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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

#741

Post by b112 »

wwalexander wrote: post #616
jagged-chisel wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many places in apps just wait for no reason. Let's take a hypothetical situation: Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it…

While doing Instacart deliveries here in Maine, I dropped off a leave-at-the-door order which requires uploading a picture of the shopping bags at the entrance. However, there wasn’t any service in the rural area I was delivering to, and the app required a connection to even open the camera interface. So I had to drive away down the road until I had service, open the camera, drive back to the delivery point, take the…

Same thing with paypal.

They require a mobile phone number now. If I give them one, they'll enforce SMS as a login path.

I live in an area with excellent cell service, except for a few miles around my house. I'm not going to try to log in, while buying something, then drive down the road and wait for the SMS.

Sheer stupid.

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

#742

Post by kelnos »

jjav wrote: post #519
crazygringo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't want to have to worry about my device being available during boarding I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the airport from home, your battery is charged. And if your phone somehow breaks on the way, you print at a kiosk. It seems far more likely that I'd lose a random piece of paper on the way to the airport than lose my phone...

> I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the airport from home, your battery is charged. You're assuming the phone works and the internet connection works and the app works and the service behind it responsive. That's a lot of trust in thousands of moving parts. Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends on nothing other than me having it in m…

> You're assuming the phone works and the internet connection works and the app works and the service behind it responsive

At check-in (24 hours before my flight), I add the boarding pass to Google Wallet. From that point, displaying it doesn't require an internet connection, or having to rely on the airline's often-shitty app.

Yes, the phone has to not be broken, but that's a pretty low bar: in my 15 years of owning smartphones, my phone has been broken and unusable for perhaps a grand total of a few days of time (so under 0.01% of the time). Yes, Google Wallet has to be functioning, but that particular app being broken would be an unusual, surprising occurrence.

And if by 0.01% chance, I can't get the boarding pass off my phone for some reason, I can always go to the check-in desk or kiosk or gate and ask them to print me one.

> Meanwhile I have a printed boarding pass which depends on nothing other than me having it in my pocket, so it basically 100% fail-proof.

I've never lost a phone before, but I have lost paper boarding passes on more than one occasion.

The point is that the mobile boarding pass is a nice convenience (especially with the auto-updating gate number on it), but the ability to get a paper boarding pass printed is never far away if the mobile one fails. So why not just use the mobile one, and save some paper, and the need to keep track of one more item?

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

#743

Post by kelnos »

ryandrake wrote: post #236
crazygringo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't want to have to worry about my device being available during boarding I don't think most people worry about that at all. Why wouldn't it be available? If you're heading to the airport from home, your battery is charged. And if your phone somehow breaks on the way, you print at a kiosk. It seems far more likely that I'd lose a random piece of paper on the way to the airport than lose my phone...

Maybe I'm weird, but when I go on a trip, I generally pack my smartphone, if I bring it at all. It would be a royal pain to go find it again when I get into line to board.

I won't call it "weird", because generally I like the idea that some people aren't actually glued to their phone at all times, and don't even have it handy.

But I will call it unusual, because the vast majority of people will have their phone in their pocket or purse while at the airport.

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

#744

Post by nicoburns »

bhaak wrote: post #727
strken wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spinners are a lie. Nowadays, you hardly encounter a spinner that actually shows the progress of the action you started. For this reason, they are mostly useless. Even worse than useless if errors aren't even propagated to the user.

It's pretty useful to indicate "network requests are in progress". I agree they lose their value if you don't handle errors.

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

#745

Post by edwinjm »

roughly wrote: post #425
bee_rider wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s bizarre. The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right?

The whole point of having an app is to collect data, show ads, and “engage the customer with the brand.” Any additional capabilities beyond that are incidental.

And send push notifications

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

#746

Post by Symbiote »

gamedever wrote: post #531
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…

AFAIK this is only a problem on iPhone, not Android? Note: I have an iPhone. It sucks. Same issue. I have bank accounts in other countries. The app needs an update. To install the update I have to switch countries on my account which instantly voids any and all subscriptions through Apple. It's insane. It's even more crazy that every single Apple employee I know has this issue but for whatever reason it's not fixed.

The UK National Health Service app is restricted to the UK only: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nhs.online... — that's not too crazy, as it's also only useful for people resident in the UK.

The McDonald's UK app is also restricted to the UK: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds.... which is daft, why wouldn't they want tourists and visitors?

Searching " transport app" with large cities, the first restricted example I found is for Sheffield, which is limited to the UK: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yorcard.ts... . (It's the official app, the contact email ends .gov.uk.)

An example in the article, of paying for on-street parking, is also blocked for tourists: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paybyphone...

I'm not going to bother registering an additional Google account when I visit Sheffield then want to take the tram to McDonald's.

(By "restricted" I mean Google Play reports "This app is not available for your device" which is a current phone registered in Denmark.)

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

#747

Post by nicoburns »

olowe wrote: post #718
strken wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Imagine the entire UI of an email client becoming inoperable, diplaying "loading..." and a spinner every time you send mail. We don't do it now nor did we do that when 300kbps connections were more common. Spinners are a crutch for undercooked, bad software.

Spinners don't have to replace the entire UI or make it inoperable. Classic email clients did indeed have a losding indicator when doing things like a "send and receive" operation.

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

#748

Post by kelnos »

ryandrake wrote: post #622
scarface_74 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What airline are you flying and in what country? And who has printers at home anymore? My wife and I fly quite often and mostly Delta - over a dozen times a year. Very few people still use paper tickets.

Just US domestic flights. Most people just have the paper passes. They are guaranteed to work. And I guess I just assumed everyone with a computer had some sort of printer. If not, how do they, you know, print things out? I use my printer constantly for things like forms I have to mail, printing out documentation to read later, hobby stuff…

> If not, how do they, you know, print things out?

I didn't have a printer until a few years ago (my now-wife really wanted one, so we got one). I do appreciate having it when I need it (easier than going to FedEx office), but I still very rarely have to print something out. I do really like that the printer has a built-in scanner; I've used that much more often than to print something.

> Most people just have the paper passes. They are guaranteed to work.

I've definitely had paper boarding passes that just wouldn't scan (probably from a faling airport kiosk printer), or a pass that had torn and even holding it together just right, it still wouldn't work.

I don't think I've ever had a mobile boarding pass that wouldn't scan, though of course there are other things that can go wrong, like the phone itself not working, which isn't a failure mode of paper passes.

But whatever, if my more-convenient, non-paper-wasting mobile pass doesn't work for some reason, I'll just go to the gate agent and ask them to print me one.

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

#749

Post by febusravenga »

aspenmayer wrote: post #655
maelito wrote: post #142

That's why I'm building a Web map app. The Web is universal. It's already very capable.

Maps seem like a distinct failure mode of web apps. How do you load the map data on the website to navigate or orient yourself if you got lost outside the network coverage area?

It's easy. You can download data for certain areas you expect to be in offline mode and move all routing logic to app. It has been done many times in many apps. (ok, it only easy conceptually in reality it's quite big chunk of conscious dosign of app as a whole and no lesser chunk of actual work )

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

#750

Post by Symbiote »

noah_buddy wrote: post #397
pqtyw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The idea of a parking app is better than the physical process of using a meter generally. But I have not really seen an app flow better than the physical process despite having parked in many cities. In fact, I can come up with a simple physical process better than the apps by far: tap the meter in and tap the meter out with your NFC chip in the card. Pay for the exact time, or if you forget, pay the full time period…

The article explains that some local councils in Britain are removing the pay-by-card (NFC etc) parking meters in favour of an app, payment by phone, or at a nearby shop. This is to reduce costs.
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