411–420 of 599 posts
But on a keyboard I type hella fast.
Now, I also hate creating account after account, having all these applications needing to be installed with ads in them that I can't block or some permissions that I don't think it needs. F that.
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In addition to more space, having only one foreground application really reduces distractions and visual clutter. Also, for some reason I am comfortable using larger fonts on phones and tablets, which makes doing lots of reading easier than on my laptop.
> reduces distractions Have you looked over the shoulder of somebody trying to "do" something on their phone recently? If so you might have noticed the constant pings and notifications from dating apps, news sites, random games and cool-apps-that-you've-long-forgotten-but-still-have-location-and-background-services-turned-on.
What most people dont get: Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18 For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-) But today, the very f…
> But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens! I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard…
First hand from a couple of ~16 year olds I know. Definitely not a representative sample. Some know how to type at an acceptable speed. They're awful at shortcuts (alt-tab, many of the browser shortcuts that also present in many other programs (ctrl-w,-t,-s,-q) and most text-selection and movement shortcuts (ctrl-a,-x,-c,-v and (ctrl-)shift-left,-right)) so they navigate clumsily compared to us. They feel awkward when performing simple tasks but they do it faster than on a smartphone. They don't understand some of the terms and abstractions, likely because the smartphones keep that away from them.
Seeing them navigate things like homework or spreadsheets or multiple tabs in a browser from a smartphone is like watching a caveman trying to use a piece of brittle rock as a hammer. It will work in the end, but it's slow. I haven't looked at them closely enough, but I doubt they can comfortably keep more than 10 tabs open and navigate between them with the same speed as on a laptop or a desktop. I assume their browsing habits are qualitatively different than ours because of that. You can't really do adequate research on a smartphone.
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Wrong. While I agree about younger people’s impression and experience with apps and the internet, that is not what companies are responding to - in fact it’s backward. Companies have for ages pushed apps due to more control and data. That’s why younger folk grew up with apps. The push to apps was absolutely not due to companies responding to consumer sentiment. Yes now it has been ingrained so now there are expectati…
Apps generally have a lot more access to the user info than Web sites. I remember getting into an argument, here (one-sided, I didn't argue then, and I won't now), about how a Web site is just as intrusive and privacy-endangering as an app (I think they wrote PWAs, and didn't want to cede the point to native apps). I feel they were wrong. Apps can get more information than web sites; even with sandboxing. In my exper…
What information do you think they got from your device other than what you gave them permission to have? If you actually have any info on how apps can break Apple's sandbox to leak your personal info, you should share it.
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iOS apps have to request permission from user to send push and for basically every other problematic permission.
I'm only familiar with Android, and it bothers me that I cannot exert complete sandbox control over every app. I think I should be able to completely cut it off from the network and/or local storage; prevent it from running even though it is installed; and prevent it from having any personalizing information about me, my movements, my network connectivity status or patterns, my device usage (i.e. screen on versus loc…
In terms for pure access to the data/permissions, GrapheneOS seems to be the main (only?) choice. The default permissions apps get in current day Android allow to group activities and tie them to a single user across apps/sites.
[0]https://f-droid.org/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.fdro...
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> your contacts, location. The whole buffet. It's not like an app is getting those without your knowledge, and many times it's useful for an app to have your contacts or location...
One of the most enraging things about life since 2005-ish is that no matter how private and careful I am, it doesn't even matter because every other inconsiderate fool I know and interact with will HAPPILY let some random company have access to THEIR contacts--which includes me--in order to play Farmville for a month until they get bored of that and offer up my private information to the next bullshit ad company that…
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I just asked my college aged kid. He said pretty much everyone does their written homework on their laptop, but many will use their phones to do the reading.
Aside from being a bit small and having to be held close, phones are good proportions for reading. Computers screens have gotten wider and wider, and UIs bigger and bigger, and it eats into reading space pretty heavily. Especially if you don't have a high-density screen.
Sadly, most websites forcefully limit the width of the text. It's like they pretend our monitors are oriented to be tall rather than wide. Even HN has unnecessarily big margins. So unless I try to cram another window in my FHD monitor, I have ~50% or more completely wasted space. Margins should be 2-3 pixels wide, not 20-30% of the screen.
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> reduces distractions Have you looked over the shoulder of somebody trying to "do" something on their phone recently? If so you might have noticed the constant pings and notifications from dating apps, news sites, random games and cool-apps-that-you've-long-forgotten-but-still-have-location-and-background-services-turned-on.
That's where Reduce Interruptions on the iPhone (or Do Not Disturb) comes in handy.
I noticed this only recently - I switched the default phone launcher to a scifi theme built on Total Launcher (there's legit personal research project reasons behind that, it's not just to look cool!) and after few days (and a bunch of missed messages), I realized my life seems suspiciously light in interruptions and random events. It took me a few more moments to pin-point the reason: the theme hid the notification bar entirely. It was still there, ready to pull down and expand with a gesture or a button tap - but that top line with icons was not visible (and through the stroke of luck, I misconfigured something in another experiment and had no notification indicators on the lock screen, either).
Not having notification indicators visible on any surface is really all it took - and conversely, this means that just having them there created the majority of the burden for me. I thought I successfully solved the distraction problem by silencing or eliminating ads and useless notifications, but now I know that even the important ones aren't really that important for the burden their very existence creates.
I have an app that is literally just a wrapper around the website. The mobile website and the mobile app are the exact same experience. Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app. I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased…
My analog is something along the lines of "please build a small room in your house, closet-sized at first, but with enough room to grow to twice that as we add features, so we can give you the best possible temperature and weather information. Also, we need access to your full contacts so you can share how you feel about the weather more easily, with just a push! Also also, we need a hot microphone in your closet, so…
Even then, there's a good chance that web a API exists for the required hardware, so it still doesn't need to be an app.