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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

#471

Post by golemiprague »

nicbou wrote: post #421
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…

Immigrants are often left out for various reasons, such as not having the right documents, having an unsupported kind of passport, not having an address they can register as their home, not having an app store account in the right country, not having a local payment method, and a variety of other issues.

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

#472

Post by abraxas »

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…

Yes, I've long given up trying to reconcile this mess and bought three separate cell phones with three separate sim cards to for the three countries where I spend non-trivial amount of time.

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

#473

Post by anigbrowl »

zulban wrote: post #195
tdeck wrote: post #92

One thing not mentioned yet is what happens when you've got a cheaper phone filled with photos and videos. At various times I've had to spend a few minutes deleting things just to download some stupid 100 meg app that I need to use for a total of 5 minutes to complete some basic task.

If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside. Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your media.

How other people choose to use their phones is not your business.

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

#474

Post by adrian_b »

ajolly wrote: post #432
adrian_b wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I have a smartphone, I choose to not have a Google account. One of the banks that I am using has terminated its on-line banking service, which I had been using for almost 20 years, replacing it with an app. That would not have been a problem if they would have provided the app themselves on their Web site, but they refuse to do this and they provide the app only in the Google on-line store, which I cannot use b…

Can you use Aurora store? https://auroraoss.com/ (That's what I use when I don't want to put a Google account on an Android phone)

Thanks for pointing to that.

I was not aware of it, so when I will have time I will experiment with it, to see if it works for downloading the app I need when logging in anonymously.

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

#475

Post by worik »

ndriscoll wrote: post #283
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…

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

For most CRUD apps

Sometimes wheels within wheels can slow down even modern computers.

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

#476

Post by kristianc »

anigbrowl wrote: post #459
bluefirebrand wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Then it should give explicit status information like uploading to server (xx%)...OK waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes. Not as cool, but at least somewhat informative. Engineers have a responsibility to push back on this kind of thing, because marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes.

> marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes

It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks.

But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.

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

#477

Post by fsflover »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #81

App store monopoly hurts us way more than it is talked about. Suddenly, not only we are not to chose which devices to use to access what could be a simple website. Now unrelated third party decides if we have access to it based in, for example, country of residence. Or at all. Apple routine forces censorship on our phones as if it was it's property. I still believe it was a tragedy that Microsoft folded their attempt…

Our next best hope is GNU/Linux smartphones. Sent from my Librem 5.

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

#478

Post by throawayh666 »

invalidname wrote: post #7

That's like saying the tyranny of credit cards prevents me from enjoying discounts in some venues. Or that the tyranny of educational system prevents me from working as a doctor. No, I don't like installing apps for every stupid parking lot or restaurant. But calling it "tyranny" is clickbait and bad journalism. I pay more for my sons bus pass because I don't want him to have a smartphone. That's a choice I made. My…

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

#479

Post by anigbrowl »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #282
jdietrich wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is an incredibly competitive and well-regulated market. If you're in receipt of welfare benefits, you can get a tariff with unlimited 5G data for £12 ($15) per month. If you're a light user, you can get a tariff with a few gigabytes of data for as little as £5 ($6.50) per month. https://smarty.co.uk/social-tariff A cheap but perfectly useable phone costs less than £100 new from a brand like Xiaomi, Motorola or…

This is actually something the US does pretty well, actually. The Lifeline Assistance Program (colloquially known as "Obama Phones") gives low income people (basically anyone who qualifies for food stamps) a phone, with calling and internet, at no cost to the individual.

I wouldn't bet on that being around much longer, because for some reason it makes a lot of conservatives absolutely seethe. Many of them convinced themselves poor people were being given the latest luxury model iphone out of taxpayer funds.

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

#480

Post by mihaaly »

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

It sucks to live with a dial in nowadays.
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