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'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

theguardian.com

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Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#521

Post by marssaxman »

JustExAWS wrote: post #449
marssaxman wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? I click on a button twice and my wallet pops up on my phone with my boarding pass

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.

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#522

Post by TylerE »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #512
jagged-chisel wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 vari…

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).

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#524

Post by TylerE »

bee_rider wrote: post #407
jagged-chisel wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s bizarre. The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right?

History has shown over and over again that you cannot trust the client.

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#525

Post by TylerE »

TheDong wrote: post #506
kortilla wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Democrat is the only sane choice if you want a functioning government. Republicans have departed reality.

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#526

Post by gamedever »

null0ranje wrote: post #243
reaperman wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#527

Post by TheDong »

Henchman21 wrote: post #453
gxs wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Go look for how many ballots were disqualified in the swing states?

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?

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#528

Post by jagged-chisel »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #512
jagged-chisel wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 vari…

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.

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#529

Post by brookst »

yurishimo wrote: post #517
koolba wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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.

Re: 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised

#530

Post by aucisson_masque »

lazycouchpotato wrote: post #270
aucisson_masque wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

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