I’m gonna say something stupid — the chances of my phone running out of battery and me not being able to charge it is lower than me losing the paper ticket.
Not stupid at all. I think that's the case for most people. It's easy to lose a random piece of paper. Whereas people are generally extremely aware of where their phone is at all times.
I don’t know why you keep calling it a “random” piece of paper? It’s really not hard to keep track of your physical boarding pass for a few hours.
Also in my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos.
> my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos Hello fellow Canadian
Where I used to live, in NY (not NYC, but close to _a_ major city), I had to go out onto my front porch to use my cell phone. It wasn't a great signal out there, but it was better than the _no_ signal inside my apartment.
I often can no longer ask for a menu at restaurants that expect me to scan a QR code. Well…I can ask, but they don’t have any to provide.
Tell them you can't use your phone for whatever reason, and then ask them to just tell you what they have. I think enough people must have done this already because I've seen paper menus return in many places. (This fall under the general pattern of "make it their pain")
There's a restaurant my parents take me to when I come to visit that requires you to scan a QR code to get to a website and then order and pay for your food on your phone. You are prompted to provide a tip up front before anybody has even done anything. Then when the food's ready your phone alerts you, and you have to get up and grab the food from a shelf outside the kitchen. So if you do tip, you end up tipping... the management, I suppose.
It's just about the most cynical dining experience I've ever had the misfortune of enduring.
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…
Not sure if it counts as CRUD but, when downloading files, it can take a while to prepare the files. If that while is long enough the user may thing something isn't happening, and a "I'm working on it" signal is not unreasonable.
Ticketmaster is the worst of these for me. They have a near monopoly, and started forcing this shit on everyone a few years ago with covid as the excuse. Now going to one of their concerts is like taking an international flight. Forget privacy, forget having a paper stub as a souvenir (not even an option), forget paying with cash. As I avoid ticketmaster, I've avoided most concerts the last few years... only going to…
I'm all-in on this. If the only way for me to attend an event is to deal with an app on my phone, I automatically assume there are a few dozen other activities or events I'd enjoy doing more during that time and choose to go do one of those instead.
> 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…
Don’t people just print their boarding passes at home before they leave for the airport? Or worst case, use the kiosks at the airports which print passes? Very few of the passengers in line ahead of me are using their phones.
Printing a boarding pass at home works for the flight out. But what about the returning flight?
Just last week I flew back home from SFO. I needed to change the flight at the last minute. The app failed to update with the new flight. The airline had removed all the boarding pass kiosks from that airport and only seemed to have luggage drop service. I asked an airport employee how I could get a boarding pass printed, and he pointed to a poorly-marked lane with a sign about "special accommodations" or something, like I was blind. I waited in that line for about 20 minutes along with people who were trying to check their bags. Eventually I got to someone who seemed really put out that I hadn't checked in yet and that they'd need to push a few more buttons on their computer to do that for me.
Depends where you are and which flights. Around me, maybe 60% of people use mobile. From the other 40%, some probably got their paper tickets when they checked in their baggage and going with that now. > boarding passes at home before they leave for the airport It’s been years I’ve heard or seen anyone doing it. Even my parents in their 70s get theirs at the airport.
That's because they don't fly low coasters. It's often €50 now to print boarding pass at the counter in Europe.
> It's often €50 now to print boarding pass at the counter in Europe.
I was about to respond, "No way this is true. I don't believe you." But then I found an article claiming that yes, indeed you can be fleeced like this for simply showing up and asking for your boarding pass. Unreal.
You equate doing things for other people without money transactions, with slavery?
If it’s mandated by law, yes. What would you call it if you were required to work—paid or otherwise—under threat of criminal punishment?
Is the threat of criminal punishment the only incentive that works on you? You never do things because it would make someone happy or you a better person?
> 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…
what if your phone runs out of battery?
Apple Express Mode lets you use certain Wallet cards when the phone is very low battery and turned off.
For me it is less about being concerned about my device running out of batteries. It's more about some weird incompatibility between my device and the scanner. It's one less thing to worry about when I just want to get on the plane. My paper ticket isn't going to lock before I get to the gate, or not be bright enough. I won't have to "play" with my ticket to keep it active and proper for the scanner.
> It's more about some weird incompatibility between my device and the scanner.
I think I held up an entire flight for nearly an hour because the QR code on my Graphene OS Android phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but didn't scan at all at the gate. They ended up letting me on the flight without properly registering that I boarded in their system. That triggered some crazy security hold that prevented the crew from obtaining permission to pull back from the gate.