'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised
537 comments
·February 22, 2025fifticon
arp242
The annoying part is that website can just be used as an app. For a booking app we don't need native performance; just a webpage-inside-an-app is fine. In most cases, it should be fairly straight-forward and cheap to make this work.
What happens is they hire some contracting firm and they go "whole thing will have to be redone" so they get more work, and that's how you end up with a "solution" like this. Basically the software equivalent of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq6WME576ZE
koolba
What’s even more asinine is the website can be updated without publishing to an app store. You always have the latest version and all these apps are just a thin veneer on some CRUD endpoints anyway.
yurishimo
This is the entire philosophy behind all of the apps run by DHH/Basecamp. The web should be the default and native apps should only be used for software that just isn’t possible through the web (yet).
ndriscoll
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. Either way the animation is a crappy attempt to paper over a bad job.
bluefirebrand
> 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
This is only really true with stable, high speed internet connections. We still cannot take for granted that everyone has that, especially not in rural areas and double especially not on mobile devices
jagged-chisel
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 just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can.
I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip to the server before the app moves to the next step. There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive teensy data updates.
But all "the best" software development employees (that they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies can't seem to work that out.
ndriscoll
At least on my mobile, I get ~100 ms ping to most things. Admittedly I don't use it very often so it's hard to have a real world feel for how frequent things like dropouts are, but that's mostly because data costs a lot. That kind of also ties into developers doing a bad job though (e.g. sending me 10 MB of who knows what when the task (like paying for parking) fundamentally should be doable with a few kB, most of which are the TLS handshake). If they didn't do that, their thing would be instant with 3g speeds. Most CRUD generally just doesn't need a lot of data to actually accomplish the desired task.
Satellite Internet will be slow, but should still be well under a second? I'd still expect that even extreme cases, you wouldn't expect a spinner to complete a single revolution. So it still seems unnecessary.
Anyway, I'm generally on a reliable 300 Mbit/s connection where my pings are more like 20-70 ms, so I suppose you could alter my statement to "if I see a spinner, I interpret it as incompetence".
anigbrowl
Then it should give explicit status information like
uploading to server (xx%)...OK
waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes.
maximilianthe1
Also, inside buildings in very urban areas
mihaaly
It sucks to live with a dial in nowadays.
null
ChrisMarshallNY
Nah. We have a spinner, but I also have a timeout handler.
The reason is that the app's backend (and many of the servers on which it depends) can be hosted on the lowest-tier-dogshit-shared-hosting plan. I would love to have a better backend server, but we are a nonprofit, and can't afford better. This app would be a lot faster, with a more robust backend.
But error handling/reporting is a true art, and should never be an afterthought. In my experience, I need to start thinking about error management, as soon as I start planning.
In my experience, the best error handling is to not have errors, and, quite often, good UX is the answer to that. If the user doesn't do something that might cause agita, then they don't get an error.
mark-r
Some things in the real world simply take longer than milliseconds; this is not a failing. I'm working with a system that takes over 10 seconds to get a list of wifi access points, and you bet we throw up a spinner while that's happening.
Now of course if the spinner is merely cosmetic and doesn't represent any actual work going on, that can be a problem especially if the process you're waiting for dies.
worik
> For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds
For most CRUD apps
Sometimes wheels within wheels can slow down even modern computers.
andai
>150ms
Server in Australia?
Boogie_Man
At what point does this constitute a hostile action against the user and what degree of retaliation is appropriate? Open question for everyone.
Henchman21
I’m gonna punt on the question of where the line is for hostile actions and use some past legal justification of “I know it when I see it” and I see it clearly here.
The second part is the more interesting question to me:
Appropriate reactions would seem to include:
- finding a new doctor/practice/provider. Super hard in practice as they seem to be geographical monopolies a la the cable networks
- providing appropriately hostile feedback to your current doctors — but this is likely only to garner empathy as the docs have little say over this
- stop using smartphones and claim hardship — not sure how this would pan out. Probably not well?
- channeling Luigi and murdering the people responsible for our ongoing dystopia
This is why so many people are content to let the world burn. It ain’t for us anymore anyway.
throwawayqqq11
You have forgotten sabotage or whistle blowing. If i would work for such a crappy manager, i would let upper management know.
Feeling helpless is the moment you loose.
1propionyl
This is all downstream of consolidation of ownership in private equity of clinics, community health centers, emergency rooms, veterinarians offices, end-of-life care facilities, etc.
This is what happens when you let the bean counters and MBAs a quarter turn around the world with no on-the-ground experience or institutional knowledge make decisions from their spreadsheets to "optimize out inefficiencies".
Let's call it what it is: strip mining.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
Is stupidity instead of hardship a legally valid claim? Are cognitively disabled people, unable to operate a smartphone, a protected class?
kortilla
VOTE MOTHERFUCKER
Local government politics work. State politics even kinda work.
The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind boggling.
meristohm
I tend to push back against this nonsense pretty firmly, and would go so far as to request paper documents be sent, as "I don't have a device up to the task" (which sometimes is true, as I use old hardware until I luck into a handmedown or the thing breaks). I get that paper and postage and time are costs. So is user time and stress level.
PaulDavisThe1st
what retaliation are you imagining and against whom? who is even "the user" here?
TeMPOraL
Do a little reverse engineering/analysis on the app, to parallel-construct the claims of 'fifticon (as to not require them to leak internal info or become a whistleblower). If it's as bad as it sounds, go to press. Or just dump an expose on Twitter/X to maximize public awareness.
> who is even "the user" here?
The doctors and their patients. If it's as bad as it sounds, it actively degrades the ability of doctors to provide care, so it quite literally hurts actual people.
j-bos
I imagine legal retaliation as the perpetual loading could be framed as blocking access to medical care.
m463
I had kaiser permanente and had google/doubleclick tracking through the entire website, including investigating conditions, doctor communication, and test results.
I complained, they played dumb, but eventually they came up with "the website is a convenience". I stopped using it.
The app was much worse.
A couple years later, other people must have complained
https://www.classaction.org/news/kaiser-permanente-shares-we...
https://www.classaction.org/news/data-breach-lawsuit-says-ka...
I believe the same thing happens with apps and websites provided by other health care providers, but nobody investigates and nobody cares.
bluedino
My hospital system has a surprisingly decent web app. I can log in and see my appointments, pre-register for office visits, view lab results, medications, request appointments, do virtual visits...
The amazing stupid part is when I have to sign in at the actual doctor's office.
They have an iPad which does some sort of remote/citrix setup, resulting in a frustrating experience that is full of lag where you interface with what might be their actual EMR system.
kraussvonespy
Feels like this well written piece by Atol Gawande is relevant if you haven't seen it. I showed it a couple of years ago to my very competent and conscientious doc and she got PISSED. She talked about how she spent literally half of her doctoring time working through poorly designed menus in {epic, cerner} to carefully document everything she could about the patient, only to discover that most doctors don't pay attention to any of that info.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...
7thaccount
At the doctor's office I'll just ask for paper if there is no real website. Apps freaking suck. I probably won't be able to do this forever though. Example of enshitification #456249
reaperman
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.
null0ranje
I just leave restaurants that have gone to the online-only menu. It's usually an indicator that there are other terrible cuts in service and quality going on as well.
42772827
I ask the waiter what’s good, and usually end up going back forth a few times. It’s not as efficient, but it keeps me from reaching for my phone, which is covered in germs.
whoisthemachine
I've seen this trend regressing where I live, most restaurants I go to have done away with the QR codes (unless it's a brewery/distillery kind of establishment).
janc_
"Online menus" are fine; they allow quick updates without requiring the restaurant to re-print menus, and allow for just one copy/version of the menu to be used everywhere.
But then they should also display them publicly outside/inside, and/or have a bunch of tablets ready for visitors to use.
_Algernon_
Companies need to be held accountable for their negligent behaviour
Henchman21
How? What do you propose?
_Algernon_
Holding C-level executives criminally liable for the actions of the company would be a start.
null
2shortplanks
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 watch Star Trek because the US paramount plus app detects I’m in the UK and I can’t install the UK version.
I could switch to a UK iCloud account but then when I’m in the states everything falls apart the other way round.
userabchn
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 App Store using the Google account that I have for the other country.
[1]: https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/launching-your-own-...
crusty
To be a little pedantic, your solution is a solution to your problem, but only a fraction of the problem you're responding to. Your VPN won't help access the UK apps that require a UK phone localization if those same services aren't also available in the region of your VPN exit node. And since he's talking about UK-specific apps and services, VPNing his US phone back to the US isn't any help.
Netflix? Sure UK NHS? Not so much.
__turbobrew__
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 toll. I tried my best to comply but the system is totally user hostile.
odiroot
Truth be told, the tolls in Austria are a total mess.
whall6
Ha seems like the app is the scapegoat for this one
odiroot
This is all rather easy on Android. You can have multiple Google (Play) accounts set to different countries.
But most app developers don't even enforce it. I had UK bank apps installed through my "German" Google account.
realityking
Interestingly EU consumer protection cooperation is currently claiming this is illegal within the EU/between EU markets: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_24_...
I hope they manage to change things.
benhurmarcel
I’ve had the same issue between Spain and France, so it might be illegal but it’s still the case.
Farbklex
I recently complained to my local cities transportation office that their mobile app for bus tickets was only available for German Google users. The actually changed it now.
gamedever
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.
abraxas
Yes, I've long given up trying to reconcile this mess and bought three separate cell phones with three separate sim cards to for the three countries where I spend non-trivial amount of time.
gambiting
Yep, as someone who also travels between countries regularly, it's complete nonsense. "This app isn't available in your region" - what do you mean, I am literally in your region.
fnikacevic
The sad part is sometimes just switching languages/locales on your phone (i.e. changing the language from US English to British English) fixes this as it's all the code checks.
ComposedPattern
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 it hard for me to drive or talk on the phone, and I'm sure there are many people with more extreme conditions for whom it's impossible. There are people like Richard Stallman and members of certain religious communities who have strong moral objections to using certain technologies. Society should accommodate all sorts of people and all sorts of ways of living.
kevincox
IMHO at some point it makes sense to start requiring the internet, it makes a lot of things easier. But when we do that we need to ensure that everyone is supported. For example ensuring that people have ready internet access at public libraries. Providing government-provided email inboxes for receiving government communication (lots of homeless people get locked out of regular free mail providers). Train support staff at these libraries (or whatever institution provides these services) to help people who need assistance though the government processes, including doing it on their behalf when required.
nicbou
Immigrants are often left out for various reasons, such as not having the right documents, having an unsupported kind of passport, not having an address they can register as their home, not having an app store account in the right country, not having a local payment method, and a variety of other issues.
golemiprague
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13_9_7_7_5_18
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cbozeman
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vladms
> I don't like paying taxes.
If we replace "taxes" with "paying for an army, paying for police, etc." than the above statement seems strange. I can understand "I don't like what society choose to build (with the taxes)", but some things can't be let to the free market.
> I have to go do the fucking IRS's job
That's a society choice. I have no experience with IRS, but other countries have tax systems that are much more automatic (come prefilled with most info for example). But taxes are maybe a bit higher (because if you don't do the job, someone needs to maintain the systems that allow the automation).
sensanaty
The only reason you have to do the IRS' job is because the "free market" you love so much spends obscene amounts of money buying out your government and making sure people have to use their products in order to not go insane filing their taxes.
In most countries filing taxes is a painless process that takes 5 minutes and is more or less completely automated for you.
malfist
Have some empathy for your fellow humans. Life is better for everyone, you included, when you give people some grace and don't assume bad intentions
lsecondario
> Society is about conforming.
This is an expression of personal preference. It is a common preference but not universal.
Neonlicht
Society is what people invented so that different people can live together. If you do not conform you're banished to jail.
vladms
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jmholla
> 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.).
This falls apart when you realize this isn't just a consistent percentage of the population. It's a large portion of the population at different portions of their lives. It's something like 90% of adults will be disabled in their lives.
How many times have you lost your phone, or broken it without an immediately available backup?
miltonlost
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.
lezojeda
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johnea
Your argument is of course predicated on the assumption that "society" doesn't fail to accommodate you...
Requireing purchase of a private companies product, and accommpanying service, to access merdical or government services should be illegal...
Apple or goggle don't speak for me...
joshdavham
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 it improves the world…
pqtyw
> 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 much more convenient than having to find a printer.
Duolingo isn't really a replacement for classes (which are obviously a magnitude or few more expensive) but self learnings books, tapes and such (IMHO it's mostly inferior to those too but not by a such high degree).
Can't disagree about Tinder/etc. though.
lambda
I'm kind of puzzled by your first point. In my experience, parking apps require you to pay in larger chunks of hours than paying with coins used to; many times I have to pay for a minimum of 2 hours of parking with the app when I could pay for just 10 or 15 minutes of parking with coins.
svelle
The parking app I use in Berlin, easy park, works in the sense that I pre-select a timeframe I think im going to park which then gives me an estimate for how much it'll cost and reserve that amount using my CC. When I end the parking before that timer ends, the actual time I've parked will be taken and only that amount is charged.
It used to be even better in the sense that you'd only start and then end parking without having to pre select a time. But I think too many people, me included, forgot to end the parking when taking off and paid way more than they actually parked for.
gs17
>In my experience, parking apps require you to pay in larger chunks of hours than paying with coins used to;
Here in Nashville, they sold out our public street parking to a private company. Now instead of coins in a meter for the time you want, you have to buy at least an hour for $1.75 (or more), pay by scanning a QR code (which is misprinted on the signs) unless you're in one of the spots where there's a working pay machine, and it now is enforced 24/7 instead of having holidays and weekends off (IIRC it was also free after 6, which was great). Also they had two hour limits where you can't simply move your car, you have to park somewhere they don't check for an indeterminate amount of time. How is any of this an improvement unless you get a cut of the money?
pqtyw
I depends on the app I guess, where I am you just click to start/stop and (IIRC) get billed at 15 minute increments.
noah_buddy
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 you’re legally allowed to park.
Instead, on my city’s app I must select a car (despite having only one), select a zone (despite GPS), and then manually enter my card (despite it being my account default). Every time.
__turbobrew__
The Pay By Phone app works well for me. It automatically figures out what parking area you are in from the phone GPS, it already knows your license plate, and it has your credit card.
Basically the flow for me is open the app, and hit how long I want to park for. And then the app will let me know when my parking is running out and I can add time on my phone without going back to the car.
TeMPOraL
> 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.
Why do iOS and Android phones have a "wallet", and why a boarding pass would have anything to do with it?
There's an electronic solution strictly better than the app, for when you have no printer handy: just give the user the goddamned PDF! Works everywhere, works offline, can be printed if needed, and the user can manage, send or back it up however they like.
It's a simple solution that works.
realityking
You can do that if you want. Most airlines issue PDF boarding passes and both iOS and Android can store and show those files.
Apple Wallet (and Apple Pay) are actually one of my favorite smartphone features. The built-in Wallet (speaking for iOS here) has a few advantages over a folder of PDFs:
- The QR code is always fairly big without having to pan and zoom a PDF file
- The display brightness is automatically increased to make reading the QR code easier
- The Wallet syncs with my Apple Watch (where passes use a different, optimized layout) giving me backup if something where to happen to my phone during boarding
- Passes can be updated by the airline (e.g. gate changes)
- Passes automatically expire, I don’t have to cleanup myself. (There’s archive in case I need an old one)
- Passes can be shown on your lock screen during the boarding time for easier access
- Passes can be multilingual, adapting to your phone’s language
joseda-hg
> Why do iOS and Android phones have a "wallet", and why a boarding pass would have anything to do with it?
It's not that deep, just a skeuomorphic name for somewhere where you'd keep importants/valuables for quick access, credit/debit cards, boarding passes, concert tickets
Not unlike keeping a folded up copy of a pass in a physical wallet (Which may not be universal, but I would have guessed not that uncommon either)
svachalek
The wallet allows activation by proximity like RFID. So if the pass is in the wallet you don't need to go digging around for wherever the PDF is stored in the phone. Tap, the pass is requested, the pass responds, go.
scarface_74
Can a PDF automatically update with gate changes and delays?
closewith
I have a few qualms with this app:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
OptionOfT
I recently got bitten in the rear by Delta not updating boarding passes stored in Apple Wallet, even though it had / has all permissions to do so.
Only when I checked the time and wondered why we weren't boarding yet, and opened the app did I notice that the gate changed.
Even afterwards the one stored in Apple Wallet did not update. I even tried to do the pull-to-refresh. Eventually I pulled to refresh, and that worked.
realityking
To be fair, a printed boarding pass also didn’t update when the gate changed.
ryandrake
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.
mrweasel
I don't trust apps, I don't mind using them for stuff that doesn't matter much, like parking og supermarket loyalty programs. For travel information, absolutly fucking not. I print everything. At the airport I mostly see people using their phones as boarding passes, I absolutely refuse to do that, I have zero trust that that will work as well as the paper boarding passes.
hibikir
Depends on where you are. My experience in American airports is almost all apps, but Spain's Iberia, for example, is basically all paper, typically printed by the airline and not even someone at home. So for them, minimal changes over how flying worked in the 1990s.
marssaxman
That's what I do, because phones are too fiddly and I don't want to have to deal with unlocking it and finding wherever the barcode went off to when it's my turn to check in, but my wife does something with an app instead and seems to like it.
tokioyoyo
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.
scarface_74
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.
Kwpolska
People still have printers at home?
Low-cost airlines charge a fee for printing boarding passes at the airport.
thfuran
>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.
And once the gate or departure time changes, your printed boarding pass will start lying to you.
dpkirchner
> 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).
Maybe it's better these days, but back when I used to use online apps/sites to pay for parking in private lots, 4/5 times I still got a "ticket." I never had to pay the fine with money, only with time.
I think it really was the 4th time I decided to stop using those apps entirely.
Sometimes I wonder if the devs behind these apps and processes feel embarrassed by the results. I would be, even if the failures weren't my fault.
369548684892826
>> 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.
gs17
>Pay-on-exit car parks are the answer to this
Except having the actual barrier is expensive. The license plate reader is cheaper, so they'll do that instead, and if it malfunctions, hope you don't mind paying for a full day of parking!
xxr
A few months ago, I had to use street parking in Long Beach, California. They no longer had individual meters along this particular street, but rather one parking sticker machine. The parking sticker machine was broken, so I had to download the advertised parking payment app which was not one of the parking apps I already had on my phone. Finally, I had to pay an additional “convenience” fee on top to use this app that I wouldn’t have needed to pay using physical payment infrastructure.
So everyone wins here, except us: the app company gets to make a killing on compulsory payment processing, and City of Long Beach gets to continue to pull in parking revenue without worrying about whether their payment machines still work—a broken machine is not an excuse because you can still pay with the app because everyone has a smartphone with an up-to-date OS and functioning cell service with appropriate bandwidth, right? I’m sure I could have complained to the city and gotten my +/-dollar back, but I didn’t have time just to do so for the principle of the thing.
gs17
> 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 the road to it say to pay before proceeding, so I do. After driving all the way up, it turns out the ferry wasn't running (they neglected to close the gate at the start of the road). The parking app was tied into a pair of license plate readers on the boat, but since I couldn't drive past the "exit", they never considered my "parking" to end and it racked up a charge over two days. Of course, the "parking" starts without my car being detected going on to the boat.
Fortunately, I got a refund, but it required jumping through a bunch of hoops. If we paid the way it used to be done this wouldn't be possible at all!
>Airline apps that are worse than just printing a boarding pass.
Delta's app is pretty good. I really like the peace of mind from being able to see where my bags are, including when they get put on the conveyor.
internet2000
I don't think I could disagree more with your number 4. Adding a boarding pass to Apple Wallet and having it update itself with gate changes, delays, etc, notifying you and even scribbling skeuomorphically what changed on the pass [0] has been one of the strongest delighters I've experienced in recent times.
RhysU
Are you not also paying attention to the gate itself and to departure boards? Why do you need your phone to tell you what's posted on numerous displays that you walk past?
internet2000
> Are you not also paying attention to the […] departure boards?
I’m not, not anymore.
> Why do you need your phone to tell you what's posted on numerous displays that you walk past?
Convenience.
tdeck
You can do that with a boarding pass downloaded from the airline website or emailed to you by the airline. But some airlines like to hide this option in order to force you to download their app.
Kwpolska
How can you remotely update a PDF file after someone downloaded it?
kjkjadksj
My apple wallet boarding passes never update on time. At LAX they sometimes put you as a placeholder at the international terminal for your gate on boarding pass. So then you show up, slog through the international terminal to this gate, and see that no you are actually in terminal 7. Enjoy the resulting 2.5 mile walk I hope you baked in extra time.
Now I don’t trust it. Googling the flight number brings in the updated gate. Not the apple wallet boarding pass though.
nayuki
> Parking apps are worse than parking meters.
Case in point - Toronto Parking Authority (Green P)'s app forces you to keep a balance and refill in multiples of $20 CAD, whereas street parking meters can charge your credit card in any increment as necessary (e.g. $1.25).
Also, the app forces you to disclose your phone number as an account identifier; you have no option to sign up by email or username. https://mobilepay.greenp.com/faq/i-have-a-new-phone-number-w...
The culture of designing user-hostile apps is wild.
rqtwteye
I would dispute your points 2 and 4. But yes, the trend towards apps is not very good. I am not sure if the apps are cheaper or just makes people think they are doing something modern and better. One thing is for sure, most apps based devices won't age well.
bdcravens
Having taken both academic classes in Spanish, and using Duolingo for multiple years, I feel like Duolingo is a faster, more cost effective option for establishing a foundation. Obviously if you want to approach fluency, submersion is necessary.
poincaredisk
Not to mention that it's hard to take a language class while commuting in a bus.
dwedge
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.
afandian
I'm glad to see people talking about this. I'd love to see a new right: The right to not have your phone on you.
For whatever reason. Maybe it was stolen. Maybe it's being fixed. Maybe the battery is dead.
(Maybe you don't want to get a Google or Apple account. But that's not the only use case.)
All public services and essential services (government services, banks, car parks, etc) should respect this right. It's bizarre that people think it's such an outlandish request.
LinuxBender
I think this article is city-centric. I am in a rural area in the US and I have only had a smart phone for 2 years and have never installed any apps beyond Mumla that I use for my own self hosted uMurmur server. I have never browsed the web from the phone. My life today is just as it was in the 1970's in that regard. All the businesses here have printed coupons. There are local printed newspapers. I have zero dependency on any "smart" features of phones unless one considers texting to be a smart feature given that was not a thing in the 70's. I do not expect any of that to change. The people here like keeping things simple. With exception of Amazon to get things small shops here do not carry I could even kill my internet connection and life would go on just fine. I would probably even get healthier. All the local businesses know me by name so I guess that makes up for a lack of cookie tracking.
PaulDavisThe1st
> I think this article is city-centric.
It's an article about the situation in the UK. If your "rural area" is in the US, it is not surprising that it's a bit different than anything in the article.
LinuxBender
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.
crusty
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 insult, but rather because I don't think there's an inherent difference, I just think rural communities are harder for companies to monetize, for multiple reasons - think density and average income.
But like Amazon, they will get there, and unlike cities, rural communities have less ability to resist and less ability to support a diversity of options. Think about the takeover of Walmart and Dollar General/Tree.
I don't think there's anything special inherent to your rural community that protects you from all this "progress". You're just living through the time before it catches up to your community. And i bet if you think about the effects of the arrival of changes like Walmart's rural expansion, you might find that they upset rural life as well, reducing wages, extracting money from the local economy instead of allowing it to continue to circulate locally, and then investing driving distances, and the associated costs in fuel and time among others.
My guess is that you will go from blaming cities for their problems to blaming cities for your communities problems once they reach you.
But maybe if you reevaluate your perspective, you could help your community prepare to resist those changes while you still have time.
tdb7893
In the US large companies in rural areas also often use apps in the same way as they do in the city (at least they did the last time I visited) and at least all the people I know in rural areas have had smartphones for a long time and use apps a lot (though maybe the fact that the area I know well is near a major university has made it a bit techier). The smaller local stores don't use apps so even in Chicago most places I actually went to didn't. I just went through my phone and the only app like that I have is for Taco Bell
LinuxBender
People here do have smart phones and I'm sure some have apps installed. What I am saying is none of that is required today. Nobody here is penalized for not installing some app.
null
kxrm
Unless it's McDonalds. Then you pay more for not having the app.
curious_cat_163
I had never heard of Mumla and just looked it up -- looks like it needs some help. [1]
Curious, why do you use it?
LinuxBender
Amazing audio quality. Text chat. No censorious behavior. The server is ultra light weight in terms of memory and CPU.
crusty
I don't think it's a natural urban/rural division. I suspect that that division is more an artifice of capitalism. These new services want to grow, so they target places with the most potential customers. If the pitch to the municipality is that they can take the cost of coin collection and meter maintenance out of the budget entirely, and switch the enforcement from a human walking around, checking meters and wiring tickets to a car that drives past with license plate readers and a sass subscription, then it will come for anywhere with meters, and may eventually come for everywhere, because the original pitch for meters required justifying the expense with projected revenue. And now, if the expense of a few signs and a subscription are low enough, and the license readers are already on police cars, then that evaluation changes.
Of course, as with all of it, local jobs disappear from the local budget, and that money gets shipped off to Wall Street.
realo
Don't worry... The 21st century should reach you too, eventually.
LinuxBender
No worries. This troglodyte will bury his head in the sand. There will be a documentary about us and even the Amish will be shaking their heads. People in the 25th century will look back in envy after the machines take over and they had to reset civilization with EMP's back to agrarian or hunter gatherers. All of that pales in comparison to what happens from the years 201 BG to 108 BG during the Butlerian Jihad.
cheschire
Well, not so much city-centric as it is population-centric. Cities are population centers, so there is correlation.
The scale you are thinking in is comparable to a small web forum being sustainably moderated by the owner of the site, while the majority of the world exists in a place like reddit that has more moderator users than even large web forums have in total. Reddit would not be sustainable if they had to pay a moderation staff, and similarly rural living cannot be scaled up to support cities without becoming city-like.
So assuming you accept all that, why even read this article or post a reply in the discussion?
I'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't see why you find this topic interesting? It's like replying to a thread about how life in Afghanistan is really difficult, and you're saying "I think this article is not about America because of all the American things I experience."
LinuxBender
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 store apps that have massive teams of marketing psychological warfare experts manipulating them then I have done my hero's doodie.
andelink
I for one very much appreciated your response. I am pleasantly surprised to hear life like that still exists in the US
Glyptodon
My city has parking meters that I can't use because the website has a broken credit card form and the app "isn't available on your version of Android." And of course they don't accept cash.
It's a farce.
joshdavham
You’re in Vancouver, too?
pcthrowaway
City of Vancouver parking meters have to accept cash still.
If you try putting a quarter in and it doesn't work (as is often the case because of tampering with the coin slots), I believe you don't have to pay for parking.
jrochkind1
going back to pre-smartphone but still true, in the US at least, it is generally illegal to park at a broken meter and you can get a ticket -- because otherwise there would be incentive to break the meter so you could park there for free.
bsder
> If you try putting a quarter in and it doesn't work (as is often the case because of tampering with the coin slots), I believe you don't have to pay for parking.
Huh? That's the exact opposite of most municipalities I know of.
Normally it is "If the meter is broken, you cannot park there. It's an automatic ticket."
Otherwise, everybody just jams something in the slot and all your meters wind up broken.
jebarker
When visiting the UK last summer we tried to go to a train museum. There were three public parking lots around with different app based parking systems. We were unsuccessful in using any of them due to various issues relating to poor cell service, lack of UK phone number etc. In the end we had to leave without visiting the museum. It was farcical.
jamesfmilne
As a North London resident, the parking app situation is just as farcical for me.
There are at least three different apps for parking around me: RingGo, PayByPhone and JustPark.
I went to East London recently to visit the Velodrome, and discovered yet another one: Evology.
It's always great fun, standing around in the car park trying to wrangle your cards whilst creating yet another account to pay for 30 minutes of parking.
Then, of course, there's the 50/50 chance that my iPhone has decided to offload the parking app you need because you haven't used it in the last month or so.
And occasionally RingGo will decide to log me out, and when I go to log back in for some reason the last password I have in my password manager doesn't work, so now I also have to reset my password.
Agreed, paying for parking has turned into a total farce.
ryandrake
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 a small amount. And if the debt collector does pursue, I can send them a dispute letter, forcing them to prove I have a debt obligation, which 99 times out of 100 will make them go away.
acdha
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 right to use their services without paying, your choice is still to pay or not use them.
aucisson_masque
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 still refuse to pay that, get cops to show up at your house and then you have to shoot to get them to leave.
At some point of course you would think it's a bit much for a parking ticket.
If you don't like it, just don't use it, like everyone else does.
kjkjadksj
The thing is they can tow your car away potentially. At which point your little protest is over as you are now being extorted for hundreds for something you can’t ignore.
mihaaly
Even those having phone and app have trouble in the form of hefty penalties when cell service does not allow them paying in the hard 5 minute mandated. There was a little 'scandal' (more like the usual random weekly media article pick for traffic increasing annoyment from among the thousands of similar f ups not getting any traction) recently provoking thunderous and colorful statements from officials. Regualation change may come in some form sometime perhaps that solves something possibly, but change something for certain, perhaps.
QuadrupleA
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.
Zak
If I'm forced into using an app when a website would have done just fine, I give it a one-star review.
kjkjadksj
Embedded browser with a 450mb app size of course. I wish you can sort by size on app store. It is a signal for quality when you find a 4mb app that does the same thing as a 450mb app.
jampekka
Cue HN's anti-PWA brigade.
tdeck
One thing not mentioned yet is what happens when you've got a cheaper phone filled with photos and videos. At various times I've had to spend a few minutes deleting things just to download some stupid 100 meg app that I need to use for a total of 5 minutes to complete some basic task.
shipp02
A lot of suggestions ask the poster to not store photos on their phone, but this takes away the functionality from their phone that they actually want in service using 1 app for 5 minutes.
philipov
Is your cheaper phone unable to interface with a computer? I'm no advocate of an app-based economy, but your phone shouldn't be the archive for your photos.
layer8
That doesn’t solve the problem of having to spend time deleting photos and later restoring them back from the archive.
philipov
plug in USB cable, drag and drop entire directory from one drive to another with file explorer, is the only reasonable way to manage photos. Get everything off the device at the end of each day. Why would you ever put things back on the phone?
tdeck
I back my photos up using adb backup, but I don't keep them in cloud services.
zulban
If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside.
Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your media.
tdeck
Perhaps I can be patient and explain the underlying concepts here, since they seem to be unintuitive to a small minority of very condescending commenters:
1. I like to have access to my photos and videos while I'm on the go. You never know when the subject of some trip or experience from 2 years ago will come up in conversation, and I'll want to show a photo of it to someone I'm talking to. Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them.
2. I don't like to give cloud services all my photos and videos. Despite the extremely dark pattern in Google Photos where it tries multiple times a month to trick me into enabling cloud backup, I've kept it off. Some of my photos may be sensitive things like personal documents, I'd rather not have to think about what's in the cloud and what isn't, and what is deleted where. These services also often aren't free and I'd prefer not to pay for them.
3. I back up my phone regularly to my personal computer, so losing my phone doesn't mean I lose all the media on my phone.
4. And since I know someone will ask, I lock my phone. Not with a fingerprint; with a passcode. It's not perfect but I'm comfortable with the level of security.
ryandrake
> Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them.
But in your example they -do- weigh something, measured in megabytes. So there is an obvious tradeoff in terms of what you can fit on your phone with some spare empty margin, similar to physical goods that you need to fit into a backpack when you know you might pick something else up along the way.
anigbrowl
How other people choose to use their phones is not your business.
kxrm
> If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside.
I really don't like this analogy. These are entirely different concepts. A backpack has weight, dimension in real space that impacts the real world. A phone full of videos has no extra weight or volume in the real world.
JeanMarcS
My brother doesn't have à smartphone (by choice).
For example, he cannot access his bank account via his desktop anymore. He have to go to his agency in person.
Well we all did that for years so it's just annoying, because he still have the possibility to do it and it's his choice.
But what will happen if all the brick and mortar close ? When will it be mandatory to get a smartphone for his bank app, just to have access to his money ?
And it's just an example...
adrian_b
While I have a smartphone, I choose to not have a Google account.
One of the banks that I am using has terminated its on-line banking service, which I had been using for almost 20 years, replacing it with an app.
That would not have been a problem if they would have provided the app themselves on their Web site, but they refuse to do this and they provide the app only in the Google on-line store, which I cannot use because I do not have a Google account, despite the fact that the app is free.
Therefore I have reduced a lot the number of operations that I do through that bank, redirecting them to another bank, which still has on-line banking on their Web site. Fortunately, for now the bank that has closed their on-line banking Web site still keeps an SMS service, which allows me e.g. to check the balance of my account from my phone and which notifies me about the transactions on my credit card.
Many years ago, I have closed all my accounts at a bank that has annoyed me by updating their on-line banking Web site so that it no longer accepted any browsers except Microsoft Internet Explorer. At that time I have hoped that it will be the last time when I leave a bank because they believe that they can force their customers to also be customers of unrelated third parties, but now this problem with Google has appeared.
I am not a US citizen and the bank is not from USA. I doubt that it can be legal for a bank here in Europe to condition their services by their customer becoming the customer of a foreign entity that is Google. However I cannot afford to waste time and money to determine the legality of their actions.
ajolly
Can you use Aurora store? https://auroraoss.com/ (That's what I use when I don't want to put a Google account on an Android phone)
adrian_b
Thanks for pointing to that.
I was not aware of it, so when I will have time I will experiment with it, to see if it works for downloading the app I need when logging in anonymously.
cenamus
I really felt that when I was waiting for a replacement display from china for about 3 months...
If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for everything, if there's even a branch still open close to you.
Can't even buy bus tickets without an app (tracks your journey with GPS of course), without paying more, even at ticket machines in the busses.
hypeatei
> If you want to do stuff at a physical bank you pay fees for everything
This hasn't been my experience at all in the US. If you need something in-person, going to the bank is the best option since they don't charge fees like a random ATM does.
SkiFire13
My bank used to provide you with a small TOTP device the size of a usb key. Sadly they eventually deprecated it and recently dismissed it entirely in favor of their increadibly slow app.
pseingatl
With a text sent to your phone for TFA. Which means you can't access your accou nt if you travel. You could always access it with the TOTP device.
sumuyuda
The solution is that banks should support any TOTP client for authentication and not just their proprietary app. So you can use open source software or a hardware key.
everdrive
But they won't. HN is quite good at suggesting a lot of genuinely intelligent and valid potential technical solutions, but most banks won't even think about supporting TOTP broadly. They'll lean into smartphones and apps because this is where the bast majority of their customers are. In this case the 'tyranny' is the overwhelming preference of other people. The masses have spoken, and they want everything to be on their phones.
iforgotpassword
Also because ticking boxes. You just provide an app that fulfills all the silly security requirements for banking apps and then if something goes wrong, the customer has the burden of proving it's the banks fault.
I've had my banking app installed on an old Samsung phone running lineageos. I only powered it on when I had to do online banking. At some point I needed to update the app and they started checking for rooted devices, so it wouldn't work anymore. Now I've installed it on a much newer android device that I also use for a lot of other crap and sketchy stuff I don't want on my main phone. Also it's powered on all the time. Whether that's really more secure than what I did before is questionable.
nkrisc
And that’s where the government needs to step in order in order to advocate for the minority.
szundi
[dead]
sebazzz
The ING has a small Android based single-purpose authenticator device they offer to customers without smartphones. It can scan the QR code and do the auth.
Kwpolska
Can your TOTP client show what operation you’re approving? Because my bank app can.
adrian_b
I had a couple of such TOTP clients from different banks. For approving an operation, both of them required me to sign the amount of money transferred by that operation (i.e. they generated a one-time code that depended on a hash of the amount of money), so no confusions were possible.
mr_mitm
A chip TAN generator can. I'm glad my bank is still supporting those.
captainbland
In the UK loads of bank branches have closed. They've opened up "hubs" which are a joke, some are open only have weekend opening hours of Saturday morning and you usually have to travel to a different town to get to it.
morkalork
I had some hilariously degenerate experiences with this recently. There are basic services that branches won't provide at all anymore like cashing cheques, which can be annoying in some circumstance. But the real dumb one was being blocked from taking a certain action in the online banking with a message like "present yourself with 2 forms of government ID at a local branch". OK. Fine. Drive there, wait in line, blah blah blah. The teller looks at me like I'm crazy when I say that online banking sent me there. They figure it out, do the KYC process, unblock me and I say great now can you do the thing I was trying to do before all this? "No, you must use online banking for that."
pseingatl
The advantage of having to go to the branch in person is that KYC is never an issue.
SilasX
Related issue: how every website seems to migrate to some smartphone-optimized version that looks like a mobile app blown up to a bigger screen that works much worse on desktop. Hall of Shame: Twitter, Facebook, even Vanguard.
What's even more confusing/frustrating is that, despite being developed with very elaborate, mature frameworks, they still lack basic UI accommodations, like making clickable elements detectable by add-ons, or allowing you to open up a detail view in a new tab.
I get if Joe Shmoe's cobbled-together app forgets some things, but why wouldn't stuff like that be rolled in as a default, with all the development hours applied to it?
mrweasel
My bank is developing a new version of their online banking solution. They've decided to model in on their app, which I refuse to use because it's absolutely garbage. So now I have a online banking platform that can't do copy/paste on, hides much of the relevant information and is generally much harder to use than the old version.
I've provide feedback on multiple occasions, but I don't have high hopes for them to fix anything. If I where running a business and to use the site every day I'd be pissed and threatening to move my business else where.
hamilyon2
App store monopoly hurts us way more than it is talked about. Suddenly, not only we are not to chose which devices to use to access what could be a simple website. Now unrelated third party decides if we have access to it based in, for example, country of residence. Or at all. Apple routine forces censorship on our phones as if it was it's property.
I still believe it was a tragedy that Microsoft folded their attempt into mobile. To explain my level of desperation, I feel our next best hope here is China.
fsflover
Our next best hope is GNU/Linux smartphones. Sent from my Librem 5.
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 to actually implement and deliver it.
Internally, I know it is because the original dev team has been gutted, development outsourced to india, and just a skeleton crew from the original team manages the chinese-whispers process with the huge indian team.As a result, the use case flow (IE the only way you can operate it..) of the app, goes as follows:
1 close the app 2 launch the app and sign in 3 do ONE action 4 enjoy the result of the action 5 repeat from 1..
You might wonder why that is.. Well, that is because your software is not allowed to display any errors - because that might indicate there were bugs.. So instead, whenever an error happens, you just display the '... still loading..' animation... forever. So, technically, there are no errors, no bugs.. "IT IS JUST TAKING TOO LONG TO RESPOND". (spoiler: it will NEVER respond, because hidden behind the screen, is a series of unhandled web api errors..)
But again, as an "internal" employee, I have seen our management claim all this is a huge success (client paid/pays).
Back to using it: When I have to interact with my doctor, I write the texts on my PC, and mail them to myself. Then I cut/paste them from gmail into this wonderful app.