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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

#371

Post by ThinkingGuy »

techorange wrote: post #225

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.

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.

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

#372

Post by sensanaty »

cbozeman wrote: post #271
ComposedPattern wrote: post #245

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…

[flagged]

The only reason you have to do the IRS' job is because the "free market" you love so much spends obscene amounts of money buying out your government and making sure people have to use their products in order to not go insane filing their taxes.

In most countries filing taxes is a painless process that takes 5 minutes and is more or less completely automated for you.

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

#373

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

rapind wrote: post #363
maximilianthe1 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, inside buildings in very urban areas

Also in my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos.

Hello fellow german

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

#374

Post by pqtyw »

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.

I depends on the app I guess, where I am you just click to start/stop and (IIRC) get billed at 15 minute increments.

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

#375

Post by Henchman21 »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #325
fifticon wrote: post #120

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…

Companies need to be held accountable for their negligent behaviour

How? What do you propose?

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

#376

Post by LorenzoGood »

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.

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

#377

Post by ndriscoll »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #300
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…

> 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

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".

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

#378

Post by grg0 »

einpoklum wrote: post #185
montroser wrote: post #177

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 b…

> 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.

Yup, it will certainly do its thing.

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

#379

Post by exe34 »

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.

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