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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

#591

Post by lucb1e »

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…

> I developed the opinion that putting a spinner into your site at all is a sign of incompetence

This so much. If your site is so slow that it can load what is usually a video file (non-SVG animated graphics) before it can load the text on the page, then you have failed at making a website

Looking at Discourse® here, and iirc Google AMP did something similar except it was a blank page for 8 seconds (until it hit a timeout) if you blocked their tracking

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

#592

Post by autoexec »

rixed wrote: post #446
kortilla wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VOTE MOTHERFUCKER Local government politics work. State politics even kinda work. The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind boggling.

Ok, maybe something less desperate than voting but appropriate in this case: create a competitor to disrupt the suckers? Maybe using the same API?

Even avoiding the problems with getting a foothold into this space any start up that tried to do the right thing would get bought up by someone else and enshitified until it was just as bad if not worse. There's more money to be made by screwing over the public than by not screwing them and our entire system is centered around making the most money at any cost and placing money over every other concern.

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

#593

Post by lucb1e »

odiroot wrote: post #507
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…

This is all rather easy on Android. You can have multiple Google (Play) accounts set to different countries. But most app developers don't even enforce it. I had UK bank apps installed through my "German" Google account.

That might also be because it's not legal to geoblock consumers within the "single european market" EU strategy thing. The bank might have not blocked German residents from using their UK bank account before and now they noticed there's no reason to bother people with geoblocking and so it still works after the UK broke out of the EU

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

#594

Post by autoexec »

michaelmrose wrote: post #248
azemetre wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually when people say vote with your wallet, it means those with more money make the rules. What recourse does an individual have if they live in a rural area with 1 or 3 doctors that all use the same hostile software? Should they suffer because they don't have money or the ability to go else where?

Most people don't have 3 doctors let alone 3 which all use the same niche/bad customer facing software. Those that do should organize to make their displeasure known. Senior decision makers are probably incompetent boobs rather than compete assholes. If they live somewhere with 1 doc they should vote with their feet by leaving before the town finishes dying around them.

> Senior decision makers are probably incompetent boobs rather than compete assholes.

It's not some coincidence that just about every company in every sector is screwing over more and more people. This is all extremely calculated. We've decided that making the most money is all that matters and we're seeing the inevitable results of that choice everywhere around us. If shareholders got richer by providing people with quality healthcare and well designed websites and the freedom to use or not use mobile technology we'd already have those things. No one cares how shitty they make our lives or even how many of us they kill as long as they keep the ability to stuff more money into their pockets this quarter than they did last quarter. The people doing this shit to us aren't incompetent. What we want from them isn't what they're optimizing for. Maybe you haven't noticed the massive amount of consolidation in every industry going on, but consider that voting with your wallet gets harder over time. Consider how many companies you're personally giving your money to right now while wishing you had an alternative that better met your needs. Voting with your wallet is not a real option. The fattest wallet will always win.

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

#595

Post by lucb1e »

pqtyw wrote: post #141
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…

> 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…

> you can just export it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more convenient than having to find a printer.

...or show the document they sent you rather than printing it?

As someone who never installed these wallets (maybe I'm missing out), what's the problem they solve?

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

#596

Post by edelbitter »

karaterobot wrote: post #158

I see that this thread is full of a lot of very valid complaints about the hellish world we've created. But my reaction when these things come up is to point out that we effectively demanded this with our revealed preferences. We're at the triangulation of people preferring to use their phones for most things, while also demanding the lowest price possible. At a certain point, it's natural for companies to realize th…

If my revealed preference is that you should pay extra to subsidize my shopping, does that really make you any more complicit in the redistribution scheme?

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

#597

Post by lucb1e »

realityking wrote: post #341
lenkite wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not effortless...and god forbid if your drop your smartphone and get it cracked. This headache is simply avoided with plain old paper reliability.

In that - hopefully exceptionally rare case - the gate could just print you a boarding pass. It’s not a big deal.

I didn't know that. Based on what do they print a boarding pass, or perhaps rather: why don't they check {whatever the answer to the previous question is} at boarding instead of you having to hold onto a pass that apparently is a proxy for something else?

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

#598

Post by bluefirebrand »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #528
bluefirebrand wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can. The obvious answer is because asynchronous workflows are brittle, and require intervention from the end user to correct if they break Then most end users aren't going to care to fix it when it breaks, or be able to fix it when it breaks for a vari…

And what should one do if the network is down? Stand there indefinitely hoping it comes back up? Recall the driver can’t continue without an address.

If the network is down it really doesn't matter if your app does synchronous or asynchronous operations because both will fail?

I'm not entirely sure what your point is at all

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

#599

Post by raziel2p »

tdeck wrote: post #202
internet2000 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I could disagree more with your number 4. Adding a boarding pass to Apple Wallet and having it update itself with gate changes, delays, etc, notifying you and even scribbling skeuomorphically what changed on the pass [0] has been one of the strongest delighters I've experienced in recent times. [0] https://i.imgur.com/OkthcOi.png

You can do that with a boarding pass downloaded from the airline website or emailed to you by the airline. But some airlines like to hide this option in order to force you to download their app.

did you simply ignore what the parent poster wrote about it updating itself with gate numbers etc.?

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

#600

Post by arp242 »

brookst wrote: post #529
yurishimo wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the entire philosophy behind all of the apps run by DHH/Basecamp. The web should be the default and native apps should only be used for software that just isn’t possible through the web (yet).

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…

For a GP booking app that most people only use once in a blue moon it really doesn't matter much. And most users will absolutely prefer a well-designed webapp vs. a crummy semi-working native app, as the previous person described. In short, this is just boring thoughtless repetition of a cliché with no consideration for context.
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