Everyone knows all the apps on your phone • Hacker News Board

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#421

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #395

crazygringo wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have literally never needed to select text in a UX element. In the past, occasionally there would be an error message in a message box dialog that I wanted to copy and paste. And then I discovered that despite it not looking selectable, it actually was. I don't want to accidentally select the text of my menu bar, or of a text box label, or a dialog tab title.

I, I, I. Empathy is a weakness. Lots of limitations for you to not accidentally do something, maybe there is a way to not accidentally do those things and also help people that need them.

No, not providing concrete examples is a weakness.

You're awfully arrogant in making a judgement about my empathy... if you want to make this personal.

Or maybe you can justify why people need to be able to select menu labels in the first place? That's not standard on any OS I've ever used, so it's up to the person who wants to change things to justify why.

Maybe be less judgmental of people here on HN, and contribute something factual instead? I at least gave a factual account of my personal experience, which is a data point. Describing one's experience isn't egoism.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#422

Post by retrac » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

sbierwagen wrote: post #418

turblety wrote: post #137

I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp. The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need. Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept intr…

Push notifications. Apps have them on by default, websites have them off by default. 100% of Temu's valuation is because they pester users all the time with nudges to buy stuff, which works. Normies don't turn off notifications. Over the last few years all my relatives have picked up smart watches, (thanks to cell carriers upselling them hard during phone replacements) and in any given conversation at family events t…

Registering for push notifications ought to be a protocol much simpler and lightweight, compared to this spinning up a virtual machine and running a downloaded binary for each channel of notification you wish to receive.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#423

Post by divan » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #402

divan wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browser apps do have their advantages: These are more like byproduct of the fact that web apps are built on the stack not suited for modern UI apps. It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI. So, it can also be framed as: - everything is selectable, even what shouldn't be - buttons, drawers, video players, etc - content is zoomable, which most of the time j…

> It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI This is an outdated view of the web. Catch up or be left behind.

This is factual view. No matter how many layers of abstraction you put on top, the foundation is always there. Luckily we have better and better support for wasm in browsers, so it's a matter of time when this outdated stack will be replaced with solutions designed from the ground up for the task.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#424

Post by divan » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:21 PM UTC

rblatz wrote: post #384

divan wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> browser apps do have their advantages: These are more like byproduct of the fact that web apps are built on the stack not suited for modern UI apps. It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI. So, it can also be framed as: - everything is selectable, even what shouldn't be - buttons, drawers, video players, etc - content is zoomable, which most of the time j…

Disabling zoom is so hostile, why not disable screen readers and put bollards on handicapped ramps while you are at it. It’s literally a middle finger to older people and people with vision issues. If you disable zoom I will not be using your website.

Luckly most popular operating systems have concept of global text size that can be adjusted, and non-web UI frameworks respect that.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#425

Post by whalesalad » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

android* phone

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#426

Post by CharlesW » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #408

CharlesW wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is so annoying that it’s either "give access to ALL my contacts and ALL their information… […] I wish we could limit the number of contacts and the level of information we give. iOS added fine-grained (at the contact level) access to contacts data last year. https://lifehacker.com/tech/you-can-control-which-contacts-a...

They did the same for photos years ago. Many apps have not updated and perhaps never will.

They don't need to be, since it's enforced at the OS level. Users can limit permissions to individual contacts regardless of whether iOS apps have been updated to explicitly handle that use case.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#427

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

xmprt wrote: post #417

Mistletoe wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is one of the huge Achilles’ heels of Reddit. I’m confused why Reddit thinks a monarchy with no term limits will work on a website when it has never worked in human history. There is no voting whatsoever where users can give feedback on how they think the moderation or the subreddit is going. You get entrenched subreddits like /r/movies and their obsession with movie posters instead of movie discussion or…

The nice thing about reddit is that no one is forcing you to follow such broach subreddits which appeal to the common denominator. In my experience, any subreddit which has more than a few millions members is going to be pretty terrible. Find a more niche subreddit like /r/ running (although location subreddits fall into a similar trap) or /r/longdistancerunning and you'd probably find them to be more interesting sim…

I agree with your comments about the large subreddits, but I also agree with Mistletoe that even many niche subreddits (or at least "midsized" subreddits) suffer from the same moderation problem.

Namely, once a subreddit becomes popular or has basically "the default" subreddit name, it's extremely difficult to just start a new subreddit if you don't like the moderation on the old subreddit, because it's so hard to get people to know about or move to the new subreddit. There was some drama years ago where some r/lgbt mods went on a major power trip, which caused other folks to start the r/ainbow sub, but still most folks go to the lgbt reddit as it's what comes up first if you just search for "gay subreddit" or similar.

You say "because moderators are beholden to a smaller community", but that's the point - mods aren't really beholden to anyone at all, as it's not like electing mods is a democratic process. Note nor do I think it should be, as being a mod is a ton of grief and labor that people donate for free. But I do think Reddit could make it a lot easier and "fairer" if people wanted to "fork" a subreddit if people wanted to discuss the same topics with the same community, just with different moderation rules.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#428

Post by dghlsakjg » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #419

Mistletoe wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is one of the huge Achilles’ heels of Reddit. I’m confused why Reddit thinks a monarchy with no term limits will work on a website when it has never worked in human history. There is no voting whatsoever where users can give feedback on how they think the moderation or the subreddit is going. You get entrenched subreddits like /r/movies and their obsession with movie posters instead of movie discussion or…

You are confused. You seem to think Reddit Inc wants anything but control over the users. They are not at all interested in discussion or being a social network. If they could achieve their real goal without all the annoying comments, they would shut those off instantly. Reddit is a narrative pushing machine first and foremost. The money they make on advertising - IS NOT - from the one of two ads you see per page. Th…

Their annual report, and their advertiser platform doesn’t really back up whatever it is you are implying here.

I would be incredibly surprised to find that reddits officers are willing to risk life ruining fines to lie in their filings about this.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#429

Post by iamnotarobotman » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

einszwei wrote: post #6

Just wow. I assumed that Google patched this few years back but guess they left a few backdoors.

I just don't trust Google anymore. They are not the same as they were years ago and have just declined in general.

Play Store Review and everything takes weeks sometimes and I can't tolerate that.

Re: Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

#430

Post by Seattle3503 » Sun, Mar 30, 2025, 8:00 PM UTC

Mistletoe wrote: post #406

diggan wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some subreddit are more dead than other but r/android got to be one of the worst. Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly is going on with reddit but if dead-internet theory would hold anywhere, it seems to be there. Besides, all the topic/subject subreddits seems moderated by people who hold a vested interest in the topic/subject, to the detriment of their community. I made a submission which went into details about the p…

Moderation is one of the huge Achilles’ heels of Reddit. I’m confused why Reddit thinks a monarchy with no term limits will work on a website when it has never worked in human history. There is no voting whatsoever where users can give feedback on how they think the moderation or the subreddit is going. You get entrenched subreddits like /r/movies and their obsession with movie posters instead of movie discussion or…

As someone who has moderated multiple subreddits, and single handedly brought a subreddit from 0 to 100,00 subscribers, this misunderstands subreddits, moderation, and the relationship between Reddit and moderators. IMO subreddits were supposed to be like random forums on the internet of old, but with a shared substrate. Those forums were singularly owned as well and if you didn't like the operators you moved on, because there was no one you could escalate to.

There is fundementally a social contract between Reddit and its moderators. Moderators get autonomy and control, and reddit gets content that keeps users around. As long as Reddit does not pay moderators, autonomy and control is all they can give moderators. I'm investing a lot of effort, and I'd like to retain some control. IMO creating a community is more like starting an open source project on Github with a lot of community contributions.

If you take away autonomy and control from moderators, what is in it for the moderator? Imagine if github started seizing projects wholesale, taking them over and installing new maintainers. People would move off the platform.

Some people say that moderators are unpaid employees, but IMO that is only to the degree that moderators are required to carry out Reddit's agenda and priorities. We don't call OS maintainers github employees. I don't mind if Reddit benefits from my communities, as long as I can run it the way I want. If you take away autonomy and control, moderators absolutely become unpaid employees.

If Reddit didn't like my policies and took my subreddits, I would take that as a strong signal that Reddit is not the place to build my communities. The API debacle, protests, and mod removals caused me to decentralize my community more. I spam a linktree in my subreddit that links to Discord and other resources, exactly to protect against community seizeure by Reddit.

I think you touch on some real issues. One is of namespacing; folks can sit on valuable portions of the namespace and basically extract rent. We have the same issues for domains, and haven't solved it there. Some places like github semi-solve it by putting repo's in organizations, but that shifts the namespace issue to the organizational level.

The other problem is second generation moderators. Most moderators are terrible at succession planning, and so generally chose terrible successors. Many second generation moderators don't understand the original decisions that shaped the community, and what makes the original community successfully. Reddit should do more to encourage succession planning, and teach moderators how to do it.