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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

#781

Post by 4k93n2 »

jdietrich wrote: post #188
everdrive wrote: post #28

People are writing this off, but it eventually becomes impossible not to own a smartphone; an expensive device, with an expensive monthly plan, and an absolutely terrible privacy record. Eventually more businesses will require smartphone usage just to use their services. There could even be a time when government services require it.

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…

if only i was that simple. you will still need to swap it for a newer phone every once in a while when the OS stops being supported, and have to transfer the apps and auth to the new device which is not always straight forward

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

#782

Post by TexanFeller »

It’s especially bad for elderly people. I have elderly family members with cancer and other serious issues who struggle because medical offices expect contact to be only in app messages and chats. When these patients call on the phone and say they need to talk to someone on the phone because they struggle with accessing other forms of communication they still often only reply back in the app/website. Some are elderly and rural enough to have grown up without electricity or running water until they were adults(yes, they grew up in the US). They still don’t have smartphones. They have <1mbit Internet. 2FA is a major hurdle for them. Some have vision problems that make reading text difficult. Some are hard of hearing and struggle with the phone too. So many people are left behind by trying to make patient communication efficient for the staff and documented for their electronic records systems. No one is thinking about what’s efficient and effective for the patients they serve, and no one will because doctors have huge debts to pay and have to work for the Wall Street crowd.

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

#783

Post by mneubrand »

odiroot wrote: post #509
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently travelled to Europe and found that a number of transportation apps disallowed me installing them. Toll road apps, public transit, etc… It was a major pain, and to make it worse I got fined €130 by Ausfinag for not paying tolls, but I couldn’t install their app and I bought the wrong sticker at the gas station because as it turns out there are a bunch of special areas with additional tolls above the base to…

Truth be told, the tolls in Austria are a total mess.

There is a country wide sticker/digital vignette you can get for different periods of time and a handful of tunnels that cost extra money that you can pay in cash or by card at the time you drive through one of those. How is that a mess?

Of course a system like Germany where you don't have any tolls is even easier but compared to France or Italy where you constantly have to pull over for toll stops and end up paying a multiple more for most trips I think this is pretty great

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

#784

Post by bluefirebrand »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #778
bluefirebrand wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Asynchronous operations can be retried until the network returns without blocking the UI.

Not when they require user validation like making sure a photo updated correctly

If you drive away from the delivery before that photo is uploaded, then you risk not having the proof that you delivered the package successfully

That is actually worse for the driver than having to wait for the upload so they can retry immediately

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

#785

Post by dalke »

tuna74 wrote: post #754
dalke wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Sweden, it took me about 5 months but I was able to get the school to send me info by email. They switched to an app-only system, and I have no smartphone. Setting aside any issues related to privacy or US corporate control over my life, I'm one of the people who doesn't use a smartphone because the temptation to be online, at the drop of the hat, is too much to resist. I compare it to being like someone who…

I live in Sweden with two kids in school and can do everything through the web (except BankId authentication of course).

In January our city switched from a web portal to an app-only system.

Last fall I was working on getting a username+password access to the portal, since the students and teachers don't need BankID to log in. I was using my son's login to read the weekly newsletters.

At the time I warned our skolnämnden that I would not be getting a smartphone. They switched to app-only, making it impossible for me to get info or let the school know about absences or late arrive.

It took talking with the teachers, with fritids, and the principal to work out an email-based option.

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

#786

Post by ndriscoll »

strken wrote: post #703
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…

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…

Processing should be more like 6 ms though (assuming basic CRUD), not 60. The TLS/TCP latency can be solved with a TLS terminating proxy in the region. After that, unless you want spinners on every data fetch (a miserable experience), you probably want a read replica if you're actually trying to serve the region. If you're a big company, you probably want a full read/write setup in the area (which is something for big companies to figure out anyway with newer data protection laws).

Slow server calls and daisy chained sequential operations are both people doing a bad job. My last job had backend calls that took over 1s to do basic CRUD on a low traffic service (bouncing around a dozen micro services on the backend). That should never happen.

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

#787

Post by piperswe »

Marsymars wrote: post #623
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…

> Unless the app is exceptionally horrible you can just export it to Apple/Android wallet which is much more convenient than having to find a printer. You can just print at the airport at the check-in machines. I never even bother checking-in in advance of arriving at the airport. I theorize that they assign bad seats to early checkins to incentivize people to pay to choose a different seats. I have at various times…

United's self service kiosks at some airports (e.g. AUS) no longer print boarding passes - they say that they're switching to only mobile boarding passes.

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

#788

Post by piperswe »

kelnos wrote: post #751
369548684892826 wrote: post #293

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). Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this. Combined with contactless card payment and that's peak parking experience.

> Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this. Combined with contactless card payment and that's peak parking experience. US here (you are presumably elsewhere given that you said "car park"), but I can't remember ever seeing a parking garage that had a parking app. All of them are like you describe, with pay-on-exit. I mainly see parking apps for street parking (where pay-on-exit can't work), and sometimes more bas…

In Austin, I've parked in a handful of parking garages that require using an app. They have license plate recognition on entry and exit, and they mail you a nastygram if you enter/exit without linking a credit card to your plate online.

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

#789

Post by LinuxBender »

crusty wrote: post #496
LinuxBender wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. I think the US tries to mimic big city behavior in the EU so it's probably just a matter of time for big cities in the US to have the same problems. Maybe that means I have a few more decades for any of that to find it's way to me. Curious how prevalent this behavior is in the rural parts of the UK.

I realize this might not be a kosher comment for HN, and i aphid for that. But you seem to have imagined some inherent divide between the mechanics of urban and rural (and apparently foreign and domestic) lives or at least governance. With this imagined division, you are free to ascribe whatever outcome that affects cities to whatever cause, since you live in a different state of existence. I'm not saying that as an…

All of this could come to pass. Should that be the case I can always move to a smaller community or to a very remote location. I've always wanted to build an underground home or build a cave home to reduce my carbon emissions for really real. That might be the time.

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

#790

Post by robocat »

jampekka wrote: post #541
robocat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> loyalty programs" discriminate against the less well off. The opposite: supermarket loyalty cards are often designed so that the well off pay more: i.e. it is the well off that are being discriminated against. The barriers are designed to allow poorer people to pay less. The topic is called price discrimination. All the poorer people I know use loyalty cards because they judge them to be valuable (despite the extra…

In loyalty programs the benefit percentage often increases as a function of money spent, disproportionally benefiting the more well off who spend more. I've yet to encounter a loyalty program that would do the inverse (probably there are some that cap the benefits, which could be interpreted to be to this direction). Neither have I seen a loyalty program that would only accept poor people. Price discrimination is any…

> disproportionally benefiting

Only if you think a $50000 discount on a Lamborghini is disproportionate compared with a $500 saving on a Kia.

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