Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

821–830 of 870 posts

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

#821
post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's dismissive, sophomoric, and can be applied to literally anything you might complain about - eg "If you don't like how the 'HN crowd' votes, then stop coming here". In reality, Exit is not the only option.

Dude you seriously need to go out in the real world and try to understand how things work. Complaining on the Internet never does anything. Zero.

When and where is the meatspace protest against the Hacker News community's voting tendencies?

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

#823
post #540

It's funny how people in this thread keep saying "well if you're going to complain about people being penalized for not using apps, you might as well complain about people being penalized for not using telephones/cars/internet"... and yes, I am going to complain about all of those things. I imagine that many or most homeless people don't have reliable access to any of the above. I have an anxiety disorder that makes…

To quote something from a favorite fiction-series, where someone has traveled to a relatively backwards planet: > "Poor?" said Cordelia, bewildered. "No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?" > "It's not, of course," answered Vorkosigan. > "Then how can anybody get their schooling?" > "They don't." > Cordelia stared. "I don't understand. How do they get their jobs?" > "A few escape to the Service. The rest…

Thanks, a bit of nostalgy from my youth. I read it in Russian, in 200x, though

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

#824
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your condition, and while I think society can decide to accommodate to some conditions, I disagree with that idea that it "should accommodate". It is a common decision, and sometimes the answer will be "no, we don't accommodate for that, sorry". In the end, everything has a cost (being it effort, resources, time, etc.). Regarding the article, there are many cheap smartphones (<100eur) so I wonder…

In your world, people in wheelchairs would be housebound. But I guess we shouldn't accommodate them by requiring wheelchair ramps or curb cut-outs. They are lesser than us.

The world is not what you or me want is what you can convince enough people to do. In the country were I choose to pay taxes, people in wheelchairs are well accommodated.

But you know what that also means? That the same resources used for the ramps are not used to help someone that maybe starves to death somewhere else. I can't say I know which of the two I would choose, but I will not imply that the ones making a choice think "some are lesser than us".

Probably you will say "we can do both", "why choose", or something similar. But practically, all resources I know seem to be finite (time, energy, people). If you have infinite resources that I am not aware of, please fix all the problems.

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

#825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 want other than development cost/non-customer concerns. No way / at most, HIGHLY context dependant. Facebook/Insta/social media slug of the year? Yes, probably app is desired. My bank? Maybe, at a strech, if it's good. My local doctor? The real estate ag…

My bank has been fine as an app. My main nitpick is that it makes it very hard to fully detach from the app store since none of the banks publish elsewhere (I can easily ditch social media on the go or use a website, in comparison). I went to college early enough in the smartphone era that they didn't have an app as a freshman but did by senior year... I don't miss it.

Yeah banks want the closed ecosystem. Last thing they want is a plethora of app stores where fraudster clones of their apps appear, or jailbroken phones where grandma does everything right but a bootkit steals her money.

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

#826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

part of that is old perceptions that have long went away. And the other part is the huge push against PWAs, especially from Apple. Web-based app development has come so far but Apple is showing off its control freak tendencies as usual to make it not seem so. Hearing the story above about infinite loading to hide crashes really boils my blood and shows that it's simply a matter of care these days (and not hardware/ba…

I’m not sure what Apple’s huge push “against” PWAs is, other than just declining to support them. Are they doing anything active to lobby against PWAs?

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

#827
post #776
post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From what I remember of Thunderbird and Outlook, they both showed a visual loading indicator somewhere in the UI. Am I missing a detail of terminology here? By "loading spinner" I meant it in opposition to "do absolutely nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the page with the network tab open." I didn't mean to suggest any particular indicator of a pending network request, only that there should be an in…

Yes see what you mean now. Sorry - I was imprecise with my wording. As a fellow Australian I feel the pain too by the way :)

> do absolutely nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the page with the network tab open

This is what I was talking about. A pattern I see is papering over this deficiency with a massive “spinner”. Barely noticeable for the devs accessing the app on 127.0.0.1 on fancy machines - so frustrating for everyone else.

Absolutely agree indication of activity is important. Especially so considering how buggy many of these web apps are.

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

#828

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…

My ugly solution to this problem is to have a free Oracle Cloud VM in the other country that I use to run a VPN (Oracle provides instructions [1]). I then connect to this using OpenVPN on my phone, which allows me have a Google account that thinks I am in the other country and so allows me to install apps that are restricted to that country. I don't have the VPN connected all the time - only when I want to access the…

This is essentially what's known as 'digital migration'[1] in mainland China. Many streaming services aren't available in China; foreign companies that do operate here often have their features reduced. So, apart from buying foreign SIM cards and using multiple Apple accounts, we typically subscribe to something called 'airports,' which provide standardized, open-source VPN protocols with servers (called 'nodes') in various regions. Besides bypassing internet censorship, these nodes often use residential broadband and specify which streaming and LLM services they can unlock.

[1]: https://blog.shuziyimin.org/

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

#829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics. Except, marketing too is a market for lemons. Scammy marketing outcompetes good marketing . Simple as that.

Scammy marketing can sometimes be effective in the short term, but the problem with it it’s inherently self-limiting. Deceptive brands burn their audiences, lose customer trust, and either get regulated out of existence or collapse under their own churn rates. Meanwhile, companies that invest in clear, honest positioning, strong customer relationships, and long-term brand value consistently outperform in the long run…

Did you seriously just mention Tesla as an example of "honest positioning" and "strong customer relationships"??

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

#830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

part of that is old perceptions that have long went away. And the other part is the huge push against PWAs, especially from Apple. Web-based app development has come so far but Apple is showing off its control freak tendencies as usual to make it not seem so. Hearing the story above about infinite loading to hide crashes really boils my blood and shows that it's simply a matter of care these days (and not hardware/ba…

I’m not sure what Apple’s huge push “against” PWAs is, other than just declining to support them. Are they doing anything active to lobby against PWAs?

I'm not sure if they hit the US side as hard, but they were (to be frank) trolling a lot with PWA support as a protest to the DMA over in Europe.

https://x.com/mysk_co/status/1754978973417672794

I didn't keep up with how this ended, but they clearly do not care for the feature.

Post reply on HN