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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

#701

Post by genewitch »

gs17 wrote: post #358
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…

> Parking apps are worse than parking meters. I had a frustrating experience with this. We were staying in a small town and the casino had a ferry to cross the river, which would save 20 minutes driving and be kind of neat. I'm guessing they had issues with the staff collecting payments, so they had switched to a parking app to pay for it. You pay for the ferry as a "parking lot" and it should all work fine. Signs at…

You know what all these stories kind of sound like me? When some new technology comes out and you see somebody and they're like, one of the first people to buy it and they're like, oh, check this out. And then they try to show you something, but it doesn't work?

So if the parking thing is broken and I don't have my phone with me I can't go to the doctor today?

Cool. If a meter was broken I could just go to another spot with a working meter.

In Laguna beach they had $1 coin machines to get around the "ten quarters" thing, and this was 20 years ago!

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

#702

Post by avidiax »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #587
TeMPOraL wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better they can't continue than they do the last order wrong, amirite? There's some strong "Seeing Like a State" vibes here. I'm pretty sure these apps are intentionally designed as tools to force the users (here, drivers) into a specific flow, a flow that minimizes complexity for the vendor , reality be damned. Another way to look at it: the job of the driver side of a delivery (or taxi) app isn't to be useful to th…

So the automaton can’t deliver to the next customer because the app can’t phone home. I don’t see how this benefits anyone.

Lots of delivery jobs are effectively paid by the piece or paid by the route. The driver is not paid hourly.

This is one reason that package delivery drivers often will say that they've attempted delivery when they at best drove past the delivery point. Marking the delivery as attempted gets them off the hook for that delivery, and they can finish their shift that much faster.

Having a broken app that forces the driver to 100% complete every delivery before moving to the next one thus costs the company relatively little, but saves some complexity, missing proof of delivery, etc.

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

#703

Post by strken »

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…

As an Australian whose parents have 300kbps internet, please continue to add spinners to your apps. The round trip time to US west is 270ms for a good connection here. That 270ms doesn't include any processing (maybe 60ms or so) and the wifi tax (another 20ms). Then your round trip time gets doubled by HTTPS, which goes up to tripled if you're sending more than 14 KB of data.

This means it takes a full second to load most websites or apps, and this is further compounded by slow server code, daisy-chained sequential calls, living further away from the undersea cables, and bad infrastructure.

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

#704

Post by tsm »

dwedge wrote: post #445
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…

Printing a boarding pass for the return trip when you can only check in 36 hours before departure is a lot trickier than printing at home. I'd prefer to print but this is one of the things that is simpler. The only annoying part is when the app gets battery killed with terrible reception in the airport and then takes 2 minutes to show you the boarding pass it already downloaded.

Time was you could check in online and get the ticket counter agent to print your boarding pass for you

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

#705

Post by nicbou »

techorange wrote: post #225

My greatest aspiration in life (yes, hyperbole) is to retire and get rid of my smartphone, and I can imagine it’s just going to be harder and harder as time goes on. I went into a restaurant recently and asked for a menu and they looked at me like I was from another planet.

I went on a trip without any tech. No smartphone.

I made it five days but could have gone for longer. It was interesting to see how the system worked from without, and how people reacted to requests that would have been banal in the nineties. For the most part, it went well. Very few things were unavailable. I only remember hotel phones being missing or broken. However it was impossible to handle things back home and my life would have started falling apart after a few weeks of ignoring emails.

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

#706

Post by genewitch »

andelink wrote: post #418
LinuxBender wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't see why you find this topic interesting? My ulterior motive and secret agenda is to let people know they can escape that nonsense. Many rural areas are getting faster internet but are much more chill. There are pros and cons people can research themselves. For me most of the cons are pros. If I can save even one person per year from the social, government and s…

I for one very much appreciated your response. I am pleasantly surprised to hear life like that still exists in the US

I have never had any of the apps people are talking about on my cellphone since I moved to Louisiana. I just rarely eat fast food anymore, once I realized that I was paying nearly double for my app-free lifestyle. I didn't notice because of inflation at first.

The nearest fast food place to my house is 25 minutes away. Same with Walmart, Kroger, my bank, and nearly everything except dollar general and gas stations.

No ubet, Lyft. There is the food delivery, but only "in town". So far I have never been able to convince anyone to deliver food to my house.

I could use digital ID/license but I don't.

"Reward cards" are just phone numbers, at least the two I use (Kroger and horror fright). Oh and 1 gas station rewards.

I grew up in Los Angeles and spent 33 years there.

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

#707

Post by genewitch »

acdha wrote: post #275
ryandrake wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people just stopped paying for parking en masse, things might change. I'm in the US, so maybe my attitude is different, but if I parked in a parking lot that didn't let me pay without installing some weirdo app, I would just park without paying and let them come after me if they can find me. If they send me a bill, I can refuse to pay. If they send it to collections, collections will probably not pursue over such…

This is like the people who think “admiralty court” is a magic phrase to get out of paying taxes. What actually happens is that your car gets towed if you ever park anywhere affiliated with the same company (hope you never need to go to the same place twice), or you get tired of dodging collectors and having that mounting debt affect your credit and employability. Not liking how a business runs doesn’t give you a rig…

Okay, but if everyone or a plurality of people did that because they disagreed with the business practices?

An individual may not be able to do much in all circumstances, but a lot of people might.

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

#708

Post by genewitch »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #262
ryandrake wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people just stopped paying for parking en masse, things might change. I'm in the US, so maybe my attitude is different, but if I parked in a parking lot that didn't let me pay without installing some weirdo app, I would just park without paying and let them come after me if they can find me. If they send me a bill, I can refuse to pay. If they send it to collections, collections will probably not pursue over such…

Yeah yeah yeah. They sell the debt at lower price to companies specialized in debt collection, the longer you wait then to pay them the more they are allowed to collect from you. If you try not to pay at all, they put you in court against lawyer working for the company whose only job is to collect debt, so he knows his job pretty well and the bonus is that you end up having to pay the lawyer fee. Of course you could…

Is this like US fanfiction?

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

#709

Post by filleduchaos »

bxparks wrote: post #617
dehrmann wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 50% sure you can set this credit card through their website.

Yeah, I remember reading something like that, but isn't the United app required to pay for the meal on the flight, so that they know which credit card to charge? To be honest, I have never been able to understand their payment process, and since the United app doesn't run on my phone, I just gave up on the in-flight meals.

The discoverability is horrible, but in this case there actually is a somewhat accessible way to pay: if you visit https://united.com/inflightpayment, you can add your card details for a specific flight before the flight (possibly also during the flight using in-flight WiFi, but don't quote me on that).

I actually find it more convenient than presenting a card in person, because my country uses chip-and-pin cards and many American (soft-)POS terminals break when presented with one. There's also less of a chance of my bank arbitrarily flagging the transaction as suspicious.

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

#710

Post by genewitch »

jampekka wrote: post #125
QuadrupleA wrote: post #116

I avoid apps too if I can. So rare that the app does anything a website can't. Indeed most apps are implemented with embedded browsers. It's about tracking, and push notifications. Full stop.

Cue HN's anti-PWA brigade.

I wanted to make one but I wanted it to work without networking but be able to trigger notifications on a timer. I don't know anything about cellphone development or JavaScript so I gave up and made a discord bot instead.
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