it
| to Apple/Android wallet which is much more convenient than
| having to find a printer.
|
| Duolingo isn't really a replacement for classes (which are
| obviously a magnitude or few more expensive) but self learnings
| books, tapes and such (IMHO it's mostly inferior to those too
| but not by a such high degree).
|
| Can't disagree about Tinder/etc. though.
| lambda wrote:
| I'm kind of puzzled by your first point. In my experience,
| parking apps require you to pay in larger chunks of hours
| than paying with coins used to; many times I have to pay for
| a minimum of 2 hours of parking with the app when I could pay
| for just 10 or 15 minutes of parking with coins.
| svelle wrote:
| The parking app I use in Berlin, easy park, works in the
| sense that I pre-select a timeframe I think im going to
| park which then gives me an estimate for how much it'll
| cost and reserve that amount using my CC. When I end the
| parking before that timer ends, the actual time I've parked
| will be taken and only that amount is charged.
|
| It used to be even better in the sense that you'd only
| start and then end parking without having to pre select a
| time. But I think too many people, me included, forgot to
| end the parking when taking off and paid way more than they
| actually parked for.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Of course the apps could _easily_ detect that parking has
| ended. They could note your location when you park. When
| the phone returns to that location, and then moves at
| driving speed, parking has ended.
|
| But they don't because they make more money by profiting
| from people who forget to "clock out" when they are done
| parking.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Yes, that's what we need, parking apps tracking user's
| location 24/7.
| pohuing wrote:
| Don't android and IOS try to prevent background location
| tracking? The location permission dialogs don't even have
| that option
| svelle wrote:
| > Of course the apps could easily detect that parking has
| ended. They could note your location when you park. When
| the phone returns to that location, and then moves at
| driving speed, parking has ended.
|
| They could at least start with adding proper CarPlay and
| Android Auto support so you can just end the parking from
| the infotainment. But I think there can be at most a
| single engineer working on this app if at all. Up until a
| couple months ago it didn't even have the option for a
| persistent notification to remind you that you had an
| ongoing parking...
|
| > But they don't because they make more money by
| profiting from people who forget to "clock out" when they
| are done parking.
|
| fwiw, at least in this case, the app that profited from
| you not clocking out got shut down and bought out by the
| app that asks you to pre-set your parking time. Which I
| guess is still not great, but at least somewhat of a step
| up.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > But I think there can be at most a single engineer
| working on this app if at all.
|
| I assume they're contracted out to the lowest bidder.
|
| In my city the payment schedule on the app significantly
| lags the meters/official rates. Fine when prices go up,
| but pretty annoying to app-users when the app charges
| more than the official parking rates. Maybe if they get
| their merchant account sanctioned for too many
| chargebacks someone will take notice.
| gs17 wrote:
| >In my experience, parking apps require you to pay in
| larger chunks of hours than paying with coins used to;
|
| Here in Nashville, they sold out our public street parking
| to a private company. Now instead of coins in a meter for
| the time you want, you have to buy at least an hour for
| $1.75 (or more), pay by scanning a QR code (which is
| misprinted on the signs) unless you're in one of the spots
| where there's a working pay machine, and it now is enforced
| 24/7 instead of having holidays and weekends off (IIRC it
| was also free after 6, which was great). Also they had two
| hour limits where you can't simply move your car, you have
| to park somewhere they don't check for an indeterminate
| amount of time. How is any of this an improvement unless
| you get a cut of the money?
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Has nothing to do with technology.
| pqtyw wrote:
| I depends on the app I guess, where I am you just click to
| start/stop and (IIRC) get billed at 15 minute increments.
| gamedever wrote:
| Parking apps requires registration. I arrive, park my car
| then
|
| (1) via machine: insert my card into the machine, get
| ticket, leave
|
| (2) via app: spend 10 minutes registering an account,
| email, password, phone number, wants verification via email
| or phone number, wants me to register my credit card and
| the agree to them selling all my data.
|
| IF on the other hand, they just made it use some kind of
| common e-cash and no registration, no tracking, no account,
| I'd be 100% for it.
| kelnos wrote:
| If you pay with a card, then they can track you, so it
| doesn't really matter if you put that card into a machine
| or into an app account.
|
| For places where I don't expect to return (or only
| rarely), sure, having to do an app is annoying. But for
| places where you expect to use it often enough, it can be
| a time-saver, after the initial time cost of setup.
| kelnos wrote:
| Strange, I only have experience with two parking apps, but
| they both let you pay in 15-minute increments.
|
| I have seen meters that have smaller increments, like
| sub-10-minutes, but when the increments cost something like
| 50 cents, it's hard to really care that much.
| petepete wrote:
| On public transport I can tap in and tap out with the
| wallet on phone or any bank card. Car parks could work in
| exactly the same way, but instead there are 15 apps.
| noqc wrote:
| what if your phone runs out of battery?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I'm gonna say something stupid -- the chances of my phone
| running out of battery and me not being able to charge it
| is lower than me losing the paper ticket.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not stupid at all. I think that's the case for most
| people.
|
| It's easy to lose a random piece of paper. Whereas people
| are generally extremely aware of where their phone is at
| all times.
| noqc wrote:
| It's not that hard to maintain a random piece of paper,
| you do it with your ID, which presumably you do not keep
| on your phone. It is much harder to ensure an iPhone
| won't randomly be miscalibrated and shut off at 30%.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not it's not _hard_ , but it is significantly _harder_ ,
| and why introduce unnecessary additional complexity into
| my life?
|
| My ID is in my wallet. A sheet of paper doesn't fit in my
| wallet. So I have to put the folded paper in a pocket,
| where it might fall out when I take out my gloves, or I
| forget if I put it in my backpack, and in which pocket,
| etc.
|
| A sheet of paper is extra. My phone isn't. And I sure as
| heck don't bring a phone with low charge to the
| _airport_... when I know I 'm probably going to be using
| it for hours... and I've got my charger with me anyways
| in case I somehow did.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I do it with my ID because I've conditioned myself to
| check for it everytime I'm going to move places, or
| rather, check for my wallet, which usually has my ID
| inside it, but has burned me on a couple of ocassions
|
| Also, some people do keep their ID on their phones,
| either directly on the back of the case (I've seen it
| more on young women, maybe because lack of pockets) or
| with something like a magnetic wallet
| genewitch wrote:
| Louisiana has digital ID, I don't use it but my wife does
| and it seems to work OK. I think you can have your phone
| locked with the ID up, which is the only way I'd consider
| using it, anyhow.
|
| Its been a while since I've heard any issues with it. I
| prefer the physical card still.
| kelnos wrote:
| My ID is not a random piece of paper. A boarding pass is.
|
| I have never ever in my life lost my ID or my phone. I
| have lost paper boarding passes on several occasions.
|
| The failure modes of a phone don't really matter; if the
| phone fails for some reason (still has never happened to
| me), I can always ask a gate agent to print me a boarding
| pass.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| Word. I think I'll actually shut down if I'm further than
| 25 metres from my phone...
| what wrote:
| I don't know why you keep calling it a "random" piece of
| paper? It's really not hard to keep track of your
| physical boarding pass for a few hours.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's not hard, certainly. But I _have_ lost paper
| boarding passes a few times. I 've never lost my phone,
| though.
|
| I just like not having to keep track of an extra thing.
| Travel is already often stressful; having one fewer thing
| to keep on me and avoid losing is nice.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| You could lose your phone, or even have it stolen.
|
| I think of it as multitasking. A paper ticket means I can
| focus on reading etc on device, while the ticket can
| serve its purpose. I keep all pertinent materials in a
| pouch in front of me however so not hard to find.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| At the airport? That's fine. I'll just talk to the agent
| and get a ticket if needed. I think these are just
| extreme cases that applies to extremely tiny percentage
| of people.
| kxrm wrote:
| For me it is less about being concerned about my device
| running out of batteries. It's more about some weird
| incompatibility between my device and the scanner.
|
| It's one less thing to worry about when I just want to get
| on the plane. My paper ticket isn't going to lock before I
| get to the gate, or not be bright enough. I won't have to
| "play" with my ticket to keep it active and proper for the
| scanner.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It 's more about some weird incompatibility between my
| device and the scanner._
|
| That's not a thing. They're literally just cameras
| looking for a QR code.
|
| And unlocking your phone and adjusting brightness is
| pretty effortless, I dunno. I already do those things
| lots of times a day.
| lenkite wrote:
| Its not effortless...and god forbid if your drop your
| smartphone and get it cracked. This headache is simply
| avoided with plain old paper reliability.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _and god forbid if your drop your smartphone and get it
| cracked_
|
| Then you print a boarding pass at the kiosk? But I've
| cracked a phone once in ten years, it's not really
| something I'm worried about.
|
| And paper isn't reliable. For most people, you're much
| more likely to lose a random sheet of paper than for your
| phone to suddenly permanently stop working.
| steelframe wrote:
| > Then you print a boarding pass at the kiosk?
|
| Those kiosks are gone from many airports. You're going to
| have to wait in line to get anything printed. And if you
| fly Ryanair it will cost you over 50 euro.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| In Europe yes. Other parts of the world don't charge for
| printing boarding passes and it's easy to find a kiosk.
| realityking wrote:
| In that - hopefully exceptionally rare case - the gate
| could just print you a boarding pass. It's not a big
| deal.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I didn't know that. Based on what do they print a
| boarding pass, or perhaps rather: why don't they check
| {whatever the answer to the previous question is} at
| boarding instead of you having to hold onto a pass that
| apparently is a proxy for something else?
| Symbiote wrote:
| I've had a boarding pass reissued at the gate based on my
| passport.
|
| Some airlines in Europe check both the boarding pass and
| the passport/identity card at the boarding gate, to
| ensure people haven't swapped boarding passes within the
| airport. I think I see this on flights outside the EU,
| but I'm not sure.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Speed.
|
| It takes time to look up a passenger on a computer.
|
| The plane will be delayed if they have to do that for
| everyone while boarding.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Hmm but what lookup does a human need to do? Identity
| documents have had chips for quite some years now so you
| just need to touch it to the reader and beep through, or
| for even older ones, they've had a machine-readable
| section since as long as I'm alive. A standardized
| government-issued passport is probably faster to read
| than a potentially dark and reflective phone screen or
| crinkled piece of paper, and equally fast in the case
| where the person presents a well-readable document. The
| gate doesn't even need to do any database lookup: it can
| locally store the list of the 200-odd names of passengers
| during boarding
|
| I'm just speculating but if they can simply do a
| name+DOB-based lookup at a counter, it seems to me like
| the boarding pass thing might just be for historic
| reasons where people would feel weird if they are
| suddenly tracked based on personal details instead of a
| ticket
| steelframe wrote:
| > That's not a thing. They're literally just cameras
| looking for a QR code.
|
| And yet for me one time earlier this year said QR code on
| my Graphene OS phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint
| but refused to scan at the gate, leading to mayhem as the
| crew couldn't figure out for nearly an hour why the
| number of people sitting on the plane wasn't equal to the
| number of people who they registered as boarding.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I've had airline machines fail to scan the barcode on my
| poorly printed paper boarding passes (e.g. faded ink or
| unfortunate located gaps etc in the barcode area). The
| solution is simple, just type in the details off the BP
| into the terminal to look up my PNR and type the command
| to confirm I've boarded. I've seen this done for both
| paper and mobile boarding pass issues. Not a mobile issue
| but obviously poor staff training and problem solving
| which occurs with or without mobiles.
| steelframe wrote:
| > It's more about some weird incompatibility between my
| device and the scanner.
|
| I think I held up an entire flight for nearly an hour
| because the QR code on my Graphene OS Android phone
| scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but didn't scan at all
| at the gate. They ended up letting me on the flight
| without properly registering that I boarded in their
| system. That triggered some crazy security hold that
| prevented the crew from obtaining permission to pull back
| from the gate.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| When that happens (and note it happens to paper boarding
| passes as well) I've always seen gate agents simply type
| in the details off the boarding pass. E.g. name, sequence
| number, etc and do a manual entry that way. I've had this
| happen to me at least once, and the agent very quickly
| just typed in something in their terminal and it was all
| done with no fuss. Really surprised no one thought of
| doing this in your situation.
| steelframe wrote:
| Apple Express Mode lets you use certain Wallet cards when
| the phone is very low battery and turned off.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Don't people just print their boarding passes at home before
| they leave for the airport? Or worst case, use the kiosks at
| the airports which print passes? Very few of the passengers
| in line ahead of me are using their phones.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Depends where you are and which flights. Around me, maybe
| 60% of people use mobile. From the other 40%, some probably
| got their paper tickets when they checked in their baggage
| and going with that now.
|
| > boarding passes at home before they leave for the airport
|
| It's been years I've heard or seen anyone doing it. Even my
| parents in their 70s get theirs at the airport.
| kxrm wrote:
| I guess I am weird. I still do this.
|
| I just don't want to have to worry about my device being
| available during boarding nor do I want to have to stop
| at a kiosk.
|
| Just print at home, go through security and scan at the
| gate.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I just don 't want to have to worry about my device
| being available during boarding_
|
| I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why
| wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the
| airport from home, your battery is charged.
|
| And if your phone somehow _breaks_ on the way, you print
| at a kiosk.
|
| It seems far more likely that I'd lose a random piece of
| paper on the way to the airport than lose my phone...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe I'm weird, but when I go on a trip, I generally
| pack my smartphone, if I bring it at all. It would be a
| royal pain to go find it again when I get into line to
| board.
| kxrm wrote:
| Same, I do recognize that walking around without a
| smartphone starting to become "weird" to others though. I
| don't mind being weird.
|
| I live in a major US city and get hit up for cash by the
| homeless sometimes. When I explain I do not have a
| cellphone to them when they ask for money through some
| cash app. They look bewildered. Just 20 years ago I was
| the only one carrying around such a device for IT
| reasons. Now I am putting limits on my digital life, and
| it makes me socially "weird".
| ryandrake wrote:
| Wait, destitute people who have nothing are asking to
| send money _through a smartphone app_?? I 'd argue the
| world is weird, not us.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why is that weird?
|
| Almost nobody carries around small cash or change
| anymore.
|
| And social services provide the homeless and those in
| poverty with free smartphones, since they're far more
| effective at ensuring communications with social
| services.
|
| So how is the world weird? It all seems quite rational
| and reasonable to me.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| OTOH Currently, the only thing I don't pay regularly by
| using a smart device, are bus fares, which are a solved
| problem, my city just hasn't implemented that yet
|
| Everything else, I can either use a digital wallet for,
| or an instant bank transfer (Which I've been given to
| understand are a bit more of a hassle in the US)
|
| I'd basically never expect to be without a device for an
| extended period of time, specially not in an airport
|
| I am aware of the single point of failure though, so I do
| take particular care of not running out of battery,
| keeping an accesible spare, and some cash around for
| emergencies I just never use it
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, that's definitely weird.
|
| Most people get pretty bored going to the airport, in
| line at the airport, waiting for boarding, waiting to
| take off, during the flight.
|
| A smartphone loaded with books and magazine articles and
| podcasts seems pretty essential by this point for nearly
| everyone.
|
| Not to mention loved ones who want to reach you by text
| or phone...
| what wrote:
| You're supposed to raw dog the flight.
| kelnos wrote:
| I won't call it "weird", because generally I like the
| idea that some people aren't actually glued to their
| phone at all times, and don't even have it handy.
|
| But I will call it _unusual_ , because the vast majority
| of people _will_ have their phone in their pocket or
| purse while at the airport.
| jjav wrote:
| > I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why
| wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the
| airport from home, your battery is charged.
|
| You're assuming the phone works and the internet
| connection works and the app works and the service behind
| it responsive. That's a lot of trust in thousands of
| moving parts.
|
| Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends on
| nothing other than me having it in my pocket, so it
| basically 100% fail-proof.
|
| While I always use the paper boarding pass, I do also
| check the boarding pass on the app out of curiosity.
| Easily like half the time on the American Airlines app,
| when I'm at the gate about to board and click on show
| boarding pass, the app hangs for many minutes and never
| responds. I'm always glad I have the paper boarding pass
| in my pocket instead.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _You 're assuming the phone works and the internet
| connection works and the app works and the service behind
| it responsive_
|
| At check-in (24 hours before my flight), I add the
| boarding pass to Google Wallet. From that point,
| displaying it doesn't require an internet connection, or
| having to rely on the airline's often-shitty app.
|
| Yes, the phone has to not be broken, but that's a pretty
| low bar: in my 15 years of owning smartphones, my phone
| has been broken and unusable for perhaps a grand total of
| a few days of time (so under 0.01% of the time). Yes,
| Google Wallet has to be functioning, but that particular
| app being broken would be an unusual, surprising
| occurrence.
|
| And if by 0.01% chance, I can't get the boarding pass off
| my phone for some reason, I can always go to the check-in
| desk or kiosk or gate and ask them to print me one.
|
| > _Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends
| on nothing other than me having it in my pocket, so it
| basically 100% fail-proof._
|
| I've never lost a phone before, but I have lost paper
| boarding passes on more than one occasion.
|
| The point is that the mobile boarding pass is a nice
| convenience (especially with the auto-updating gate
| number on it), but the ability to get a paper boarding
| pass printed is never far away if the mobile one fails.
| So why not just use the mobile one, and save some paper,
| and the need to keep track of one more item?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| That's because they don't fly low coasters. It's often
| EUR50 now to print boarding pass at the counter in
| Europe.
| steelframe wrote:
| > It's often EUR50 now to print boarding pass at the
| counter in Europe.
|
| I was about to respond, "No way this is true. I don't
| believe you." But then I found an article claiming that
| yes, indeed you can be fleeced like this for simply
| showing up and asking for your boarding pass. Unreal.
|
| https://www.the-independent.com/travel/news-and-
| advice/check...
| kiwijamo wrote:
| That's a European thing. Here in Australia/New Zealand
| it's free to print boarding passes at the airport on LCCs
| like Jetstar and Air NZ.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Ryanair (3rd largest airline in the world) insists on
| people printing their boarding pass like this, or using
| their app. They save money by needing fewer terminals at
| the airport.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| People still have printers at home?
|
| Low-cost airlines charge a fee for printing boarding passes
| at the airport.
| gs17 wrote:
| At a certain point, low-cost airlines become high-cost,
| at least in time and annoyance. I have a cousin who
| insists that Sprit saves him money, and every family
| holiday his plane is delayed or cancelled, and he had to
| fly to a different city and drive to where we are.
| marssaxman wrote:
| That's what I do, because phones are too fiddly and I don't
| want to have to deal with unlocking it and finding wherever
| the barcode went off to when it's my turn to check in, but
| my wife does something with an app instead and seems to
| like it.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Really? I click on a button twice and my wallet pops up
| on my phone with my boarding pass
| marssaxman wrote:
| Perhaps that's the thing with an app my wife is doing. I
| don't have a wallet app, myself; I mistrust phones (and
| the corporations which own them) too much for that.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| The Wallet app is built in on the iPhone.
|
| Do you also print out directions from Mapquest before you
| leave home?
| hibikir wrote:
| Depends on where you are. My experience in American
| airports is almost all apps, but Spain's Iberia, for
| example, is basically all paper, typically printed by the
| airline and not even someone at home. So for them, minimal
| changes over how flying worked in the 1990s.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I don't trust apps, I don't mind using them for stuff that
| doesn't matter much, like parking og supermarket loyalty
| programs. For travel information, absolutly fucking not. I
| print everything. At the airport I mostly see people using
| their phones as boarding passes, I absolutely refuse to do
| that, I have zero trust that that will work as well as the
| paper boarding passes.
| quantified wrote:
| I really hate that the basic cost for participation has
| gone up, a smartphone and quality internet (in the USA)
| can be a significant cost.
|
| But I've never had a problem with a screen capture of a
| boarding pass, and I've found the Apple wallet to work as
| well. The airport kiosks are good for printing out the
| pass when you check in, or even for just printing if you
| checked in on-line 24 hours prior.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I usually print a boarding pass at the airport kiosk -- I
| always have luggage to check anyway, and there's then no
| concern if my battery dies etc.
|
| But at the automatic gates to security, and at the
| boarding gate, I think the majority of people having
| trouble scanning their boarding pass are using a phone.
| For those elderly people who can't scan a paper boarding
| pass, the staff can immediately help -- but they're much
| less able to help scan a barcode on a phone, which might
| be set too dim, be turning to landscape mode, etc.
| kelnos wrote:
| I mean, they do demonstrably work. And if for some reason
| yours doesn't, no big deal, just walk two feet over to
| the gate desk and ask them to print you one.
|
| I prefer to use mobile boarding passes so I don't have to
| waste paper, and don't have to keep track of yet one more
| thing while traveling. (I'm already bringing my phone, so
| I have to keep track of that regardless.)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What airline are you flying and in what country?
|
| And who has printers at home anymore?
|
| My wife and I fly quite often and mostly Delta - over a
| dozen times a year. Very few people still use paper
| tickets.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Just US domestic flights. Most people just have the paper
| passes. They are guaranteed to work. And I guess I just
| assumed everyone with a computer had some sort of
| printer. If not, how do they, you know, print things out?
| I use my printer constantly for things like forms I have
| to mail, printing out documentation to read later, hobby
| stuff...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You act as if the same QR codes scanned on your phone
| don't work. Even if your phone dies or something happens,
| the gate agent can still print out your ticket at the
| gate.
|
| What are you printing off and mailing so often?
|
| Any documents you I don't want to read on my phone, I
| read on my iPad.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _If not, how do they, you know, print things out?_
|
| I didn't have a printer until a few years ago (my now-
| wife really wanted one, so we got one). I do appreciate
| having it when I need it (easier than going to FedEx
| office), but I still very rarely have to print something
| out. I do really like that the printer has a built-in
| scanner; I've used that much more often than to print
| something.
|
| > _Most people just have the paper passes. They are
| guaranteed to work._
|
| I've definitely had paper boarding passes that just
| wouldn't scan (probably from a faling airport kiosk
| printer), or a pass that had torn and even holding it
| together just right, it still wouldn't work.
|
| I don't think I've ever had a mobile boarding pass that
| wouldn't scan, though of course there are other things
| that can go wrong, like the phone itself not working,
| which isn't a failure mode of paper passes.
|
| But whatever, if my more-convenient, non-paper-wasting
| mobile pass doesn't work for some reason, I'll just go to
| the gate agent and ask them to print me one.
| steelframe wrote:
| Printing a boarding pass at home works for the flight out.
| But what about the returning flight?
|
| Just last week I flew back home from SFO. I needed to
| change the flight at the last minute. The app failed to
| update with the new flight. The airline had removed all the
| boarding pass kiosks from that airport and only seemed to
| have luggage drop service. I asked an airport employee how
| I could get a boarding pass printed, and he pointed to a
| poorly-marked lane with a sign about "special
| accommodations" or something, like I was blind. I waited in
| that line for about 20 minutes along with people who were
| trying to check their bags. Eventually I got to someone who
| seemed really put out that I hadn't checked in yet and that
| they'd need to push a few more buttons on their computer to
| do that for me.
| asdff wrote:
| What airline was this so I stay far away
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Weird, I've flew out of SFO two weeks ago on United, and
| their online check-in never works for me so I just do it
| at the airport and get a paper boarding pass. I didn't
| run into any issues. Line was short (mid morning on a
| Thursday). They have a bunch of self-service kiosks to
| check-in and print passes.
|
| It's never crossed my mind that an airline app exists and
| I would never consider installing one. If they don't want
| to provide self-service kiosks or a working website, I
| guess they'll have to have more demand for agents. Same
| with banks: there's no check deposits through their
| website, so I go in person when I need to do that.
| Installing an app is just not even on my radar to
| consider.
|
| I'd also never rely on a gate number from my phone anyway
| knowing that it could be out of date. I'd have to verify
| with a departure board or sign at the gate anyway, so I'm
| just going to start there.
| kelnos wrote:
| Huh, interesting, I suppose it depends on where you live,
| but most people I see at airport gates are scanning a
| boarding pass on their phone.
|
| Most people I know also don't even have a printer at home.
| (I didn't either, until a few years ago.)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just
| export it to Apple /Android wallet which is much more
| convenient than having to find a printer._
|
| Why do iOS and Android phones have a "wallet", and why a
| boarding pass would have anything to do with it?
|
| There's an electronic solution strictly better than the app,
| for when you have no printer handy: _just give the user the
| goddamned PDF_! Works everywhere, works offline, can be
| printed if needed, and the user can manage, send or back it
| up however they like.
|
| It's a simple solution that works.
| closewith wrote:
| I have a few qualms with this app:
|
| 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system
| yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account,
| mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or
| CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this
| FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
|
| 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I
| know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere
| online to be able to perform presentations, but they still
| carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems.
| This does not solve the connectivity issue.
|
| 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I
| know this is premature at this point, but without charging
| users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make
| money off of this?
| realityking wrote:
| You can do that if you want. Most airlines issue PDF
| boarding passes and both iOS and Android can store and show
| those files.
|
| Apple Wallet (and Apple Pay) are actually one of my
| favorite smartphone features. The built-in Wallet (speaking
| for iOS here) has a few advantages over a folder of PDFs:
|
| - The QR code is always fairly big without having to pan
| and zoom a PDF file
|
| - The display brightness is automatically increased to make
| reading the QR code easier
|
| - The Wallet syncs with my Apple Watch (where passes use a
| different, optimized layout) giving me backup if something
| where to happen to my phone during boarding
|
| - Passes can be updated by the airline (e.g. gate changes)
|
| - Passes automatically expire, I don't have to cleanup
| myself. (There's archive in case I need an old one)
|
| - Passes can be shown on your lock screen during the
| boarding time for easier access
|
| - Passes can be multilingual, adapting to your phone's
| language
| svachalek wrote:
| The wallet allows activation by proximity like RFID. So if
| the pass is in the wallet you don't need to go digging
| around for wherever the PDF is stored in the phone. Tap,
| the pass is requested, the pass responds, go.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Can a PDF automatically update with gate changes and
| delays?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| You're already at the airport. Just look around, stop
| staring at the phone.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Until two years ago, I flew out of ATL - the busiest
| airport in the US. Am I suppose to look on the board and
| look for my flight out of the hundreds of flights to see
| if anything has changed and keep looking every 30
| minutes?
|
| If I'm sitting at a restaurant or a bar I should get up
| every 20 minutes to see if something has changed?
|
| Should I also print out MapQuest directions before I go
| somewhere and wait for the paper boy to deliver the
| newspaper to get the news?
|
| And it's literally a mile from one end of the airport to
| the other. Is it somehow better to look on a board than
| just look on a phone?
|
| And then you also get notifications when the flight
| changes so drastically that I need to completely change
| my flight plans. Just this past weekend we were suppose
| to fly MCO - MSP - LAS and flight changes meant we were
| going to misd our layover.
|
| Luckily we were notified as soon as the change happen and
| we were able to make a change to MCO - ATL - LAS and get
| two of the last seats.
|
| The same happen on the way back. It was LAS - MSP - MCO
| and we were able to change it to LAS - LAX - MCO.
|
| Things always change when you fly a lot. The sooner you
| know about those changes the better.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Until two years ago, I flew out of ATL - the busiest
| airport in the US. Am I suppose to look on the board and
| look for my flight out of the hundreds of flights to see
| if anything has changed and keep looking every 30
| minutes?
|
| That's what I usually do. It's not that much of an effort
| to look at the screen right at the gate you're sitting at
| to confirm that nothing has changed. I've been to ATL
| twice, it's not that bad.
|
| What are you going to do when something happens to your
| phone ...
|
| Can you imagine... how did we manage to live before
| everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket.
|
| So yeah... yeah? That's exactly what you supposed to be
| doing.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > That's what I usually do. It's not that much of an
| effort to look at the screen right at the gate you're
| sitting at to confirm that nothing has changed. I've been
| to ATL twice, it's not that bad.
|
| And you somehow think that's more efficient? Do you also
| think polling is more efficient than web hooks and push
| notifications? Why would I do that?
|
| And the restaurants are usually not right at the gate
| you're sitting at. Well in our case we are usually
| sitting in the lounge...
|
| > _What are you going to do when something happens to
| your phone_
|
| Well, I personally would take out my cellular equipped
| iPad on the rare occasions that I was flying by myself
| and I would still get text notifications on my cellular
| equipped watch or depend on my wife having her phone,
| cellular equipped iPad or Watch.
|
| If all that failed yes I would have to get a paper ticket
| - which you can do at the gate.
|
| How often do you actually fly? My wife and I have been
| flying over a dozen times a year post Covid.
|
| I was in ATL either flying in, out or through ATL over
| 25x last year alone.
|
| > _Can you imagine... how did we manage to live before
| everyone and their dog had a phone in their pocket._
|
| I personally had my first phone in my pocket in 1995.
| Never once in 30 years has anything "happened to my
| phone".
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| What is there to be more efficient? You're sitting there
| waiting for a flight. This isn't a shopping mall, even if
| it appears to look like one.
|
| Re push vs pull... which one do you prefer more? Kafka or
| MQTT? On a more serious note... pull because I don't sit
| snd stare at the phone all the time. Phone stays in the
| pocket. So the act of taking it out of the pocket is a
| pull action.
|
| There are no screens and announcements at the lounge? You
| went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping or a
| dinner for two, no? What's more important than getting to
| your destination?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _What is there to be more efficient? You're sitting
| there waiting for a flight. This isn't a shopping mall,
| even if it appears to look like one._
|
| That's just it, even if I didn't have lounge access, I
| would be hanging out at a restaurant or a bar that isn't
| near the gate. I would have to be constantly looking on
| the board with all of the flights. ATL has 192 gates
| spread across seven concourses and two terminals.
|
| > _pull because I don't sit snd stare at the phone all
| the time. Phone stays in the pocket_
|
| Of course I have an alarm set for when I need to start
| heading toward my gate. But gate changes and when it's
| time to board are both push notifications to both my
| phone and my watch.
|
| > _There are no screens and announcements at the lounge_
|
| 2100 flights take off per day from ATL. That's over 100
| flights an hour - I think there are at least 6 hours a
| day where no flights take off. They explicitly say they
| don't make announcements.
|
| This goes back to do you really want to be searching for
| your flight on a board with that many flights?
|
| > _You went to the airport to fly somewhere, not shopping
| or a dinner for two, no_
|
| If you either get to the airport early to avoid rush hour
| or have a long layover, you probably will end up having a
| meal or drinks while you wait. We had a four hour layover
| at LAX last week.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I think it was Kyiv's airport (so I can't check) but
| their flight times were not all rounded to the nearest 10
| minutes.
|
| I liked this, as finding the single 12:34 flight was much
| quicker than looking at the 4+ flights all with "12:30"
| at another airport, where on the display each line is
| rotating between multiple flight numbers, airlines and
| languages.
|
| Personally, even if I'm using an app I still look at the
| screens to check. A notification might not have been
| sent, or my phone might have dropped off the airport wifi
| leaving me with no connection, or roaming might have
| stopped working.
| kelnos wrote:
| I really don't get why you're being so hostile here. If
| you don't want to rely on modern conveniences, don't.
| There's no reason to get up in arms that some of us think
| that other ways can be easier.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| I want to offer a counter point to all these Luddites:
|
| I'm mentally handicapped (my mind is apparently somewhere
| on a spectrum) and technology allows me to limit human
| interaction- which causes me physical discomfort. I
| realise normal people love to talk to the lady at
| McDonald's, they probably live for that shit.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _What are you going to do when something happens to
| your phone_
|
| Uh... look at the big departures board, duh. I don't see
| why it's weird to want to use an indisputably more
| convenient method (auto-updating pass on my phone) for
| the common case, but still be able to fall back to a
| less-convenient method (departures board) if the uncommon
| case comes up.
|
| And no big deal if I need a paper boarding pass. I can
| just walk over to the gate, show them my ID, and ask them
| to print me one.
| esafak wrote:
| Why is the old way better? That's just a default bias.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| > Why do iOS and Android phones have a "wallet", and why a
| boarding pass would have anything to do with it?
|
| It's not that deep, just a skeuomorphic name for somewhere
| where you'd keep importants/valuables for quick access,
| credit/debit cards, boarding passes, concert tickets
|
| Not unlike keeping a folded up copy of a pass in a physical
| wallet (Which may not be universal, but I would have
| guessed not that uncommon either)
| tmnvix wrote:
| And if your phone is out of order? I used a PDF version
| of the boarding pass on my laptop in the past due to a
| flat phone. Even when my phone is available I still just
| use the PDF version that was emailed to me. I never use
| my phone 'wallet' for anything.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| If on hand, a smart watch also does the trick
|
| Since I use my phone to pay for things, book rides
| between places and basically existing in general I also
| keep a power bank on my person and a spare phone in my
| house
|
| But if I'm not confident on availability I also keep
| alternatives, I've not used physical money in months
| (Other than local bus fares), but I do keep some cash on
| my person, as well as the physical cards that I use
| virtually on my phone and copies of boarding passes when
| necessary, not that I've needed any of them recently, I
| just like covering my bases, it's not a binary situation,
| I'd also like to keep spares if my only copy was physical
| wat10000 wrote:
| In the unlikely event my phone dies (hasn't ever happened
| in 20 years of having phones) then I'll go to the desk
| and ask them to print a boarding pass.
| kelnos wrote:
| You can do all those things if you want. Download the PDF
| to your laptop, add the pass to your phone's wallet, even
| print out a backup copy if you want. And then when you
| get to the airport, use whichever is most convenient for
| you.
|
| I generally just get the mobile pass and put it in Google
| Wallet. If I ever run into a situation where my phone is
| lost/broken/battery-drained, I'll just go up to the
| check-in desk or a kiosk and get my boarding pass
| printed. No big deal.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money
| if I get back early).
|
| Maybe it's better these days, but back when I used to use
| online apps/sites to pay for parking in private lots, 4/5
| times I still got a "ticket." I never had to pay the fine
| with money, only with time.
|
| I think it really was the 4th time I decided to stop using
| those apps entirely.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if the devs behind these apps and
| processes feel embarrassed by the results. I would be, even
| if the failures weren't my fault.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just export
| it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more convenient than
| having to find a printer.
|
| And once the gate or departure time changes, your printed
| boarding pass will start lying to you.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I recently got bitten in the rear by Delta not updating
| boarding passes stored in Apple Wallet, even though it had /
| has all permissions to do so.
|
| Only when I checked the time and wondered why we weren't
| boarding yet, and opened the app did I notice that the gate
| changed.
|
| Even afterwards the one stored in Apple Wallet did not
| update. I even tried to do the pull-to-refresh. Eventually I
| pulled to refresh, and that worked.
| realityking wrote:
| To be fair, a printed boarding pass also didn't update when
| the gate changed.
| jmholla wrote:
| But you also don't expect it to.
| OptionOfT wrote:
| No, but when you have a device in your hands, with an app
| provided by the company you're dealing with, and they
| specifically request permissions to send you
| notifications, you start to rely on it.
|
| An unreliable boarding pass in Apple Wallet is worse than
| a paper boarding pass.
|
| With the paper one I know I need to check the screens
| etc. With the Apple the app implies that you no longer
| have to do this.
|
| And you get used to it. You stop doing the things you did
| before. That muscle memory disappears. Not dissimilar to
| driving with GPS, or programming with AI.
| asdff wrote:
| Actually, it is updated more currently usually. Apple
| wallet will not update for me with the current gate. By
| the time I show up to the airport 2 hours before the
| flight and get a paper pass on the other hand usually the
| gate is already set. But apple wallet still won't always
| reflect that update to the gate. Whereas my printed pass
| does. As well as the good old fashioned boards of
| flights, which are pretty easy to gleam considering they
| are alphabetized.
| asdff wrote:
| This is my experience most flights to be honest. LAX
| doesn't assign gates until the last minute so apple wallet
| is usually wrong. Google search for the flight number
| always works of course.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > > 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| > I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money
| if I get back early).
|
| Yeah... nothing more I love than having to scan a QR code to
| get an app from someone I don't know, then go through the
| signup process, then input a buncha personal information into
| an app... instead of just dropping 10 quarters into a metal
| stick and walking away for the next two hours.
|
| > > 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a
| boarding pass.
|
| > Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just
| export it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more
| convenient than having to find a printer.
|
| Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you should
| be finding your printer. They're not gold bars. They're not
| expensive.
| realityking wrote:
| > Yeah... nothing more I love than having to scan a QR code
| to get an app from someone I don't know, then go through
| the signup process, then input a buncha personal
| information into an app... instead of just dropping 10
| quarters into a metal stick and walking away for the next
| two hours.
|
| Quality of execution obviously matters. I find EasyPark
| (Swedish company, used all over the place) a lot better
| than the usual parking meters. Plus I can use it in several
| cities with different currencies (in my case Euros and
| Czech Koruna), saving me from carrying more change.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The point is all these things should be _options,_ not
| single points of failure. We should be able to pay by
| coin /tap, or app when at a place we frequent. Apps
| should use a single system per region, props for being an
| open standard.
|
| We have the technology.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think anyone is arguing that. While I wouldn't be
| surprised if app-only parking situations exist, I have
| never encountered one. Every place I've needed to park
| that had an app also offered the ability to pay with card
| (and often cash) at a meter or machine.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > Yeah... nothing more I love than having to scan a QR code
| to get an app from someone
|
| True. I does suck when travelling. Locally I find it much
| more convenient though.
|
| > dropping 10 quarters
|
| You're always carrying a bag full of coins wherever you go?
| And even if I did I'd end up overpaying/underpaying half of
| the time.
|
| > Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you
| should be finding your printer.
|
| So I should waste space with a huge device that I use <10
| times per year?
|
| I mean I could bring it over from the other room or the
| attic or wherever it's lying around but why would I waste
| time and mental energy each time I'm travelling having to
| keep track of some piece of paper that I mustn't lose?
| Seems rather pointless...
|
| Cheap Android phones aren't expensive either and can
| provide a lot more than a printer for most people these
| days.
| drdec wrote:
| > Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you
| should be finding your printer.
|
| The desk at my AirBnB doesn't seem to have one.
|
| > They're not gold bars. They're not expensive.
|
| If someone has an alternate solution to owning a printer
| that works for them, whats it to you? Owning a printer so
| you can print half of the boarding passes you need every
| time you fly seems excessive to me
| kelnos wrote:
| > _10 quarters_
|
| I can't remember the last time I had _any_ quarters on me,
| let alone 10. Coins are annoying to carry around, and I don
| 't drive enough or park in paid lots/areas enough to expect
| that I'll remember to ensure that I always have change in
| my car.
|
| > _Looking to the left or right of your desk is how you
| should be finding your printer._
|
| While I do have a printer now (at my wife's request), I
| went a good 20 years without one, and was fine with that.
|
| > _They 're not expensive._
|
| That's a weird take. Even if the printer itself isn't that
| expensive, keeping it fed with ink/toner can be. Not to
| mention they're just annoying pieces of hardware, with
| usually-shitty software, that take up precious desk real-
| estate.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| >> 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| > I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money
| if I get back early).
|
| Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this. Combined with
| contactless card payment and that's peak parking experience.
| gs17 wrote:
| >Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this
|
| Except having the actual barrier is expensive. The license
| plate reader is cheaper, so they'll do that instead, and if
| it malfunctions, hope you don't mind paying for a full day
| of parking!
| ncruces wrote:
| Peek (parking) experience is the car having a tag and
| paying for itself, on parks, fuel pumps, toll roads at
| 120km/h (75mph), etc.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| parking apps tend to replace metered street parking in my
| experience, not garages.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this. Combined
| with contactless card payment and that 's peak parking
| experience._
|
| US here (you are presumably elsewhere given that you said
| "car park"), but I can't remember ever seeing a parking
| garage that had a parking app. All of them are like you
| describe, with pay-on-exit.
|
| I mainly see parking apps for street parking (where pay-on-
| exit can't work), and sometimes more basic parking lots
| where there isn't room for the entry/exit gate and
| hardware, or lots where it's bare-bones enough that the
| owner certainly isn't going to spring for the expense of
| installing something like that.
| piperswe wrote:
| In Austin, I've parked in a handful of parking garages
| that require using an app. They have license plate
| recognition on entry and exit, and they mail you a
| nastygram if you enter/exit without linking a credit card
| to your plate online.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| The idea of a parking app is better than the physical process
| of using a meter generally. But I have not really seen an app
| flow better than the physical process despite having parked
| in many cities. In fact, I can come up with a simple physical
| process better than the apps by far: tap the meter in and tap
| the meter out with your NFC chip in the card.
|
| Pay for the exact time, or if you forget, pay the full time
| period you're legally allowed to park.
|
| Instead, on my city's app I must select a car (despite having
| only one), select a zone (despite GPS), and then manually
| enter my card (despite it being my account default). Every
| time.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| The Pay By Phone app works well for me. It automatically
| figures out what parking area you are in from the phone
| GPS, it already knows your license plate, and it has your
| credit card.
|
| Basically the flow for me is open the app, and hit how long
| I want to park for. And then the app will let me know when
| my parking is running out and I can add time on my phone
| without going back to the car.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The article explains that some local councils in Britain
| are removing the pay-by-card (NFC etc) parking meters in
| favour of an app, payment by phone, or at a nearby shop.
| This is to reduce costs.
| nicce wrote:
| > I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money
| if I get back early).
|
| In my experiece, apps have increased costs around 50% and
| some even try to add monthly subscription.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > you can just export it to Apple/Android wallet which is
| much more convenient than having to find a printer.
|
| ...or show the document they sent you rather than printing
| it?
|
| As someone who never installed these wallets (maybe I'm
| missing out), what's the problem they solve?
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just
| export it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more
| convenient than having to find a printer.
|
| You can just print at the airport at the check-in machines.
|
| I never even bother checking-in in advance of arriving at the
| airport. I theorize that they assign bad seats to early
| checkins to incentivize people to pay to choose a different
| seats. I have at various times been assigned to upgraded
| seats (not upgraded class, but e.g. emergency row, bulkhead,
| etc.) when checking in at the airport.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _You can just print at the airport at the check-in
| machines._
|
| I have been to airports a non-trivial amount of times where
| there were lines even at the self-service kiosks.
|
| > _I theorize that they assign bad seats to early checkins_
|
| Oof, I would never fly an airline or buy a fare class that
| didn't let me choose a seat immediately, at time of
| booking.
|
| Anyway, this theory of yours needs some evidence... doesn't
| really pass the smell test for me.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > Oof, I would never fly an airline or buy a fare class
| that didn't let me choose a seat immediately, at time of
| booking.
|
| I mean, that just seems like an expensive way to pay for
| seat selection.
|
| e.g. Checking a route I fly frequently for an arbitrary
| date, it's $232 (with seat selection in the $20 range) as
| the base fare rate, or $386 for the cheapest fare that
| includes seat selection. (With some other bonuses that
| don't have any value to me, e.g. checked bags and a
| better cancellation policy.)
| piperswe wrote:
| United's self service kiosks at some airports (e.g. AUS) no
| longer print boarding passes - they say that they're
| switching to only mobile boarding passes.
| teeray wrote:
| > I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late
|
| But they are worse than mid-2000s tech. I used to have a tag
| with an lcd timer that I loaded up with cash periodically.
| When I parked in a metered space in the city, I just turn the
| thing on and hang it on my driver window. It was synced with
| the parking schedule, so the timer wouldn't run until metered
| parking started and stopped at the end of metered parking.
| Parking enforcement simply had to look at the tag to make
| sure it was on and had a positive value. When I came back, I
| just shut the thing off--I paid for exactly what I used,
| always. Great UX: turn on thing, hang in window, remove, turn
| off thing, plug into computer to add money every few months.
|
| Compare to now where there's An App that requires multiple
| taps to tell it which street your on, which car, oh look it
| forgot your credit card and they don't take Apple Pay, time
| to enter all that data in again... oh yeah, also you have to
| overbuy parking and they charge transaction fees every time
| if you try to buy exact and add time later.
|
| Also, now parking enforcement has to key in everyone's
| license plates to figure out if they're legal or not (no
| automated plate readers--they're illegal in this state).
| Apart from being annoying, now that data is conveniently
| harvested.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >Can't disagree about Tinder
|
| And what wrong with Tinder? It is great if you are hot or a
| woman. And if you are not - well, nobody never cared anyway.
| steelframe wrote:
| > > 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| > I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss
| having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to
| figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money
| if I get back early).
|
| The last time I tried parking in downtown Salt Lake City the
| city's app wouldn't even install on my phone, complaining
| about being built for an older Android version. Fortunately
| the web site still worked. Sort of. I had to try a couple of
| different browsers before I found one that functioned with
| the site.
|
| When riding Caltrain I get charged for the maximum amount I
| could possibly pay (all stops) when I board. Then when I get
| off at my stop I tap again and get refunded for all the stops
| I ended up not getting to. It works fine. Seems a meter could
| be a "tap in/tap out" thing. If it's 5 hours until it's free
| to park, put a hold for 5 hours of time. If you get back in 2
| hours, release the hold and only charge for 2 hours when you
| tap out.
|
| It's even possible to do this with cash. Imagine a machine
| that calculates your change and spits out bills and/or coins.
| Oh wait, yeah, we've had that technology since around 1959.
| It would just need to print out a ticket with a bar code or
| something to authenticate that you're the one who paid in the
| first place. Did you lose your ticket? Sorry, looks like
| you're paying for the rest of the day. But that's still a lot
| cheaper than a citation.
|
| I suspect it's not "pay max/get refund" because
| municipalities can't stop milking those sweet sweet citations
| from people who fail to correctly guess how much time they'll
| need up front.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I would dispute your points 2 and 4. But yes, the trend towards
| apps is not very good. I am not sure if the apps are cheaper or
| just makes people think they are doing something modern and
| better. One thing is for sure, most apps based devices won't
| age well.
| internet2000 wrote:
| I don't think I could disagree more with your number 4. Adding
| a boarding pass to Apple Wallet and having it update itself
| with gate changes, delays, etc, notifying you and even
| scribbling skeuomorphically what changed on the pass [0] has
| been one of the strongest delighters I've experienced in recent
| times.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/OkthcOi.png
| tdeck wrote:
| You can do that with a boarding pass downloaded from the
| airline website or emailed to you by the airline. But some
| airlines like to hide this option in order to force you to
| download their app.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| How can you remotely update a PDF file after someone
| downloaded it?
| tdeck wrote:
| Why would you need to do that? The boarding pass has a QR
| code on it; the QR code links to your ticket. If you need
| to change your booking, they can email you a new one.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| They are referring to gate and time changes
| tdeck wrote:
| And? These are available on google, on the airline's
| website, and on screens throughout the terminal. Many
| airlines will send them to you via SMS. There's no need
| to have a whole app just to check your gate assignment.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| Or I could just use an app and get a push notification.
| asdff wrote:
| If you have a half gig spare for such an app these days
| maybe
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I received a gate change
| notification via SMS. App push notifications are more
| common in my experience.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Some airlines email you a hyperlink that put passes in
| your Apple wallet from a website. This seems like the
| ideal case to me.
| raziel2p wrote:
| did you simply ignore what the parent poster wrote about it
| updating itself with gate numbers etc.?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| My apple wallet boarding passes never update on time. At LAX
| they sometimes put you as a placeholder at the international
| terminal for your gate on boarding pass. So then you show up,
| slog through the international terminal to this gate, and see
| that no you are actually in terminal 7. Enjoy the resulting
| 2.5 mile walk I hope you baked in extra time.
|
| Now I don't trust it. Googling the flight number brings in
| the updated gate. Not the apple wallet boarding pass though.
| RhysU wrote:
| Are you not also paying attention to the gate itself and to
| departure boards? Why do you need your phone to tell you
| what's posted on numerous displays that you walk past?
| internet2000 wrote:
| > Are you not also paying attention to the [...] departure
| boards?
|
| I'm not, not anymore.
|
| > Why do you need your phone to tell you what's posted on
| numerous displays that you walk past?
|
| Convenience.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| So you disregard what's in front of your face, in
| preference to your device.
|
| Other folks here were talking about how their devices did
| _not_ update in a timely fashion. They had to force
| refresh several times to get a response. Meanwhile the
| gate screens have a single job and update within seconds.
| eesmith wrote:
| Like following the GPS instructions onto a logging road,
| or into a lake.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| no I dont waste my time with the screens anymore.
| asdff wrote:
| What all 10 seconds?
| kccqzy wrote:
| I've seen good airline apps and bad airline apps. The good ones
| allow you to do things like checking your own bags and dropping
| off bags without talking to anyone. The bad ones simply are
| slow and have missing features: you may be able to buy a ticket
| but changing it requires calling a number. (Of course if you
| are the type to prefer human customer service, these won't
| appeal to you.)
| fundingshovel wrote:
| Even if you do they might? Good service in app can lead to
| shorter wait times for people that need to talk to humans
| _fat_santa wrote:
| And don't forget an increasing number of consumer electronics
| now need to be "activated" via an app.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Having taken both academic classes in Spanish, and using
| Duolingo for multiple years, I feel like Duolingo is a faster,
| more cost effective option for establishing a foundation.
| Obviously if you want to approach fluency, submersion is
| necessary.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Not to mention that it's hard to take a language class while
| commuting in a bus.
| nayuki wrote:
| > Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| Case in point - Toronto Parking Authority (Green P)'s app
| forces you to keep a balance and refill in multiples of $20
| CAD, whereas street parking meters can charge your credit card
| in any increment as necessary (e.g. $1.25).
|
| Also, the app forces you to disclose your phone number as an
| account identifier; you have no option to sign up by email or
| username. https://mobilepay.greenp.com/faq/i-have-a-new-phone-
| number-w...
|
| The culture of designing user-hostile apps is wild.
| rglover wrote:
| > 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| Generally, yes, (it may have improved since I left but the
| Chicago one was a nightmare a few years back) however the best
| experience I've ever had was in Nashville (don't recall the
| company name).
|
| I signed up via the web (no app) and then the parking lot has
| cameras/sensors that detect my plate. Any parking lot owned by
| that company is now accessible to me in the city. I can just
| pull in, it detects me (notifying me my "session" has started),
| and then charges my card on file when I pull out (either in an
| hour, or even the next day).
|
| As with a lot of things, there are often examples of well-
| executed solutions at the fringes, they're just not deployed at
| a large enough scale to cancel out the other negative examples.
| Software _can_ improve a lot, but it 's down to the
| team/individuals involved to care enough to do it right (and
| not be distracted by other incentives).
| eep_social wrote:
| Sounds fantastic. Literally not an app. Bring back websites.
| marssaxman wrote:
| In general, I agree with your observation, but in terms of
| Duolingo it does not matter whether language classes would have
| been better, because I was never going to sign up for them.
| Letting myself get hooked on another daily word game was a
| commitment I could actually make, and after plugging away at it
| with steadily increasing enthusiasm for a little over a year
| now, I've gained a significant degree of fluency I would not
| otherwise have. Thus I think that Duolingo offers a genuinely
| valuable service, not directly comparable to language classes.
| maeil wrote:
| >1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| The customers for these apps are the parking lot _operators_
| and they love the apps.
|
| > 2. Tinder is worse than IRL speed dating.
|
| It is now, it definitely wasn't when it first came out. Prime
| example of enshittification, but not an example of what you're
| conveying.
|
| > 3. Duolingo is worse than language classes.
|
| This one I feel has the most merit, but still not a lot. What %
| of Duolingo users would've actually taken classes were it not
| for these apps? Also, some people don't learn well from classes
| (I'm one of them). Not that that makes Duolingo any better, but
| despite its pretenses it's squarely aimed at extremely shallow,
| casual, surface-level learning that might be useful on a
| holiday. And people don't take classes for that.
|
| > 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding
| pass.
|
| In what way? Admittedly I've only used the apps of 2 airlines,
| but they worked fine.
| Neonlicht wrote:
| I recently had to buy a printer because some shitty company
| didn't accept my smartphone screen.
|
| It was a lot less convenient let me tell you.
| 201984 wrote:
| Re no. 1, what are you supposed to do in those cities if you
| don't have a smartphone? Just get a ticket? Seems heavily
| discriminatory against the poor.
| xxr wrote:
| A few months ago, I had to use street parking in Long Beach,
| California. They no longer had individual meters along this
| particular street, but rather one parking sticker machine. The
| parking sticker machine was broken, so I had to download the
| advertised parking payment app which was not one of the parking
| apps I already had on my phone. Finally, I had to pay an
| additional "convenience" fee on top to use this app that I
| wouldn't have needed to pay using physical payment
| infrastructure.
|
| So everyone wins here, except us: the app company gets to make
| a killing on compulsory payment processing, and City of Long
| Beach gets to continue to pull in parking revenue without
| worrying about whether their payment machines still work--a
| broken machine is not an excuse because you can still pay with
| the app because everyone has a smartphone with an up-to-date OS
| and functioning cell service with appropriate bandwidth, right?
| I'm sure I could have complained to the city and gotten my
| +/-dollar back, but I didn't have time just to do so for the
| principle of the thing.
| kelnos wrote:
| Ugh, that's gross. And I bet if you hadn't paid, gotten a
| ticket, and then defended yourself by saying the machine was
| broken, they would have still fined you because the app was
| available.
|
| It should be illegal to have that sort of setup... if the
| lowest-common-denominator form of payment is broken, then it
| should be free.
| gs17 wrote:
| > Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| I had a frustrating experience with this. We were staying in a
| small town and the casino had a ferry to cross the river, which
| would save 20 minutes driving and be kind of neat. I'm guessing
| they had issues with the staff collecting payments, so they had
| switched to a parking app to pay for it. You pay for the ferry
| as a "parking lot" and it should all work fine.
|
| Signs at the road to it say to pay before proceeding, so I do.
| After driving all the way up, it turns out the ferry wasn't
| running (they neglected to close the gate at the start of the
| road). The parking app was tied into a pair of license plate
| readers on the boat, but since I couldn't drive past the
| "exit", they never considered my "parking" to end and it racked
| up a charge over two days. Of course, the "parking" starts
| without my car being detected going on to the boat.
|
| Fortunately, I got a refund, but it required jumping through a
| bunch of hoops. If we paid the way it used to be done this
| wouldn't be possible at all!
|
| >Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding
| pass.
|
| Delta's app is pretty good. I really like the peace of mind
| from being able to see where my bags are, including when they
| get put on the conveyor.
| genewitch wrote:
| You know what all these stories kind of sound like me? When
| some new technology comes out and you see somebody and
| they're like, one of the first people to buy it and they're
| like, oh, check this out. And then they try to show you
| something, but it doesn't work?
|
| So if the parking thing is broken and I don't have my phone
| with me I can't go to the doctor today?
|
| Cool. If a meter was broken I could just go to another spot
| with a working meter.
|
| In Laguna beach they had $1 coin machines to get around the
| "ten quarters" thing, and this was 20 years ago!
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 4. Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding
| pass.
|
| Whenever I fly business class for an international trip, I
| always check in at the counter. It's just as fast, but getting
| that boarding pass printing on cardstock and tucked into the
| photo page of my passport feels so quaint and charming.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I always check in at the counter. It 's just as fast_
|
| Having waited in several check-in counter lines because the
| airline's app insists that a human needs to check my travel
| documents before giving me a boarding pass, no, it is so not
| just as fast. Even for business class. Even if there is no
| line, I can tap through a mobile app check-in flow (in the
| comfort of my own home!) faster than a check-in agent will
| usually verify my identity and print a boarding pass.
| Regardless, I'd rather not add that kind of variability into
| the airport process, and have to pad my arrival time even
| more.
|
| > _getting that boarding pass printing on cardstock and
| tucked into the photo page of my passport feels so quaint and
| charming._
|
| This made me smile :)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, in the digital world these folks feel like they can
| strongarm you, in a way they would never have the gall to do in
| person. By demanding full information and customer-hostile
| rules. Sorry, we don't "support" anything else at this time!
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| But all of those situations require human labor or oversight
| which is extremely expensive in the developed world. So in the
| sense that they allow people to access these things for cheaper
| they are better. And Tinder, Duolingo, etc. are at least
| cheaper. The other two the cost savings is gained by the
| government or the airline
| dwedge wrote:
| Printing a boarding pass for the return trip when you can only
| check in 36 hours before departure is a lot trickier than
| printing at home. I'd prefer to print but this is one of the
| things that is simpler.
|
| The only annoying part is when the app gets battery killed with
| terrible reception in the airport and then takes 2 minutes to
| show you the boarding pass it already downloaded.
| JustExAWS wrote:
| That's why you put your boarding pass in your phone's wallet
| dwedge wrote:
| I don't use my phone wallet, but I suppose that is the
| purpose of it.
| tsm wrote:
| Time was you could check in online and get the ticket counter
| agent to print your boarding pass for you
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _2. Tinder is worse than IRL speed dating._
|
| women, and a small pool of men, use Tinder to efficiently find
| hookups. IRL speed dating is actually a much bigger pain in the
| ass for that purpose. it's "uber for nookie"
| mihaaly wrote:
| I believe they alwasy want and do change or revolution, or the
| most notorius ones disrupt life.
|
| No improvement - displacement vector towards the positive half
| space of life quality - is implied, except for those selling
| it.
| cblum wrote:
| > Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
|
| I generally agree, but I've had a great experience with one of
| those. I just wish they all did the same streamlined thing this
| one particular app I used did.
|
| The QR code I had to scan actually ran an App Clip instead of
| taking me to a website. Everything was done in one screen:
| enter plate, parking stall number, hours. My physical
| interaction with it was just scrolling a little and hitting a
| button. Done. Wonderful.
|
| Most parking solitions are a shitshow though. Multiple screens
| (seriously, why?!), having to create an account, not handling
| payment via Apple Pay so I have to enter my credit card
| manually. Having to enter the parking location manually (how
| come it's not a parameter in the QR code URL?). I'd really like
| to know what happens at the companies that develop those. It's
| borderline criminal how bad they are.
| rramadass wrote:
| You have hit the nail right on the head.
|
| I had come to this conclusion long ago i.e. computers/software
| are now majorly being oriented towards purely money-making (for
| certain vested interests) rather than doing any good for
| people/society or the world in general. The original idealism
| is long gone.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Parking apps are worse than parking meters._
|
| Ehhhhh. In the case where it's a one-off, yes, because I'm not
| going to install an app and give it my payment details if I
| only expect to rarely park in a particular place.
|
| But, for example, in downtown Truckee, California, I _always_
| use the parking app, especially in the winter, so I don 't have
| to futz with a machine out in the cold while my fingers are
| freezing. I pay from inside the warmth of my car, or inside the
| building I'm going to. Even in the summer, it's nice to be able
| to pay while I'm walking to my destination, rather than stand
| there staring at a machine, waiting for it to charge my credit
| card.
|
| It's also great to be able to "feed the meter" from my table at
| the restaurant if end up there longer than I expected, and the
| time has run out.
|
| > _Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding
| pass._
|
| To each their own, I guess. In general I prefer not to waste
| paper for one-time use things, and when I'm traveling I already
| have my phone, and not having to keep track of more things is a
| plus. I do worry about situations where I could lose or break
| my phone (though I could lose a printed boarding pass too) or
| its battery runs out, but if that happens I can still go to the
| check-in counter or a kiosk and get a boarding pass printed, so
| I'm really no worse off than if I didn't have the mobile app in
| the first place.
| seabombs wrote:
| Though there are exceptions (even amongst your examples IMO),
| of the good-fast-cheap triangle I feel the majority choose fast
| and cheap.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I paid for a parking space in Cambridge, MA once and got fined
| by a meter maid. The department didn't answer any
| communications I placed about it. I learned my lesson to always
| carry cash and never trust the app
| Izkata wrote:
| > 2. Tinder is worse than IRL speed dating.
|
| I don't know about Tinder specifically, but from what I've
| heard apps seem to be where most people meet nowadays - you'll
| find normal people mixed in with the weirdos. Meanwhile real-
| life speed dating is where the really desperate people go and
| is mostly weirdos.
| sobakeitso wrote:
| Lots of issues with your claims.
|
| 1. Parking Kitty is much much easier than fussing with
| grafitti-ed, vandalized, unserviced parking machines.
|
| 2. Speak for yourself, Tinder is a great rebound app; vastly
| more productive than the limited pools at speed dating (which
| was big in like, 1998?)
|
| 3. True. But I don't have time for language classes. Anecdote
| but Duolingo brought my French language skills back to life,
| but probably because I already had them.
|
| 4. Do you travel much? Apps are far, far superior to any
| mechanism. Let's say your flight is cancelled due to weather.
| You can (a) call the 800 number and wait in a phone queue, (b)
| go to the desk and wait in a physical queue, which is
| challenging if you are in a country that is not your native
| language, or (c) log into the app to make changes instead of
| waiting for a person. Have you ever wanted to change your seat,
| or upgrade? You have the same three choices. Yeah, apps are
| hands-down light-years ahead of alternatives when you travel
| frequently.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Where I live in the US, only fairly recently have I started
| encountering parking where you _cannot pay_ without doing it over
| the internet on a device. I haven 't seen any where you need an
| app specifically, but you do need a smartphone or internet
| capable device. I am very annoyed by this.
| LVB wrote:
| I write small utility apps that are often used by friends,
| families, the teams my kids are on, etc. None of them are overly
| complicated or aiming for award-winning polish. While I
| personally like installed apps, many people seem to prefer a link
| they can click. To accommodate that, I've been leaning towards
| Flutter as an acceptable compromise. The installed app has some
| better characteristics regarding device integration and storage,
| but I've been pleasantly surprised at how well the web versions
| work. When run on phone it's hard to tell (visually) that it's
| not the app. (UX is laggier though.)
| maelito wrote:
| That's why I'm building a Web map app. The Web is universal. It's
| already very capable.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Maps seem like a distinct failure mode of web apps. How do you
| load the map data on the website to navigate or orient yourself
| if you got lost outside the network coverage area?
| febusravenga wrote:
| It's easy. You can download data for certain areas you expect
| to be in offline mode and move all routing logic to app. It
| has been done many times in many apps. (ok, it only easy
| conceptually in reality it's quite big chunk of conscious
| dosign of app as a whole and no lesser chunk of actual work )
| maelito wrote:
| As far as I know, Google Maps used to not work outside of
| network coverage for like 15 years ? It already reached 1
| billion user without the download area feature.
| deeg wrote:
| To play somewhat of a devils advocate, 30 years ago this article
| could have been titled the tyranny of the internet. Is this much
| different from that.
| rex_gallorum2 wrote:
| 30 years ago, the internet was a novelty, nothing more, and it
| remained so easily for another ten years after that. It wasn't
| until the widespread adoption of smartphones that permanent
| connectivity came to be taken for granted.
|
| It was actually very easy to get by without any of it until
| quite recently, when legacy options for all kinds of things
| began being phased out.
| arp242 wrote:
| Eh? 30 years ago would be 1994. Most people did not have
| internet in 1994.
|
| But let's use 10 years: you absolutely could get by without
| internet 10 years ago. It would have been a bit of a hassle for
| a few things, but internet access wasn't needed for lots of
| every-day basic activities like parking a car, ordering in a
| restaurant, using tickets at a concert, etc.
|
| Also: it was easy to use internet at a library, often at zero
| to no costs. You didn't need to have a personal device only
| used by you.
| rex_gallorum2 wrote:
| Absolutely. The internet stopped being something you accessed
| and became something you were connected to 24/7, and that you
| have a persistent, high-speed connection. That was a huge
| shift.
| lucb1e wrote:
| You'd be right if, 30 years ago, people were required to
| download proprietary software and run that on a locked-down
| computer (you don't get to have administrator-level access to
| it) in order to do simple things like pay a parking meter
|
| Internet is (increasingly: was) an open system that you can
| connect to on your own terms. Browsers do your bidding, for the
| most part anyway and you can switch if you don't like one of
| them. However, you can't simply install an open source version
| of Google Play Services on your phone and if the Deutsche Bahn
| app doesn't work for you, there is no alternative that you can
| install to talk to their server and buy that train ticket (no
| equivalent to installing a different browser aka 'user agent')
| donatj wrote:
| I know people who love having specific apps for everything, but I
| generally find them a much worse user experience than the
| browser. Can't select/copy text. Sometimes if it's a terrible
| developer you can't paste. Can't arbitrarily zoom in.
|
| I know Android now lets me copy from the screen but it still
| flows incorrectly sometimes, like copying from a PDF.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| > Can't select/copy text... can't paste. Can't arbitrarily zoom
| in.
|
| Don't forget "Can't block advertisements and tracking"
| simonw wrote:
| A factor not mentioned in this article is people not being able
| to install apps because they've run out of space.
|
| I've seen this a bunch with people who buy the less expensive
| phones with smaller amounts of storage: they take photos until
| their phone is full, and now if they need to install a new app
| they have to delete something else (including potentially their
| photos) to make space for it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I guess I'm just lucky (or don't live in UK). Nothing in my daily
| life requires a smartphone. Banking is either with a local branch
| or on the web. Making an appointment with a doctor or dentist is
| a voice phone call to the office. All my routine bills can be
| paid by check or over the postal mail. All my usual restaurant
| spots have paper menus. Sometimes I go a week or so and forget
| that I have an old iphone7 in a drawer with a now drained
| battery. I don't think I regularly use a single app on it besides
| the browser.
|
| Here's hoping this doesn't change!
| karaterobot wrote:
| I see that this thread is full of a lot of very valid complaints
| about the hellish world we've created. But my reaction when these
| things come up is to point out that we effectively demanded this
| with our revealed preferences. We're at the triangulation of
| people _preferring_ to use their phones for most things, while
| also demanding the lowest price possible. At a certain point, it
| 's natural for companies to realize they can make more money--
| which is their reason for existing--by discontinuing products and
| lines of services that can be replaced by cheaper alternatives. I
| think everyone (over a certain age at least) has had the thought
| that brick and mortar stores all seem to be gone, and the
| realization that it's because everyone shops online, and then, if
| they are self-aware, the realization that they're part of that
| process. This is that at a somewhat zoomed-out scale.
|
| Government services are a different case. I suppose they feel
| cost pressure as well, but it's right to expect them to
| accommodate more people than private businesses.
| jmholla wrote:
| I don't think that's the case. Just because companies have
| successful business models doing things this way doesn't mean
| this is what people want or that it's the only way. It could
| just as easily be this is the most profitable way (which does
| not equate with delivered value) and these decisions are made
| by a subset of people who profit off of the fallout.
| edelbitter wrote:
| If my revealed preference is that you should pay extra to
| subsidize my shopping, does that really make _you_ any more
| complicit in the redistribution scheme?
| IshKebab wrote:
| This is mostly overblown, but the really annoying cases are the
| UK government themselves! Both the NHS app and HMRC app provide
| access to things you can't get to just from the web, _even though
| they are just webview apps!!_ It 's so dumb.
|
| But generally... just buy a phone and download the apps. I
| imagine in the 1800s someone wrote an article "those without
| telephones are unfairly penalised". This is just a modern
| version.
| 2shortplanks wrote:
| One thing this article doesn't mention is how this all falls
| apart when you spend time in more than one country.
|
| My UK bank (Barclays) won't let me install their app on my US
| iPhone (i.e. my phone that uses a US based iCloud account). Tesco
| won't let me use their loyalty app. I can't install an app
| that'll let me order Starbucks or McDonalds in the UK (I only
| have access to the US versions of these apps). I can't watch Star
| Trek because the US paramount plus app detects I'm in the UK and
| I can't install the UK version.
|
| I could switch to a UK iCloud account but then when I'm in the
| states everything falls apart the other way round.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yep, as someone who also travels between countries regularly,
| it's complete nonsense. "This app isn't available in your
| region" - what do you mean, I am literally in your region.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| The sad part is sometimes just switching languages/locales on
| your phone (i.e. changing the language from US English to
| British English) fixes this as it's all the code checks.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Is this the same on Android side ? I know that you can more
| easily sideload app there so it could be an issue only on
| iphone walled garden.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Android app can still geolocate the user so yeah, still the
| same issue.
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| You can add multiple Google accounts - one for each country,
| and switch between them on the Play Store. That's how I'm
| able to access apps from my home country and resident
| country.
|
| As for using the apps themselves, you might run into issues
| depending on what restrictions they have - IP address, SMS
| verification, etc.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > As for using the apps themselves, you might run into
| issues depending on what restrictions they have - IP
| address, SMS verification, etc.
|
| sure but that is the case on iphone too, at least you are
| not blocked by the phone manufacturer to download the app
| you need.
| anarazel wrote:
| I have two Google accounts, one in the us, one in Germany. So
| far that has divided to get around this for the apps I
| encountered it. But I'm not a heavy phone user...
| userabchn wrote:
| My ugly solution to this problem is to have a free Oracle Cloud
| VM in the other country that I use to run a VPN (Oracle
| provides instructions [1]). I then connect to this using
| OpenVPN on my phone, which allows me have a Google account that
| thinks I am in the other country and so allows me to install
| apps that are restricted to that country. I don't have the VPN
| connected all the time - only when I want to access the App
| Store using the Google account that I have for the other
| country.
|
| [1]: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/launching-your-
| own-...
| crusty wrote:
| To be a little pedantic, your solution is a solution to your
| problem, but only a fraction of the problem you're responding
| to. Your VPN won't help access the UK apps that require a UK
| phone localization if those same services aren't also
| available in the region of your VPN exit node. And since he's
| talking about UK-specific apps and services, VPNing his US
| phone back to the US isn't any help.
|
| Netflix? Sure UK NHS? Not so much.
| realityking wrote:
| Interestingly EU consumer protection cooperation is currently
| claiming this is illegal within the EU/between EU markets:
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_24_...
|
| I hope they manage to change things.
| sorokod wrote:
| UK is not part of EU.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Even more so now
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I've had the same issue between Spain and France, so it might
| be illegal but it's still the case.
| Farbklex wrote:
| I recently complained to my local cities transportation office
| that their mobile app for bus tickets was only available for
| German Google users. The actually changed it now.
| Shank wrote:
| > I could switch to a UK iCloud account but then when I'm in
| the states everything falls apart the other way round.
|
| If it's only two countries, you can sign in and out of the App
| Store only with two regions. This is how I maintained a Japan
| and US region account on the same device. The thing that sucks
| is changing between accounts for updates, but it does work to
| some degree.
| kstenerud wrote:
| I can't buy overnight bunk tickets on Ukrainian trains anymore
| because I need to authenticate, and the only authentication
| methods require either Ukrainian citizenship or residency
| cards.
|
| I can't install the app for my new Amex card because my Google
| account was opened in Canada and I live in Germany now.
|
| And it keeps getting worse every year. I'm worried that
| eventually my American and Canadian banking apps will stop
| working...
|
| The internet was supposed to make this shit simpler.
| petertodd wrote:
| > I can't buy overnight bunk tickets on Ukrainian trains
| anymore because I need to authenticate, and the only
| authentication methods require either Ukrainian citizenship
| or residency cards.
|
| In fairness, that specific case is probably intentional. They
| have quite limited train capacity as all passenger air travel
| was forced to switch to trains/busses, and I suspect they're
| trying to save it for locals. It is annoying though; I've
| been to Ukraine quite a few times recently and have used that
| app myself.
| kstenerud wrote:
| It's actually to stop buying and selling tickets on the
| secondary market, which is fair. It's just the tech
| mismatch causing unintended consequences. Even the guys at
| Privatbank were shaking their heads at the absurdity (and
| they're the ones who run one of the authentication
| mechanisms. Even having a bank account there in your name
| is not enough).
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I recently travelled to Europe and found that a number of
| transportation apps disallowed me installing them. Toll road
| apps, public transit, etc...
|
| It was a major pain, and to make it worse I got fined EUR130 by
| Ausfinag for not paying tolls, but I couldn't install their app
| and I bought the wrong sticker at the gas station because as it
| turns out there are a bunch of special areas with additional
| tolls above the base toll. I tried my best to comply but the
| system is totally user hostile.
| whall6 wrote:
| Ha seems like the app is the scapegoat for this one
| odiroot wrote:
| Truth be told, the tolls in Austria are a total mess.
| mneubrand wrote:
| There is a country wide sticker/digital vignette you can
| get for different periods of time and a handful of tunnels
| that cost extra money that you can pay in cash or by card
| at the time you drive through one of those. How is that a
| mess?
|
| Of course a system like Germany where you don't have any
| tolls is even easier but compared to France or Italy where
| you constantly have to pull over for toll stops and end up
| paying a multiple more for most trips I think this is
| pretty great
| a012 wrote:
| Also as a tourist, I'm glad that DB app just works for me to
| register and buy tickets so easily with out hassle (though
| their trains scheduling is the problem)
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I have an account at a credit union that only offers SMS 2FA,
| and requires it for every login. I can't connect to that phone
| number when I'm abroad, so I can't access my account.
| abraxas wrote:
| Yes, I've long given up trying to reconcile this mess and
| bought three separate cell phones with three separate sim cards
| to for the three countries where I spend non-trivial amount of
| time.
| mihaaly wrote:
| When I was young in Europe the trend was that the place where
| you live will dictate and limit less and less of your life.
| Technology, traveling, motivation of people will allow roaming,
| postcode independent existence.
|
| Well, the trend froze up very fast and is in full reverse
| nowadays, I am in my early 50s and I believe me and my
| children's life will such more and more, be even more difiicult
| by the reverse of intents towards a more unified humanity. The
| law and all working with law will remain a big fucking barrier
| even if the representatives the people choose to form their
| life (politicians) would magicly become nice and selfless and
| efficient, they fight hard to do business the same shitty way
| as 100s of years ago, all differenty in all puny geographic
| regions, in as much diverse as possible, as incompetible with
| each other as possible. And several happily collaborate as it
| is a fix income to do unoptimal and fragmented way, happily
| waste our resources providing services in this muddy water.
| Idesmi wrote:
| Not just freedom of living and work, but things even more
| basic: Have you tried crossing the border with Germany or
| Austria by train? You'll most likely get a mini deportation
| squad on board, despite all agreeing to Schengen Convention.
| odiroot wrote:
| This is all rather easy on Android. You can have multiple
| Google (Play) accounts set to different countries.
|
| But most app developers don't even enforce it. I had UK bank
| apps installed through my "German" Google account.
| lucb1e wrote:
| That might also be because it's not legal to geoblock
| consumers within the "single european market" EU strategy
| thing. The bank might have not blocked German residents from
| using their UK bank account before and now they noticed
| there's no reason to bother people with geoblocking and so it
| still works after the UK broke out of the EU
| Zak wrote:
| You can also sideload or use something like Aurora Store to
| access Play Store content without restrictions. Yet another
| reason iOS is a nonstarter for me.
| bmoxb wrote:
| I don't see why I should even have to set up multiple
| accounts. For the vast majority of these apps, I see no
| reason they need to be geo-locked anyway.
| gamedever wrote:
| AFAIK this is only a problem on iPhone, not Android?
|
| Note: I have an iPhone. It sucks. Same issue. I have bank
| accounts in other countries. The app needs an update. To
| install the update I have to switch countries on my account
| which instantly voids any and all subscriptions through Apple.
| It's insane.
|
| It's even more crazy that every single Apple employee I know
| has this issue but for whatever reason it's not fixed.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The UK National Health Service app is restricted to the UK
| only: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nhs.o
| nline... -- that's not too crazy, as it's also only useful
| for people resident in the UK.
|
| The McDonald's UK app is also restricted to the UK: https://p
| lay.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds.... which
| is daft, why wouldn't they want tourists and visitors?
|
| Searching "<city> transport app" with large cities, the first
| restricted example I found is for Sheffield, which is limited
| to the UK: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.
| yorcard.ts... . (It's the official app, the contact email
| ends .gov.uk.)
|
| An example in the article, of paying for on-street parking,
| is also blocked for tourists: https://play.google.com/store/a
| pps/details?id=com.paybyphone...
|
| I'm not going to bother registering an additional Google
| account when I visit Sheffield then want to take the tram to
| McDonald's.
|
| (By "restricted" I mean Google Play reports "This app is not
| available for your device" which is a current phone
| registered in Denmark.)
| archon810 wrote:
| If you're on Android, apkmirror.com or another similar site is
| a good and safe solution.
| ptx wrote:
| On the safety point, how would I ensure that e.g. the APK for
| my banking app is authentic and unmodified?
| archon810 wrote:
| https://www.apkmirror.com/faq/#Security_What_measures_do_yo
| u...
| qingcharles wrote:
| I had to keep two phones for this purpose[0] and pay two
| cellphone bills, one in the USA and one in the UK. It helped
| when traveling in Europe though because then you are only
| paying UK data rates, not USA-on-vacation rates.
|
| It is still an insane situation, though.
|
| [0] LloydsTSB had the same restriction on app store
| commandersaki wrote:
| If you create multiple Apple accounts in different regions, you
| can switch to that regions app store in the App Store app (this
| doesn't have to do with your iPhone iCloud account) by logging
| in to the relevant account.
|
| I have a US and an Aus Apple Account, and I switch the account
| on App Store to get apps that are region locked.
| relistan wrote:
| I feel your pain. I've been dealing with this since 2011. The
| thing that makes it even worse is subscriptions. You can't
| switch app stores while you have subscriptions.
| bxparks wrote:
| United Airlines used to accept credit cards to pay for meals
| during the flight. It worked great. At some point they dropped
| that and replaced it with something that involves their slow
| bloated buggy app that crashes on my phone. So I stopped buying
| their meals.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm 50% sure you can set this credit card through their
| website.
| bxparks wrote:
| Yeah, I remember reading something like that, but isn't the
| United app required to pay for the meal on the flight, so
| that they know which credit card to charge? To be honest, I
| have never been able to understand their payment process, and
| since the United app doesn't run on my phone, I just gave up
| on the in-flight meals.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| The discoverability is horrible, but in this case there
| actually is a somewhat accessible way to pay: if you visit
| https://united.com/inflightpayment, you can add your card
| details for a specific flight before the flight (possibly
| also during the flight using in-flight WiFi, but don't
| quote me on that).
|
| I actually find it more convenient than presenting a card
| in person, because my country uses chip-and-pin cards and
| many American (soft-)POS terminals break when presented
| with one. There's also less of a chance of my bank
| arbitrarily flagging the transaction as suspicious.
| montroser wrote:
| I never install apps, and I don't have any problem with private
| companies offering discounts or whatever via apps. The market
| will do its thing.
|
| But where I have a big problem is when my local government
| requires me to install apps to do basic things like parking. It
| would almost be okay if the apps were developed in house and were
| open source. But of course they're not. And anyway there's no
| reason they can't just be web based.
|
| So now I just don't pay for parking and I pay the ticket if I get
| a ticket...
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The market will do its thing.
|
| Markets' "thing" is concentration of capital and the whittling
| of service/product providers until just a few major ones, or a
| single one, is left, and then they collude on pricing,
| bypassing/preventing regulation, psychological manipulation of
| customers etc.
| grg0 wrote:
| Yup, it will certainly do its thing.
| nmstoker wrote:
| It's unfortunate the article accepts the questionable argument
| about apps being more secure - companies say that to soften
| people up to handing out personal data access that apps enable.
| thyw123129 wrote:
| Resist! If a bank forces you to use a surveillance device
| (smartphone) to do Internet banking or forces you to install
| invasive apps on your PC, don't.
|
| TAN apps were still reasonable. TAN generators too, though the
| hardware sucked and used an insane amount of batteries. Then
| banks forced apps and smartphones and that is the point where to
| say no thanks.
|
| They are still required to perform transactions by filling out
| forms with a pen. It sounds like a lot of work but it really
| isn't. Use cash or credit cards and cut down the number of manual
| transactions.
| mharrig1 wrote:
| My anecdote for the pile is that my apartment complex uses one of
| those apps to pay for laundry services, but is slightly less
| expensive than the coin based counterparts _on the same machine_.
|
| What's even worse is that the app is incredibly poorly made such
| that occasionally some payments just fall into the void and
| either start the machine for free or require a double charge.
| Anytime I have reached out to complain about these I just get
| told to bring my phone closer to the machine.
| techorange wrote:
| My greatest aspiration in life (yes, hyperbole) is to retire and
| get rid of my smartphone, and I can imagine it's just going to be
| harder and harder as time goes on. I went into a restaurant
| recently and asked for a menu and they looked at me like I was
| from another planet.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Agreed. After 27 years of working in IT and having to carry a
| mobile device (first a pager, then a flip phone, & now a
| smartphone) for on-call duties, carrying a mobile device has
| always felt like a punishment to me. The days when I can walk
| around device-free are the happiest, most stress-free times of
| my life. But the tech companies are making it harder and harder
| to do.
| nicbou wrote:
| I went on a trip without any tech. No smartphone.
|
| I made it five days but could have gone for longer. It was
| interesting to see how the system worked from without, and how
| people reacted to requests that would have been banal in the
| nineties. For the most part, it went well. Very few things were
| unavailable. I only remember hotel phones being missing or
| broken. However it was impossible to handle things back home
| and my life would have started falling apart after a few weeks
| of ignoring emails.
| bdcravens wrote:
| In the late 1980s and early 1990s, you started to see more and
| more interactive phone systems appear due to touch-tone phones
| being common place. However, I grew up poor, and for quite some
| time we still had rotary phones (when we could afford to have a
| phone that is), making those systems inaccessible to us.
| s3graham wrote:
| """Many tech experts also argue that apps are generally more
| secure than websites..."""
|
| "Many", like, maybe the ones who are trying to sell you on an app
| development contract? But not many others!
| pipecmd wrote:
| ...following some excerpts from an article in the NZZ (swiss
| newspaper): "Right to an offline life and much more: French-
| speaking Switzerland is becoming a global pioneer of a new
| digital fundamental right". Source:
| https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/die-romandie-mausert-sich-zur-wel...
|
| Neuchatel is including "digital integrity" in its constitution,
| and other cantons could follow. The National Council had
| criticized a proposal as purely symbolic. But the consequences
| are visible in Geneva.
|
| The first time it could be dismissed as an accident, the second
| time not: that's what Alexis Roussel, the driving force behind a
| fundamental right to digital integrity, says. Roussel, a member
| of the Pirate Party and former president, is in good spirits.
| After Geneva in 2023, his home canton of Neuchatel also enshrined
| the new fundamental right in the constitution on November 24.
| Both times the people voted yes by a very clear margin: 94
| percent in Geneva and almost 92 percent in Neuchatel.
|
| From the new legislative period in 2025, the Neuchatel
| constitution will therefore guarantee not only the right to
| physical, mental and psychological integrity, but also the right
| to digital integrity. The new right only applies in relation to
| the state. It includes, for example, the right to security in
| digital space, the right "not to be monitored, measured and
| analyzed", the right to an "offline life" and the right to be
| forgotten.
|
| [...]
|
| In Geneva, Alexis Roussel is already seeing the first
| consequences of the right to digital integrity. Secondary school
| students there no longer use the office software Microsoft
| Office, but the non-commercial alternative Libre Office. The
| education department explained the change to the newspaper "Le
| Temps" by saying that Microsoft has been receiving personal data
| such as names and email addresses since an update to its
| licensing terms. However, the canton is only allowed to process
| data at foreign companies if they are "adequately" protected
| there.
|
| [...]
|
| In the canton of Neuchatel, too, the new fundamental right is
| already being mentioned in concrete terms in political debates.
| The liberal municipal councillor Catherine Zeter said on RTS
| television about the planned closure of the post office in Boudry
| that the company would probably prefer to offer its services only
| digitally. But, said Zeter, this "completely" violates the right
| to an offline life that the people of Neuchatel have just decided
| on with their new fundamental right.
| ComposedPattern wrote:
| It's funny how people in this thread keep saying "well if you're
| going to complain about people being penalized for not using
| apps, you might as well complain about people being penalized for
| not using telephones/cars/internet"... and yes, I am going to
| complain about all of those things. I imagine that many or most
| homeless people don't have reliable access to any of the above. I
| have an anxiety disorder that makes it hard for me to drive or
| talk on the phone, and I'm sure there are many people with more
| extreme conditions for whom it's impossible. There are people
| like Richard Stallman and members of certain religious
| communities who have strong moral objections to using certain
| technologies. Society should accommodate all sorts of people and
| all sorts of ways of living.
| nicbou wrote:
| Immigrants are often left out for various reasons, such as not
| having the right documents, having an unsupported kind of
| passport, not having an address they can register as their
| home, not having an app store account in the right country, not
| having a local payment method, and a variety of other issues.
| kevincox wrote:
| IMHO at some point it makes sense to start requiring the
| internet, it makes a lot of things easier. But when we do that
| we need to ensure that everyone is supported. For example
| ensuring that people have ready internet access at public
| libraries. Providing government-provided email inboxes for
| receiving government communication (lots of homeless people get
| locked out of regular free mail providers). Train support staff
| at these libraries (or whatever institution provides these
| services) to help people who need assistance though the
| government processes, including doing it on their behalf when
| required.
| Terr_ wrote:
| To quote something from a favorite fiction-series, where
| someone has traveled to a relatively backwards planet:
|
| > "Poor?" said Cordelia, bewildered. "No electricity? How can
| it be on the comm network?"
|
| > "It's not, of course," answered Vorkosigan.
|
| > "Then how can anybody get their schooling?"
|
| > "They don't."
|
| > Cordelia stared. "I don't understand. How do they get their
| jobs?"
|
| > "A few escape to the Service. The rest prey on each other,
| mostly." Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. "Have you no
| poverty on Beta Colony?"
|
| > "Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of
| course, but... _no comconsoles_? "
|
| > Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. "Is not
| owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can
| imagine?" he said in wonder.
|
| > "It's the first article in the constitution. 'Access to
| information shall not be abridged.' "
|
| -- _Shards of Honor_ (1986) by Lois McMaster Bujold
|
| In the 39 years since this was published, I would have hoped
| our real society would have advanced a bit more in that
| direction.
| theragra wrote:
| Thanks, a bit of nostalgy from my youth. I read it in
| Russian, in 200x, though
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I imagine that many or most homeless people don't have
| reliable access to any of the above.
|
| In the US there is a specific government program called
| "Lifeline" that provides cell phone service to low income
| people, https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-
| income-cons... (whether it gets DOGEd remains to be seen...)
| And where I live there are a bunch of programs that provide
| free cell phones to homeless people.
|
| It's not a panacea because lots of homeless people have other
| problems that make it difficult to keep a cell phone and not
| lose it. But that's really a separate issue - not having access
| is really not much of a barrier for the homeless, at least in
| the US.
| stonogo wrote:
| You cannot receive Lifeline benefits without an address in
| most states.
| ksec wrote:
| And in the good old day. Apple will force its hands on these sort
| of issues. But 10 years after Apple Pay and the Claims to replace
| your wallet. They are still millions miles away from doing it.
|
| In many ways Apple without Steve Jobs feels more Google and
| Microsoft but with better taste of software and hardware.
|
| > _" So the people who make the company more successful are the
| sales and marketing people, and they end up running the
| companies. And the 'product people' get run out of the decision-
| making forums. The companies forget how to make great products.
| The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to
| this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running
| these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a
| bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's
| required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. _
|
| >"And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting
| to help the costumers." *
| Carrok wrote:
| > 10 years after Apple Pay and the Claims to replace your
| wallet. They are still millions miles away from doing it.
|
| Clearly we have very different experiences here, because Apple
| Pay has effectively replaced my wallet. I don't carry any cash
| and carry one or two cards for the rare times when tap to pay
| is unavailable.
| modeless wrote:
| The US government hands out smartphones with service for free.
| Elsewhere you can get used phones for practically nothing. Most
| places have wifi these days so you don't even need to pay for
| service just to use an app at a store.
|
| Not having a smartphone is a choice. Nobody is obligated to
| support you in that choice. It's not "unfair". Not everything you
| dislike is "unfair".
|
| What's actually unfair is the app store monopolies that dictate
| what you can and can't do with the phone you "own". But I don't
| really expect The Guardian to understand the true issue.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Just saying, 99% of the app could be replaced by a browser
| bookmark.
|
| Of course some companies don't want it so they make their website
| unusable to smartphone.
|
| There isn't really much that technically would prevent people
| from using their web browser to pay the parking or to pay
| McDonald.
|
| You can have geolocation on browser too, save your account, take
| picture and so on.
|
| It's just better for these companies if we have their app because
| we can't use ad blocker and just close the browser. The app, it
| can send data 24/24.
|
| For instance, I have yet to find an llm or ai chatbot app that
| doesn't force me to have the Google play store enabled on my
| phone and to be logged in with my Google account.
|
| What the FCK they care if I have a Google account on my phone to
| be able to use chatgpt, deepseek, Mistral, lama and others ? More
| and more do that, recently the app I used to use to track food
| quality (Yuka) did that too.
|
| The more thing goes, the less app I use and the more I rely on
| web browser. And those who refuse to work in browser, i just
| ditch them.
|
| I feel like we reached a plateau years ago and now things are
| going downhill with android and iPhone.
| raintrees wrote:
| I chose to use a flip phone over a previous Android phone around
| 10 years ago when ISPs/Phone providers showed that security lapse
| issues for them was just a cost of doing business. I used to
| store private client info in Exchange and sync it, but I could
| not, in good conscience, continue to do so with the knowledge of
| that information's exposure.
|
| I recently worked with NetGear support to have a new router
| replaced after we determined the firmware was known to be
| problematic, and the only way the level 2 support person had of
| correcting it required their app.
|
| So fortunately, there may still be ways around working with IT
| without a "smart" phone, and I will continue to blaze that trail
| as needed.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Yes! I've often said "software engineers should be doomed to use
| what they create. Or at least watch others try to use it." One
| example is our local Costco parking garage. They replaced the old
| push-button ticketing kiosk (which had nothing wrong with it)
| with one that had a touchscreen. Many times the line is backed up
| and one day I saw why. The guy was pushing the touchscreen button
| as if it were physical, and it wasn't registering the tap. He was
| using multiple fingers and mashing instead of using one finger
| and doing a clean tap inside the digital button.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Perhaps while wearing gloves, because it's really cold outside?
| nicbou wrote:
| They should be forced to use it from scratch on a cheap Android
| phone using spotty signal.
| febusravenga wrote:
| Times where SWEs decided about these things are long gone. It's
| all in hands of product managers, designers and other business
| oriented people.
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| I don't have a permanent address nor a permanent (mobile) phone
| number. It's impossible to do so many things without these. I
| have to use my mother's address and my mother is currently suing
| me in court, so go figure how much mail reaches me. Without a
| permanent address, you can't open a bank account, you can't use
| many government services,... It's a "required" field on many
| online forms. It's such a pain because they don't need those info
| to give me the services they offer...
| EasyMark wrote:
| This is why I wished all apps were backed by webapps of similar
| capabilities. I know that I personally see how it goes with the
| website first before I install an app. I prefer the browser
| sandbox by far to the phone OS
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| I hate the app-ification of everything. 95% of apps could just be
| a web page, and should be.
| IOUnix wrote:
| Yeah, that's how that works. The world moves on and progress
| happens. You don't have to necessarily like it, or embrace it.
| But if the entire world is moving a certain direction and you
| decide to not move with it, that fine. But it's a choice you're
| making. You may not like that the entire world is going from
| horses to automobiles, but if you refuse to embrace them you
| can't be surprised when the grocery store is now a 3 hour walk
| away.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Ticketmaster is the worst of these for me. They have a near
| monopoly, and started forcing this shit on everyone a few years
| ago with covid as the excuse. Now going to one of their concerts
| is like taking an international flight.
|
| Forget privacy, forget having a paper stub as a souvenir (not
| even an option), forget paying with cash. As I avoid
| ticketmaster, I've avoided most concerts the last few years...
| only going to small local venues, which provide the options
| above.
| mglvsky wrote:
| Even for those who is OK with Ticketmaster - there is little
| "surprise" - hostile location/IP-based blockings. Do you want
| to buy some tickets for concert in Germany while being on trip
| in non-EU country? No way - we are just blocking you! They even
| learned to detect whether a client use VPN so latter could not
| circumvent this ridiculous obstacle.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Ticketmaster is the one of the shittiest apps I've ever used in
| my life. Constantly have to reactivate because it forgets your
| info, it fails to display tickets, it shows ads, etc.
|
| But I recently discovered you can just view the tickets in your
| mobile browser instead and it will work fine for whatever
| scanners the venues use.
| steelframe wrote:
| I'm all-in on this. If the only way for me to attend an event
| is to deal with an app on my phone, I automatically assume
| there are a few dozen other activities or events I'd enjoy
| doing more during that time and choose to go do one of those
| instead.
| MandieD wrote:
| The big group that keeps getting ignored are older people who
| actually do have smartphones, but find them increasingly
| difficult to use as they age, due to how fiddly touch interfaces
| can be and visuals designed by and for people in their 20s, not
| 70s and 80s.
|
| Typing on a smartphone is impossible for my 70-something father,
| even on the larger models.
| miltonlost wrote:
| Touchscreens also frequently don't work with older people's
| skin which is often dry. They often literally cannot type
| because the screen doesn't pick up the electrical currents in
| the drier, more insulated fingers. Physical keyboards wouldn't
| have this problem.
| MandieD wrote:
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what my dad's problem boils down
| to. He worked in construction for half a century,
| specializing in concrete, so heaven knows what that did to
| the skin on his fingertips.
| gs17 wrote:
| Same for my parents (ironically, my 90-something grandmother
| can use an iPhone with no problem). My dad has Raynaud's (poor
| fingertip circulation), so touch screens sometimes just won't
| work for him anyways. Making things app-only is practically
| discrimination.
| sylware wrote:
| Solution: restore noscript/basic (x)html interop, where it can do
| a good enough job (like most online services where doing a few
| years ago...).
| FpUser wrote:
| Toronto, Canada. Tried to pay for street parking using their
| machine and with credit card. It spat out some gibberish on
| display that flashed too fast to read. Parking ticket guy was
| hanging around so I asked him WTF is going on. He said I must use
| the app or he will give a ticket. I tried to argue with him that
| they must still accept the other form of payment and I do not
| want to pollute phone with the app. He said that he does not give
| a shit and will issue ticket regardless of what fucking Toronto's
| parking website pages say.
| LorenzoGood wrote:
| My grandfather does not have a cellphone, however he seems pretty
| creative about getting around situations where he would need an
| app. For example, my sister had some sporting event where the
| only way to get a ticket was to use an app, so he snuck into the
| hand stamping line, and entered the event.
| exe34 wrote:
| I don't mind having a phone, but the only way I'll put personal
| information on it is if I have root access and can run a
| firewall. anything else and it's not my phone.
|
| more and more apps are starting to reject rooted phones. I'm
| dropping them for now, but I worry that at some point I'll have
| to carry a decoy phone for essential apps. or maybe I'll learn to
| just not put anything more personal than the stuff required to
| use the essential ones like health care and transport.
| grg0 wrote:
| I've left gyms and restaurants because of this crap.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I hate having to use a metro app or bank app or app for
| conferences or whatever. Who knows what the privacy and security
| of all these are. I am sure it's a matter of time before they all
| get breached.
| danjc wrote:
| Not the point of the article but for most apps, there is no
| technical reason for them to be installed apps rather than web
| apps.
| la_fayette wrote:
| In Germany you would mostly be forced to fill forms on paper and
| send it back and forth by mail, do payments in cash or use
| support hotlines on the phone, which take a long waiting time to
| get to somebody... Apps would be fine :-)
| dwedge wrote:
| Another thing that irritated me is app designers assuming I have
| email on my phone. I don't, I use it for work and will use my
| laptop when I want to check email. Too many apps send you a
| "magic link" in your email to login with no alternative.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I do have email on my phone and it still doesn't work: the app
| that triggered the email doesn't have a URL bar so I can't
| paste the link into there. The link is often also not a real
| link but the epitome of phishing. After resolving the tracking
| link to the real link, I need to somehow trick an app into
| sending a system broadcast event for the OS to notice that
| there is an app that wants to overwrite valid HTTP(S) URLs and
| handle them inside this app instead of in a browser
|
| What ever happened to the protocol part of the URL to direct
| the data to the right software handler, I will probably never
| understand
| deergomoo wrote:
| It mentions parking which is a similar category of annoyance, but
| I think the multitude of mutually incompatible apps for EV
| charging pose a real barrier to adoption too. Maybe not in a way
| people are explicitly aware of, but it certainly makes up part of
| the stories about difficulty and inconvenience with public
| charging.
|
| I can pay for petrol with any card or, if I'm feeling really old
| school, by going into a building and handing a person cash.
| Someone like my mum, who still likes to draw the cash she'll need
| for the week and spend that, wouldn't even entertain the idea of
| having to download and maintain a suite of apps for every brand
| of charger.
|
| Apps are a good convenience option for those that want them, but
| they shouldn't be the only option, especially not for something
| as essential as fuelling your car. I would welcome regulation on
| these, even a baby step of "all chargers must accept contactless
| payment". I'd like to see manned charging stations and cash
| options too--and I say that as someone who pays for everything by
| card--but I fear in the short term that might hamper
| infrastructure rollout.
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Not a single word about covid related apps?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| One word: Orwellian.
| riedel wrote:
| It is even worse: people with smartphones not running software
| from either Google or Apple are penalized. I have huge problems
| right now because the only second factor from one of my banks
| (that also has the inbox for my insurances) is a Android app that
| requires play protect.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was just whini- er, _talking_ about this, this morning.
|
| The main issue is that end-users not only _accept_ crappy
| software, they _pay_ for it (sometimes, quite a bit). They also
| recommend it to others, give it good reviews, and subcultures of
| "tech-macho" workarounds to bugs cause people to actually
| _prefer_ crap. It 's infuriating (to me, but not, perhaps, to
| many tech companies).
|
| As long as that keeps happening, the quality of software is going
| to remain in the shitter. It doesn't make economic sense to write
| good software. Writing high-Quality software is a _lot_ more
| expensive than writing crap.
|
| My software tends to be pretty high-Quality, but that's mainly
| because it is free software, and I tend to work alone, so its
| scope is quite limited. I would not expect a commercial company
| to develop software the way that I do. It would just cost too
| much.
| afandian wrote:
| I'm glad to see people talking about this. I'd love to see a new
| right: The right to not have your phone on you.
|
| For whatever reason. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe it's being fixed.
| Maybe the battery is dead.
|
| (Maybe you don't want to get a Google or Apple account. But
| that's not the only use case.)
|
| All public services and essential services (government services,
| banks, car parks, etc) should respect this right. It's bizarre
| that people think it's such an outlandish request.
| causal wrote:
| The increasing necessity of the Internet is also why giving
| companies the power to exile someone from the Internet is an
| extremely broad power that is increasingly like a prison
| sentence. E.g. the recent cases of publishers demanding ISPs
| cut off users who have pirated content.
| elric wrote:
| Maybe the currently shitty transatlantic political climate will
| force politicians to think about the reliance on 2 US tech
| companies for every single piece of mobile software.
|
| The UK tried to force Apple to Do Evil and failes. Who's to the
| say the US wouldn't be (or hasn't been) more successful?
|
| If I were a politician relying on WhatsApp for secure
| communications (as many over here seem to be), I'd be very
| worried.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >It's bizarre that people think it's such an outlandish
| request.
|
| Bizarre but not surprising. Tyranny of the masses.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I refuse to use service specific apps (on personal devices) and
| let the chips fall where they may. So far the vast majority of
| stuff continues to work ...
| sirjaz wrote:
| Democratize it and of you require an app on the phone that same
| app needs to be available on all major pc OSes. Problem solved.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I saw on Usenet about "Digitalzwang". Here is the quotation:
|
| > The German movement "Digitalcourage" has coined the term
| "Digitalzwang" (compulsory digitalisation) for this feature. For
| instance, some public funding programmes cannot be used unless
| you have access to a PC (a smartphone is not sufficient) hooked
| up to the internet.
|
| > Digitalcourage support responsible digitalisation by offering
| help in the usage of secure authorisation and encryption but
| strictly disapproves of any form of compulsory digitalisation.
| People who refuse using public data networks, whatever their
| motives, must have equal rights as everybody else.
|
| What they describe is not quite what the linked article
| describes, but is similar and is related.
|
| I would further say, that in addition to that (and the stuff
| mentioned in the linked article), you should not be required to
| use computers with specific complicated software (including web
| browsers), or to use computers (including smartphones) or credit
| cards at all, if that is applicable to whatever you are doing
| working with. There is also the issue of a smartphone running out
| of battery power or otherwise not working, even if you do have
| it.
|
| (I have once been in a restaurant where a app is required,
| although customers who do not have a smartphone can borrow a iPad
| from them. This is not as bad, but still it is not as good as
| just not requiring it at all.)
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Some of these website-in-apps drive me fucking nuts. They will
| switch you to the app, ask for validation through email, and then
| when you go to check the email, it loses your place in its
| internal browser, sending it back to the login screen, and so the
| number you've retrieved is worthless unless you know how to
| specifically minimize the app on the screen, which it will not
| tell you beforehand how to do. The bouncing back and forth is
| annoying and idiotic.
| casey2 wrote:
| This entire article is fodder for techbros to circle jerk about
| how impactful they are despite any productivity gains being
| marginal or nonexistent.
|
| It's goes further into nonsensical territory when a progressive
| shows up and starts complaining about how the people who don't
| want to participate in society are being unfairly punished. That
| being poor is somehow not only a problem, but also YOUR problem.
| ge96 wrote:
| I bought tickets for a concert, had to download an app
|
| Had to give my phone number to reserve a table today
|
| Tickets on your phone for airline, it's not all bad saw some
| elder couple with flip phones (they're able to get by without a
| smart phone)
| elric wrote:
| Forcing apps on people keeps the Apple/Google duopoly in place.
| Every alternative mobile OS fails unless it has an Android
| compatibility layer. And even then it will fail because Google's
| anti-competitive Play Integrity API won't work, and many users
| will be unable to use bank/payment apps.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| Some even want to unleash the tyranny of apps upon our children
| at school. Can you imagine? Brainrot is a thing.
| byyoung3 wrote:
| lmao i think its those with smartphones are unfairly penalized
| Pavilion2095 wrote:
| Although I have a smartphone, I understand the problem. It amazes
| me how many businesses create so many unnecessary obstacles
| between the user and the purchase these days. It doesn't make
| sense to me.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| It's especially bad for elderly people. I have elderly family
| members with cancer and other serious issues who struggle because
| medical offices expect contact to be only in app messages and
| chats. When these patients call on the phone and say they need to
| talk to someone on the phone because they struggle with accessing
| other forms of communication they still often only reply back in
| the app/website. Some are elderly and rural enough to have grown
| up without electricity or running water until they were
| adults(yes, they grew up in the US). They still don't have
| smartphones. They have <1mbit Internet. 2FA is a major hurdle for
| them. Some have vision problems that make reading text difficult.
| Some are hard of hearing and struggle with the phone too. So many
| people are left behind by trying to make patient communication
| efficient for the staff and documented for their electronic
| records systems. No one is thinking about what's efficient and
| effective for the patients they serve, and no one will because
| doctors have huge debts to pay and have to work for the Wall
| Street crowd.
| sobakeitso wrote:
| I went through this a year ago. My 95 year old dad was in rehab
| after major heart surgery and they wanted to communicate with
| him through a clunky android app. It was enraging. He could
| barely use the TV remote and they wanted him to navigate an app
| that kept crashing, forcing him to log in with a username and
| corporate-approved password. Absolute horror. I feel for you.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| There is certainly an analogy here to servers that respond to
| HTTP ("websites") that ignore the concept of "user agent", i.e.,
| the user chooses the client, and try to force the "www user" to
| choose a certain "web browser", usually one funded by
| advertising.
|
| In the case of handheld computers ("smartphones") the situation
| is even more restrictive. The "mobile user" is forced to use both
| s specific operating system and a specific client in order to
| communicate with servers that respond to HTTP ("backends"), where
| the former is controlled by a company wholly or partially
| dependant on surveillance, data collection and the sale of online
| advertising services as a "business model".
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