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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

#721

Post by johnnyanmac »

akdor1154 wrote: post #699
brookst wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

> 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 ag…

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.

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

#724

Post by graemep »

listenallyall wrote: post #605
thwarted wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

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.

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.

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

#725

Post by wayvey »

olowe wrote: post #718
strken wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#726

Post by wayvey »

mark-r wrote: post #349
ndriscoll wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Eit…

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.

Monitor the process if it fails hide spinner, show the user an error and provide a Retry button to restart the process :)

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

#727

Post by bhaak »

strken wrote: post #703
ndriscoll wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Eit…

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…

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.

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

#728

Post by relistan »

2shortplanks wrote: post #167

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 wat…

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.

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

#729

Post by kelnos »

joshdavham wrote: post #127

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…

> 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.

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

#730

Post by kelnos »

lambda wrote: post #156
pqtyw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 muc…

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.

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.

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