I have recently started a new position and am required to use an app that has three Facebook trackers, one of them being a Facebook location tracker according to Exodus App Privacy in order to get your food when it would literally work perfectly fine ordering to a real cashier or shit even a website rather than having to download an app.
I have also read many stories of people that live in apartments that require them to use a mobile app for god damn LAUNDRY. All you need, is a card reader, and it will work perfectly fine like it has been for the longest time.
Privacy concerns aside, it is just annoying that you need this app and that app and this app and that app and it just clutters space on your phone. Security concerns too as now they have all of this additional info on you online, such as your phone number your email your real name, instead of just your credit card info like a card reader would have. And I am willing to guarantee that their security model is absolute horseshit because they have such a small team of engineers working on the app and the servers.
Literal enshitification
Magne
A person’s music taste seems to crystalize at some point in their teenage years. The bands you loved at 15-17 are probably the bands that you’ll love forever.
Likewise, I’m finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago, and the new era of “apps for every individual thing” is just wholly unappealing. Give me a web browser to interface with your information. If I can’t get it done with that, I’m more likely to move on to some even older tech and skip your product altogether.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late to bingo. And get off my lawn.
Me: “seems to” “at some point” “probably” while making a minor, secondary point. Others: Severely Triggered
I’m doing my best to constantly listen to new music every week to keep fresh and malleable in my taste
yea, discovering is part of the fun
For me it depends on the mood. New stuff is fun, but stuff I know can be instantly trabsportative to moods or mental spaces and it feels good. New stuff can be too mentally engaging if I’m trying to do focus work or zone out. I think I listen to less new stuff now because I’m usually wanting to zone out with music more than actively engage with it.
Dunno I can’t stand the music I listened to in my teenage years.
I dont listen to anyone I liked as I kid cause they all came out as sex traffickers and pedophiles.
now I just listen to disney music, and waiting for the inevitable horror revelations with regards to those.
The bands you loved at 15-17 are probably the bands that you’ll love forever.
Thank god that wasn’t the case. Listened to some awful shit as a kid
PWAs for the win!
Wait come back!! You dropped your cane!
Everything that’s normal between age 10-20 is just as it is.
Everything you get to know between 20 and 30 is the hot new shit.
Everything after age 30 is just another fad you don’t want to invest time to get to know anyway
An interesting experiment on the music thing. Top songs on your 13th birthday, at least for US/North Americans. https://www.birthdayjams.com
Wonder what they use your birthday for?
One of the credit card companies I use has a website that won’t work properly anymore in my phone’s browser.
My wife has a card through this company as well and she uses their app with no problems.
I have zero interest in installing their app so once a month I fire up my surface pro just to pay that damn bill.
It used to work just fine in the phone browser though.
Should probably just cancel that shitty account one of these days.
That’s altogether BS. The bands I listen to have changed constantly since my teenage years. That’s just an excuse to become a ranting old man.
I’m finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago
You are correct but it goes further:
Any tech that existed before you start school is completely natural and quite boring.
Any tech that is invented while you still care about new tech (this can be anywhere between 15 and 45 as it depends on the person) is exciting and cool.
Anything after that is squarely in get off my lawn territory and a bit scary and confronting.
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cut out avocado toast and Starbucks (sarcasm)
I don’t know if anyone growing up these days would actually like mobile app requirements if they took the time to think about why they’re required. Source: I’m one of them.
Most people young or old don’t think about it and don’t care.
I don’t think that’s true. I like what I liked what I was a teen but more in a nostalgic kind of way. I definitely didn’t like harder metalcore in my teens the way I do now lol.
Nice bullshit armchair Freud u hating every change due to immaturity or unwillingness to learn doesnt mean we do too
I realize you may just be venting but consider complaining to your college administration either via your student council or by yourself.
It should not be the norm to have to tell a stranger where you are to eat food.
You are paying for your education even if you are doing so via a loan and that gives you the right to tell them how you feel about them invading your privacy. In college and in jobs authority figures routinely try to control you and it is worth learning to take a stand against such abuses.
They literally could not give one fuck less. They are probably being paid or otherwise are getting some other kind of kickback to push these apps. Colleges are…I hesitate to say greedy, but let’s call it “capitalistic”.
I agree with the sentiment, but if no one ever complains things are guaranteed to not change. At least this is, at the very least, an exercise in explaining your own viewpoints and understanding the workings of an institution. That is a skill and lesson that is valuable in the professional world.
I went to college before it was app everything and our student id’s were smartcards. Dining plan associated with the smartcard. Just stick it in the reader when you show up and you’re good. You could put cash on your card then use it for the vending machines or laundry or any little incidental on campus. If you needed cashed added to your account, your parents could go online and do it, or you could. That was the only online component. The entire system just worked without any fuss or privacy concerns or anything.
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Our university made it so anything you can buy with the card was like 20-50% more expensive tho. I usually never bought anything on campus because of it :/
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Almost without any privacy concerns. When I went to college around the turn of the millennium, I worked at the main food court on campus. We had a card system just like you’re describing. When we swiped the student’s card to pay for their meal, their student ID would come up on my screen. Their student ID was their SSN. Back then the first three digits of a person’s SSN was based on the state they lived in when they got their number assigned. For most people that was when they were a baby or at least very young, and for most people that’s the state they did most of their growing up in. I used to have most of the codes memorized, so when I’d swipe someone’s card and see that they had an SSN from someplace that wasn’t the state where the university was, I’d mention it. “Oh, hey, you’re from Ohio? My aunt lives in Ohio.”
Yikes! That was a privacy nightmare. We were fortunate that the university assigned a personal ID on enrollment. I think the only place that had access to the social was the front office. Of course some of the students worked at the front office. I hope they were required to sign an NDA.
Yeah it worked this was in the late 90s except your ID was a swipe card and it really only worked on food. You also had to go to the business office with a check to deposit more funds. Online was still dial up for most people.
I like this too because it doesn’t require you to turn on NFC which I feel like drains power.
That’s still how it works where I am, but the little devices to renew your card every semester are broken half the time, so yay
Yeah, same but they also worked as bus passes.
The number of business that just expect that everyone has already downloaded and installed their app has become ridiculous.
Best Buy now demands an app be installed for order pick up. They are so sure you’ll have already done that there are no instructions in their parking lot for pick up that don’t include the app, no way to call them, and the lot employees say, “Just use the app and we’ll get your order.” It’s like the 20% tips programmed into just about every payment machine these days. No, I won’t leave you a 20% tip for handing me a receipt.
Even when going to Best Buy’s service desk the reps looked at me like I was crazy. “No, I won’t install your app to pick up an order” was met with confusion and open irritation. Fuck that.
And don’t get me started on ‘Reddit is better in our crappy Reddit app.’
Dude same here for the Reddit prompt ! I browse incognito without a profile just to see some headlines… and every ten minutes or if I got to a risque sub, it will stop me and ask for the app download or if I want to stay on the browser… if I wanted the app… I would have gotten it… I am on the browser for a reason…
Try to use “request desktop site”, stuff may be sized weirdly, but at least you don’t get that stupid pop up anymore
I find that many desktop sites scale just fine, and as you stated, the most common issue is simply that the elements may be sized a little strangely. The desktop sites tend to be way more functional. I miss my old Windows Mobile PDA with the stylus that could tap the smallest of links without a problem. With most phones I’ve had in recent history being at least 1920x1080, there’s no reason a site shouldn’t be able to display in desktop landscape mode.
When something’s flagged NSFW, you can replace the “www” with “old” (e.g. old dot reddit dot com) to bypass :)
Amazing!
Fast food is about 30% more expensive if you refuse the app.
Personal experience:
Tim Hortons
Wendy’s:
This is why I hope to god when I’m living in my own we never get to the point where apps become 100% required to purchase shit from a store. I’d rather starve and miss a day’s worth of meals than order off an app.
Grocery shopping and food prep is always an option. Cheaper and healthier too.
If you have time to browse Lemmy, you got time to throw some shit in an air fryer/insta pot/slow cooker.
That I can totally agree, as someone who actually enjoys cooking. If I could get my family on board, I wouldn’t mind getting their help making and freezing meals on the weekend for days when we just don’t feel like cooking or my mother’s back is bothering her or whatever.
My bachelor days I’d make a tray of lasagna or a pot of beef stew and I had meals for almost 5 days. I will say that I was really sick of lasagna or beef stew by day 4 though.
Looks like you’ll be foraging for food in the woods
Yeah, I hate that. At an old job, sometimes people would go around and take lunch orders before running to Wendy’s, Hate Chicken, or Chipotle. I’d way rather give my coworker cash and let them have the bonuses and discounts and crap while I maintain the privacy afforded to cash-only Chads. It’s still an L though because we’re still giving the companies money.
Jesus, it’s like they want you to order online from a third party instead of paying them.
Weird. I can just go to the mobile Best Buy site, pull up my order from my account, and get the barcode they need to scan from there. No need for the app.
I can do the same with the desktop site.
IMO people should not have to know a company’s policies and go through their website to make a purchase. Anyway, it would have been nice if they put that information on the sign in their pickup area, or their pickup reps or desk clerks mentioned it when I told them I didn’t have the app. Instead they made it clear that everyone should either already have the app or install it because they said so.
Way, way too many companies and organizations (like the OP’s) are pulling this kind of crap.
Reddit is better in our crappy Reddit app.
Oh fuck reddit for doing that.
I ordered online and picked up in store at best buy without their app. I showed them the email they sent with the info. No problems at all.
Could it be there’s more than one Best Buy?
My goodness, you’re right! 😁
I thought all best buys had the same policies for everything? Or do they differ between Canada and the US?
Policies and practices are often very different things.
How can people push back on this insanity? I don’t want 500 goddamn apps on my phone nor do I want 500 accounts on “portals” or what fucking ever your calling it today.
I agree with OP, but how do we resist the borg?
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Yet some local retailers somewhat insist on doing their own app.
One instead of a website where I could look at their course catalog and book had App Store/Google Play apps. They were terrible, and wouldn’t install on a still-supported Google Pixel phone, a friend with an iPhone tried the Apple version and said it was horrendous and uninstalled it immediately.
I don’t understand why they went with terrible custom apps, a responsive website would have been so much more convenient and easier to maintain! Also, call me old-fashioned but some things I just prefer doing from the comfort of my desktop with a nice big screen, keyboard, and mouse.
In things where I can’t avoid an account, I use an email alias (personally I use Mozilla Relay, but Proton Pass offers logins as well if I recall.
Edit: for clarity, this adds at least a level of abstraction from my actual data. It’s not the only thing I do, such as blackhole DNS via PiHole, VPN in other scenarios, Tor for others (for those curious, pihole and Tor don’t work at the same time, and pihole and VPN generally doesn’t either without extra work and it’s not compatible with every VPN).
The 80s movie classic War Games has the answer:
STRANGE GAME…THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TOO PLAY…
One way is to just lie and say you only have a flip phone. There are probably millions of old people that refuse to use smartphones because they don’t understand them and there no reason you can’t pretend to also have a dumb phone.
GREAT idea! I have both a flip and a smart phone.
My apartment complex wants me to download some third-party app just to pay my rent, instead of using their perfectly serviceable web portal. I assume they’re getting a data harvest kickback that’s buried in several layers of fine-print legalese, which will be used to send me targeted spam and junk mail. And that data will be sold and re-sold to other parties ad infinitum. Whatever they can collect about my personal life, for sale to any asshole with enough cash in their pocket. Fuck that. I shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit just to keep a roof over my head.
I was visiting family in the city I grew up in and we decided to go to this place that now charges for parking. It’s a city lot. I figured I have to get this app to park. The city app.
First, it was a nightmare of horrible bad UX and half-assed customization. Second, it took about 15 minutes of bs to pay for parking (time outs, a couple 2fa’s, we need you to use a social but we haven’t set up that login path correctly). Finally, get parking paid, my wife is losing her mind thinking I’m an idiot because it took so long, and then the spam calls started. I literally wasn’t into the building and I was getting spam texts and robo calls. I’m not talking “goods and services I might like” , this was “Canadian border services has determined you have unpaid fines” voicemails and “hi, i just found your number again can u text” type stuff. Just wild.
That’s terrible. So much data harvesting out there. It’s crazy. Cities and companies hire out to contractors that also do shady shit to the code to also harvest that data. It’s wild.
Yes, agreed. It’s not like it’s a big city but it’s big enough that it was obvious this was either a blatant cash grab or complete mismanagement (laziness/incompetence). Guessing the latter.
Oh I feel this in my soul. I am pregnant and have a two year old… I was and am a huge customer of pampers (and enfamil formula for when my two year old was little) the apps have kick backs… and against my better judgement z I broke down and got these apps for the kick back… I regret it… my email is overwhelmed with spam suddenly… an email I worked hard to get all the spam out of a few months ago… I am also getting random calls and voicemails for services I would never use. It’s so frustrating… I just wanted to the points for the products I normally buy to save a few pennies… but can’t do it with out my data being harvested and being spammed with crap
Does your lease precise you have to use the app or own a smartphone ? If not, get a cellphone, like those new 3210. Call them, ask them how to install, or visit their office. Play it dumb. Of they tell you to get a smartphone, tell them to provide you one.
Or use your bank’s bill-pay service. They’ll mail a check or send it electronically (which is effectively the same as using a debit card).
And furthermore: Most of these shitty apps are nothing more than overblown API clients. Which means they didn’t want to build a website and operate a webserver, so instead you provide the processing power for the UI yourself. These apps usually can’t do anything on their own, if you are offline, becaue all the value is generated remotely by the actual server.
The modern software experience sucks much!
My favorite barber was booked out recently, so I just walked into the next one across the road, which looked new and had no customers inside. Asked for the haircut, and he said sure, what’s your name and email address? I was confused and asked why he would need that, and he said it’s for his app to book appointments and charge customers.
I walked out without getting a haircut.
Good, that’s the only way people like that will change
Same thing but with a phone number. They were baffled that I didn’t want to give my phone number for a haircut.
Hell, I get annoyed at being asked my first name at the counter in fast food places.
Like, give me a break… I’ll be the guy who looks like me standing right fucking there waiting for it… We don’t need to be on a first name basis… We ain’t friends.
“Mork”. And you know it’ll be unique.
I’ve thought about giving them Darth Vader … lol
My apartment “upgraded” us to digital locks and now we have to use an app to unlock our door. I was so pissed the entire time they were installing them. I don’t like the idea that the locks could run out of battery and keep us out, and I feel much more insecure in my apt. It also feels like our comings and goings can be spied on now. I hate this future.
I installed something similar at my house, just a keypad, not app connected. It’s awesome. But a key will still unlock it. They are wonderful if it’s not connected to the Internet.
Electric locks are supposed to fail safe. So if they run out of battery, they should remain open, not closed.
That does not sound awesome either. I Leave the apartment locked up, return to find the front door wide open because the battery died while I was out getting milk.
My keypad lock has a regular lock as a backup… Why not just do that.
Because your house getting robbed is better than you being trapped inside when there’s a fire.
But yes, a lock and key is better.
I have never look into this type of locks, but usually with non electric ones they have a way to open from inside without a key for that same reason. Any other way is dumb. So locked by default doesn’t sound bad, if there is a way to open it mechanically from inside, like turning a knob or similar.
You can get number pad locks, no app just press the buttons. But yeah battery.
Hopefully you’re looking at different place now
Hey if you ever have to kick your door in make sure to take one or two steps and firmly flatly plant your foot on the door as near to the handle/knob/latch as you can. Try to step into and kick through it in stride. You’ll need as much of your weight thrown into the kick as you can. Remember how pissed you were while they were installing the new locks youll need that
Do not use your shoulder you will injure it
Beautiful!!
If only we had some physical object that could never run out of power, let’s call it a “key”…
House insurance does not cover digital house lock
I seem to remember some lawsuits about that situation
If the battery goes out do to something like power outage or something else and it remain locked, that sounds like the perfect excuse to “accidentally” start a fire and then claim you were trapped in your home due to the door not unlocking. Bonus points for acting like it shook up your whole life because you lost a lot of your possessions because the complex/building/whatever decided to remove physical locks.
Extra bonus points if a power outage or whatever genuinely locks you in, a fire breaks out, and you get hurt. In that case, if you have renters insurance, you may not only receive payout for that, but also for suing them if the door remained locked while there was no power.
Fire regulations require a crash bar to be able to leave a building regardless of the lock
An app in itself isn’t a bad thing… it’s the requirement that is wrong. Everything these days does seem to be geared around data mining and control. That well has to be getting awfully dry because it’s getting worse and worse.
You can’t even use many products without having an app that needs to be connected online so it can read your contacts and searches and such. Sites are getting harder to use if you have a DNS ad blocker or VPN on. Not sure where it ends…
It ends when out corporate overlords achieve the state of life depicted in Wall-E.
No.
It ends when we eat our corporate overlords. I look forward to sprinkling Torgo’s Executive Powder on my favorite dish.
I wish I could disagree with you but the path does seem pretty clear.
I can only speak from the experience of one app at one company, but data we collected was for troubleshooting. Mainly because customers will email us stuff like “your app doesn’t work!!! Worst company ever!!” And absolutely no identifying information whatsoever. To make matters worse they’ll email with an email that they didn’t give us as a customer so how in the world are we supposed to help‽
So we collect enough data so whoever in the company might need to help them can actually do so.
There’s a lot of “this app is impossible to use!!!” That we find out with enough data collection is just them refusing to hit the GIANT button in the middle of the damn screen that would solve their problem. I hate users.
I believe we answered questions in the Apple and Google stores that says that we collect information and send it to 3rd parties (because analytics platforms are technically 3rd party) but not to sell it. I don’t know if that distinction is clear on the stores though.I used to work in a job where we had a niche ebook reader app in the major app stores. My favorite review that someone left?
1 star, Worst game ever.
Collecting data relevant to the app is ok and logical. It’s collecting unrelated personal info I gave a problem with.
And i can sympathize with you regarding users. I design control system interfaces and sometimes I go to extremes to make it good for idiots. And i still get calls at 7am, have to drop everything else and drive 40 miles just to point out the giant red ALARM text i specifically put there to make things easier. It’s on the first fucking page!
It’s nice that remote access is easier now but some of these facility managers… i don’t know who puts their pants on for them because they don’t seem to be able to navigate treacherous logic and reason.
I hope I didn’t just quote your whole post, still trying to figure out boost hah
I’m sure we’ve all experienced this…
Go to example.com
“Ooops! It looks like you’re on a mobile device, which we for some asinine corporate reason don’t support on our desktop site! No “enable desktop site” won’t make this message go away because we make an unreasonable effort to deny you access to our site. Go to mobile.example.com instead.”
Goes to mobile.example.com
“Just kidding! What, you think we were actually going to let you access this without installing something? No, fuck you! This page is literally just a full screen ad for our app and has no access to any other part of platform, download it and agree to it’s fifty permissions before we’ll even give you a glimpse of our content!”
When you download the app, it’s just a web page packaged with all the tracking software.
If you try to read comments on reddit on their website it eventually forces you to use the app to continue.
use old.reddit and it works fine
Or, you know. Just stop using reddit.
True. I go there once a week
And then that ends up giving you another reason to switch to lemmy and screw reddit.
Yes, this is a trend I’ve been commenting on for…well it seems like a very long time.
It’s clearly enshittification in nearly every single case; the more clueless johnny-come-lately tech-trendsters want to label me as just being old-fashioned or something when I bring it up. Trying to explain to them what is going on is usually a pointless exercise, as they have been steeped in a new==better mindset that is nearly ironclad and since they didn’t use reason to get themselves into that position, but instead, emotion, trying to reason them out of it is not going to happen…
And they get bombarded by app developers and consultants telling them they MUST have an app or all these bad things will happen to them.
Smart phones ruined the internet
No. The corporations have ruined the Internet
Smartphones is what gave them control. On the PC you can still filter most of the nonsense away. On smartphones the user is no longer in control and has to eat up whatever they get served.
Exactly why I don’t even bother with mobile games. That market feels so oversaturated with paywalls, scams, microtransactions and ads.
Both are responsible
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Smartphones never were tools. They were from the start designed to remove control from the user and shift it to the apps and the manufacturers so they could feed you with ads and stuff.
Capitalism ruined the Internet
Capitalism ruined humanity
People ruined capitalism
Money makes pretty much everything worse.
I refuse to use services that demand you use their app.
Services only need a website for the most part, not only is this easier for development cost but it is simplier to create a mobile friendly website instead of creating an Android app, iOS app and a desktop app.
To be fair, there are frameworks like Flutter nowadays that let you build your app once in one language and it will build/compile an iOS, Android, and web app for you.
True, I am all for Flutter and Tauri. However websites are better for sevices since it is not likely the company will release a fully open source app or APIs for developers to build apps for the service. There are many web clients out there that are open source and allow for a good private web experience.
And even if a company does release a FOSS app, it is hard to get the company to release the app on alternative app stores like F-Droid.
Also I do not want a million apps on my phone taking up space, that could be running in the background and harvesting my data. Websites or PWA are like one-time apps you load in the browser, use and the close to discard, especially when you use your browser private mode.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree. Just pointing out it’s nowhere near as difficult/complicated to build or maintain apps for multiple platforms like it used to be.
instead of creating an Android app, iOS app and a desktop app.
Why do that when you can just have a buggy and crappy experience taylored specifically for each device?
Funny you mention enshittification, I just watched a talk from Cory Doctorow who coined that term and he pointed out the reason for insisting on an app is that it means you can’t block ads without violating the DMCA. Browsers can have adblocker extensions, apps cannot (unless you hack them.)
This one? It came up as the next post on sync:
That’s the one!
That’s why I use the browser for pretty much everything.
oh noo not the dmca. i love following the dmca with all my heart
