Archive link: https://archive.ph/PgtUk
My favorite part of the 30 day dumb phone challenge I did recently: I couldn’t install your crappy app even if I wanted to.
A little over halfway through the challenge, was paying for my order at a local eatery, and the cashier started plugging their new app and rewards points and digital coupons and shit. I was like “I’m gonna stop you right there: flip phone.” and pulled it out of my pocket and brandished it like I was the sheriff of Luddite-ville.
Kinda like this, but “Flip phone!”
That’s what I used to do, but a good portion of the time they’d continue their spiel to try to change my mind. Have only had to brandish the dumb phone once, but so far it’s got a 100% shut down success rate.
I just tell them I don’t have a phone. Even if I’m still holding it in my hand. Most don’t want to engage. They likely figure they’re not payed enough for that.
That’s what I used to do, but a good portion of the time they’d continue their spiel to try to change my mind.
Where are you shopping where you are routinely encountering cashier’s that are this pushy about the apps? The overwhelming majority of cash register attendance are underpaid employees that are just trying to get you through the line. They said the line because they have to say the line, but most have no intention of really trying to sell you on it.
Once upon A time, these things were just rewards programs, with the key ring bullshit. Were you signing up for each and every one of them too?
Yeah…try that in CVS.
“No no, I’d rather NOT have a reciept that’s 3 miles long, because I bought a candy bar…”
But we already cut down 3 trees just for you!
“No.”
"Oh, you’re taking this irrelevant slip of paper! We have armed guards to make sure you do! There is a world war 2 tank outside that will crush you, and blow up your car! I know it’s not really a war worthy tank, and in that sense it’s obsolete, but it can still more than handle your toyota geo. Now then…take…the…reciept!
NEVER!!!
GUARDS!!!
And then a Kill Bill-esque fight scene breaks out. You know, like when she fought the crazy 88s. Except instead of a group of ninjas headed by a 14 year old Japanese girl, it’s a group of swat team members headed by a 17 year old CVS register worker wearing a red CVS vest that he uses as a choking hazard on you in the fight.
Your goal is to dodge bullets, matrix style, while disarming one guard to shoot the rest of the guards dead, so you can fight this CVS employee one on one, as wave after wave of reinforcements constantly change the dynamic of the battle.
Finally, after defeating all the guards, you return to your car to return home, and as you make your turn onto the main road, thats when you see it. A world war 2 era tank firing mortors at you, as you’re forced to weave all over the road. Other cars exploding, you’re all over the road, a helicopter has joined the chase. Suddenly the helicopter is firing air to surface missles, and as you dodge them, they blow up the tank.
The helicopter then lands right in front of you on the highway. As you prepare for the final battle, the door opens it’s your wife. You both embrace, and take off in the helicopter. Forever on the lamb. Always running from the threat of CVS employees that can strike at any time.
What on earth are you people talking about?
I go to CVS all the time for random things, I’ve never once been pushed to use an app, nor have I ever encountered anyone that is legitimately pushing you to do anything after a simple no.
I was like “I’m gonna stop you right there: flip phone.” and pulled it out of my pocket and brandished it like I was the sheriff of Luddite-ville.
I…is the implication you would have no other choice but to install their app if you didn’t have a flip phone?
I’m baffled by these comments. Who the hell is actually listening to these people and installing apps on their phone just because a cashier mentioned it?
You can do almost anything with a website that you could do with an app. The only reason they are pushing the apps so hard is because they can collect a lot more data than a website can.
This is almost completely true, but I would add the caveat that PWAs (progressive web apps) are not as easy to discover and less familiar to install as an app in an app/play store. It might also be because it’s in Apple and Google’s best interest to not streamline that. But it’s still an obstacle nevertheless.
The number I remember seeing was that on average, app users are seven times more profitable than web users. Sorry, no citation.
I suspect there’s some selection bias in that regular/loyal users of a particular product or service are more likely to install the app, but it also affords the company greater access to send notifications and collect data. On the rare occasion that I install some random company’s app for a specific benefit, I remove it when I’m done.
This is the main reason why I seldom install anyone’s “app”.
Most of these apps aren’t true apps anyway, they’re just customized browsers that lead you to a website and are free to collect as much data from you and your phone as they want.
I’ll go on your website first if I have to and 9 / 10 I get what I want. Besides, I’ll only ever visit the service once or twice so I don’t need to install a permanent app on my phone for that.
Also desktop mode to circumvent those phone detection systems and trying to force an app.
Around here, Target (department store chain) will let you order stuff through their app and pick it up in the store parking lot. If you order through the web you have to wait around inside the store to get it. I still won’t install the app but this issue annoys me.
And then there’s guys like me. I don’t announce when I’m coming. I grab the items myself, and then I pay in cash. Nonsequential bills. I’m like a ninja! I can’t be traced! Shashasha!!! Pocket sand!
Then on the way home, if I see someone following me home, I make 3 left turns. If they’re STILL following me? I turn around, and I shoot them…a dirty look!
What? I’m not a psychopath. I just don’t like being followed.
I recently ordered something from Walmart (I try to avoid it, but I could not find this one thing elsewhere) and you get a link in your email to notify them when you’re in the pickup bay. The link goes to their app. I tried going to the website through Chrome, to no avail. It kept sending me to try to download the app. I did not. I don’t shop there often enough to justify it. I drove to the pickup bay and lo and behold, the sign had a phone number you could call; a very pleasant person answered, asked my name, and I had my order in a few minutes.
I do have a couple grocery store apps for 2 reasons: 1 - there are some extremely low prices that you can only get by “clipping a coupon” within the app, and 2 - loyalty points do turn into cash back.
Safeway (a west coast grocery chain) has implemented it in the worst way possible, though. They had a physical loyalty card which you scanned at checkout/self checkout, which let you access lower prices. But now they have even lower prices only through the app. The app, however, 1 - does not let you enter your old loyalty card number, combine points and cleanly separate from the old method and 2 - you cannot use the damn thing at self checkout. You have to have a checkout clerk scan your barcode in the app, which is insane. I’m just glad Safeway is not my main grocery, because if it were I would have to change to some other grocery.
I was thinking about that a while back. There’s got to be some sort of upper limit to collecting data being useful. I mean at some point it becomes more economical to just buy the data from one other thousands of companies data mining phones rather then going to all the trouble of building and maintaining your own data mining app.
As Cory Doctorow put it, “An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”
The cloud is many things, but most of all, it’s a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don’t control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:
The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can’t be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.
I legitimately want to scream sometimes as I feel the continual death of local computing and actual software, and it depresses me to no end how few businesses or users see it for what it is.
And it’s exactly this: a trap. A trap users people are racing into, and they have no idea, at all, how bad it’s going to get when the doors close behind them.
The rest of us are left with little recourse. Looking at the difference between Outlook and New Outlook is genuinely depressing because that’s the future we’re all being shepherded into against our will. I swear, in like 10 years, Windows will mostly just be a kiosk for Edge.
I’m with you 100% up to the “little recourse,” I think there’s more options now than there have ever been. Open source (including linux and self hosting) are about the only tech-future things I’m genuinely excited about.
There’s still a learning curve and progress to be made, for sure. However, anecdotally, I’ve seen programming and hosting become vastly more accessible in the last 15 years. Also, not everyone needs to self host, people just need to know someone who is willing and able to set them up.
Not saying it’s a guarantee, but it’s a possible way out, at least. And being here on lemmy, reading and writing about these issues is a good sign there’s movement in the right direction.
I agree with you on everything, other than
I legitimately want to scream sometimes as I feel the continual death of local computing and actual software
…it seems to me that it’s never been better, there’s free software for everything, osm data for mapping, it’s just that our expectations have shifted.
I wish. Every fucking bank has their own shitty app for 2FA instead of just using standardized and proven TOTP, no way around that.
Same about school apps the article mentioned since it’s connecting to their (one of many) proprietary system, no website for that.
And recently got into the home automation rabbit hole. Lots of devices that require their fucking app, sometimes with mandatory cloud account, just to connect! And people in reviews even praise how easy it is, it’s infuriating! I don’t need light bulbs connecting to the internet, thank you very much.
All of the banks I’ve used in the past utilize email or SMS for 2FA, which isn’t the must secure, but doesn’t require an app.
Ha, sucker, you think your non-Internet-connected lightbulbs make you safe? My Internet-connected lightbulbs have sent my online-car to wardrive your neighbourhood and sniff your Zigbee network!
…if you see my car please tell it to come back to me, I need to go to the shops…
Joke’s on you - I can’t even reach my Zigbee devices in the next room, your car won’t have a chance from the street. That’ll make it easier to convince it to come back home though.
I get emails from school, with a link that opens a 3rd party app, which only displays a link that opens in the default browser. I’ve asked the school to just send me direct links to the announcements, but they say they can’t. The site doesn’t require authentication, but the URLs have UUIDs so I can’t just guess what the link would be. The app is quite literally just a data exfiltration layer that does everything it can to make sure you can’t bypass it. Good luck getting any other parents to give a shit though.
I returned a bunch of smart outlets I got at Home Depot after I got fed up with waiting for the app to launch just to turn a light on or off.
I also don’t want to have to talk to it, so switching to Home Assistant with Zigbee button remotes has made my experience so much better. And on the plus side, everything still works when the power or Internet goes out because I’ve got it on battery backup.
I also don’t want to have to talk to it, so switching to Home Assistant with Zigbee
That’s what started it all for me. I have some Hue lights for TV backlighting and started looking for alternatives when Philipps first threatened making their cloud account mandatory.
Threw out the bridge, works like a charm and I have been buying new devices and return everything I cannot setup locally but it’s annoying because they don’t always tell about their crappy app and cloud accounts on the product info.
Nobody makes your download any damn app. You can just not do it.
Yeah but then they might pull a Reddit and make their mobile web experience shittier and shittier in hopes of sheepdogging people into the app.
If customers are telling a business what they want, and that business sabotages it to force customers to begrudgingly accept what the business wants, that’s not a customer problem, that’s a dumbass corporate idea
We’ve been on a carousel for decades now where some behemoth platform is stable and good and uncontested, then some braindead visionary gets on board and tries to leave their mark, and the entire base leaves like rats on a sinking ship. And the new thing we all run to eventually gets huge and some braindead visionary tries to fix what isn’t broken. Endlessly
I remember getting a boarding pass from an airline that was only offered in their app or printed at the airport, no email/download image/PDF option. I didn’t have to install their app, but I would have had to waste time at the airport otherwise. I removed it when I was done and left it a negative review.
Couldn’t even get into a baseball game recently without having to download an app
Should be. I bought tickets on the official website but they would not accept receipt or even verification from that website. Needed a qr code and only way to get it was with app. Had to step out of line, download the app, remember login I had generated from website, login and pull up the qr codes for my tickets.
If the apps wouldn’t be slow React Native or whatever “multiplatform framework” crapware, then I’d actually say that well designed, native Swift UI (iOS) or Material (Android) apps can enhance the user experience for a lot of services that are otherwise offered via website. Native integrations with shortcuts, widgets, fully supporting accessibility features of the OS etc.
The problem is most apps are just low-effort web app conversions.
The problem is most apps are just low-effort web app conversions.
If only that. Web apps are relatively well sandboxed. Most dedicated apps (that should be websites) are designed to harvest as much data as they can and spam you with notifications/ads.
Hell I use my garden diary selfhosted service via a wepapp (hortusfox).
Just put a direct link on my homescreen. With the included favicon it almost looks like a native app.
Do most people even know what a phone app is??!
