Yet another reason to build a website instead of an "App".
It seems to me that all this could be delivered via website or PWA... Then no one could block it.
Careful client side caching would help for times of no connectivity.
American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
81–90 of 258 posts
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I wasn't aware there were English speakers who didn't know the word roster either. I know what it is, but maybe the people that don't use schedule or timetable?
Don't they say 'rota' in the UK?
Yes, “rota” would be the commonest word for this idea. Although I did immediately understand “roster” in the article, so maybe that’s also in use. “Rota” is definitely what I would say though
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#83One side story. There is no comments / voice on the AA side. Read like a biased article. "become a must-have" reads like exaggeration
By that reasoning, if the company refuses to comment an article should not be published, or if published must be rejected as one sided? That's convenient.
You can always still publish when they don't react within a reasonable time, and add a comment to that effect, as you can often see in newspaper articles.
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#84One side story. There is no comments / voice on the AA side. Read like a biased article. "become a must-have" reads like exaggeration
> American Airlines has been contacted for comment.
They have been asked for one.
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#85The app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequence-decoder/id1439988599 For the public: -Past and future departure information for all airports -Past and future arrival information for all airports -Individual flight info lookup For flight attendants: -Flight specific info inflight -ETB alerts -Open time alerts -Flight alerts -Open time display -Sequence details -Calendar -Reserve call out list -Standby list -Crew chat…
How is the app getting the information for flight attendants, some of which looks like it might be security- and privacy-sensitive?
If it turns out that the app was getting confidential information using flight attendants' access credentials, potential problems: (1) potentially leaking confidential information to other parties, such as app developer, partners, and other users; and (2) potential additional weakness in handling access credentials.
If it turns out that special credentials weren't required for security- and privacy-sensitive data, then maybe that's a problem.
If it turns out that flight attendants were entering information considered security- and privacy-sensitive, then maybe that's a problem. (Though it looks like the article might've been prompted by the app developer, to pressure scraping access, so presumably there's something from scraping that the app wasn't getting or getting as well from user-entered info.)
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#86Yet another reason to build a website instead of an "App". It seems to me that all this could be delivered via website or PWA... Then no one could block it. Careful client side caching would help for times of no connectivity.
And how would that solve anything?
It’s the backend that is getting blocked.
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is commonsense to use the hardware/software authorized by your employer to do the work.
This is nonsense. This would be like claiming you have to use a company-sponsored to-do list app, or a company-sponsored git client, or a company-sponsored text editor, or a company-sponsored FTP client. I'd hate to be at any job that enforces any single one of those. There are many arguments against this app, but this is not one of them.
Really? Maintaining consistency across users is a huge part of IT. I can't imagine working somewhere where everyone just uses whatever software they want. Support would be a nightmare.
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be surprising if AA doesn't offer this set of information already to their employees via internal systems. It's difficult to see why AA would allegedly want to block it since it seems like a net benefit for their employee's productivity. Maybe AA IT hasn't yet combined all this into one big user-friendly app, and therefore they want to punish the perceived disloyalty of the flight attendants.
It seems pretty clear that they want to block it because they want to control how the productivity information is accessed, and that control is more important to them than their employees being satisfied and productive. The article mentioned that the author of the app even previously reached out to partner with them (maybe asked for an API so he didn't have to scrape?) and they were still uninterested. Imagine your c…
At a previous job at a certain 3 letter company, we once developed a simple web app so users could do the unimaginable: change their own passwords for an internal billing system.
Management congratulated us on the initiative and asked to shut it down immediately. The reason: the users had to previously open a ticket to get their password changed (very secure, right?) and, with this app, the customer would see a 30% reduction in tickets and would probably reevaluate how many bodies they rented from the 3 letter company.
So yes, I fully agree that most large companies are not interested in helping their users or workers at all.
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is commonsense to use the hardware/software authorized by your employer to do the work.
This is nonsense. This would be like claiming you have to use a company-sponsored to-do list app, or a company-sponsored git client, or a company-sponsored text editor, or a company-sponsored FTP client. I'd hate to be at any job that enforces any single one of those. There are many arguments against this app, but this is not one of them.
I'm not entirely sure that is a nonsensical argument.
I am permitted to use any client I like to perform SQL queries of our customer data, but if the client were to happen to route the data through a third party, I would be in employment-jeopardy breach of our security policies.
Similar rules goes for hardware: I can bring my own device for reading and locally storing our email and chats, but customer data is not to be accessed on any hardware not authorized by the company.
Roster data is not customer data, and there are reasonable arguments to be made that this is not an exact parallel. But in principle, I can understand a company wanting to have control over certain types of data and how it might be exfiltrated from the company, even if it is intended for employees to use to do their jobs.
Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are, it's just spread across multiple websites and datasources as is typical in large corporations. This app scrapes all the sites with the FAs AA credentials and aggregates the data.
My wife and I are going to be doing the whole digital nomad thing across the US, Canada and Mexico starting in less than 2 weeks, getting one way flights and staying in hotels. Currently, we have been flying out of a major Delta hub and we took for granted what an airline app should be. Now as we are planning flights between Delta, American and United, I can confidently say that American has by far the worse consumer…
Related (but anecdotal): I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the Delta app is for flyers.