- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
Archive link: https://archive.ph/PgtUk
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I legitimately do not have enough space on my phone to install all the crappy bloatware of all the stores I go to. They quite literally ask the impossible of me.
I have yet to see an app that does something a website could not do…
Harvest data more efficiently for our corporate overlords :)
One big supermarket chain here has an app where you get a few cents bonus discount on already discounted items with the app coupon. The in-store announcement praises it as the first place of some insitute’s supermarket app ranking. Even if that institute were legit, the ranking fair and the spot well-deserved, I always felt like that’s a competition with no winners.
I actually often prefer using apps over websites, because my phone is quite slow and using a browser is often way slower than an app.
Particularly since some companies have made their websites intentionally shit so that you’d be encouraged to use the app instead. I noticed that with out local flavour of door dash, where the website got slower and clunkier and generally more shit right around the same time that the “Use our app!” banners got more obnoxious.
I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.
There’s your problem right there.
Does this author not understand how dumb this makes him look? You downloaded an entire app for a $5 coupon on something you probably were overcharged for in the first place?
Even when you’re lacking in a store-specific app, your apps will let you pay by app. You just need to figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon takes Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.
If only there was a universal form of payment that you could keep in your pocket and pull out to use anytime with very minimal interaction. Maybe a card or something.
Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app.
Why are you using them?
Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus.
Why are you using all of them??
Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods
Why the fucking hell do you need any of these?!
This is literally the 2024 equivalent of your mother having a dozen toolbars in Internet Explorer because she kept clicking on coupons.
Just go to the place, pull out your credit card, pay the cashier, and leave. How the hell does any functioning adult blame the technology when they have this little self control?
People who are proud of getting a good deal via an app break my heart. Most folks I know like that are not strapped for cash. They just like the feeling of getting a bargain. They don’t consider that the prices are artificially inflated. They don’t need the sale item. And in the long run they’ll probably end up paying more when the stores know their purchasing habits and have A/B tested them enough to know how to provide as little as possible while charging as much as a customer can stomach.
If a coupon requires an app, I don’t by that item. Especially when it comes to groceries. When it comes to store cards, most let you use a phone number instead of scanning the card. So plug in a random number at checkout. You can often get a hit on the first try. Then pay in cash. Dirty up someone else’s data and give these stores nothing on you. Seriously, if people keep giving in, it’s guaranteed to get worse. First the store card, then the app, what’s next?
I stopped reading the article after it just became a list of apps. Felt like a thinly veiled ad, and if not, annoying af.
Honestly, if there were a simpler way to sell their personal data to retailers for people who want to do so, that probably would be more appealing for the users.
out of spite I don’t use my phone to “play” on.
Not sure anyone actually read the article, cuz yall are talkin about apps vs. web sites, and data collection. Two points which are briefly covered, but ultimately shrugged off in favor of the larger thesis:
Smartphones … meant [companies] could use their apps to off-load effort. … In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.
I’d like to think that this hellscape is a temporary one. As the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or utility, won’t people start resisting them? And if platform owners such as Apple ratchet up their privacy restrictions, won’t businesses adjust? Don’t count on it. Our app-ocalypse is much too far along already. Every crevice of contemporary life has been colonized. At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can’t escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.
It’s not simply the code delivery mechanism, and it’s not whether the data exchange is safe from prying eyes… It’s the fact that a digital UX has invaded every aspect of human interaction, including mourning.
At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can’t escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.
Except that’s just straight up not true. You can’t escape it? You can’t escape installing the Michaels app to get a $5 discount coupon?
I’m absolutely flabbergasted by what I’m reading here because I have no idea what the hell any of these people are doing in their lives where they’re collecting this many apps out of necessity. This is entirely selection bias. They seem to be incapable of resisting the pull of trashy, useless apps, and insist the whole world is.
Nothing is stopping you from walking into any of these businesses, getting your purchase, paying with a card, and leaving.
Some stores require you to use the app for order pickup. Why they have the Menards app installed I have no clue. They’ve always been way behind with e-commerce, but their website works perfectly fine.
Some stores require you to use the app for order pickup.
Sounds like a store to avoid like the plague.
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.
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.
Windows will mostly just be a kiosk for Edge.
I think for the vast majority of average users this has been true for a long time.
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.
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.
Desktop mode plus zoom out on iOS, sometimes… then over to a desktop browser app when that falls. Sigh
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.
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.
Good luck getting any other parents to give a shit though.
That’s the big one, sadly.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they’re still fingerprinting and tracking devices, pairing that data to facial rec and movement tracking from cameras, and all that to register transaction data.
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.
They just sell the data. If they need user data (beyond basics) they might buy it from a data mining company.
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.
This…is a BATTERY SUCKING LIE PEOPLE!! - Aldi ad
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.
Do most people even know what a phone app is??!
You know what else is overrun? Paywalls or other “requirements” where I need to signup and/or pay to access something that should be free.
Don’t get me started on those fullscreen ad interstitials that force me to watch an ad I’m not interested in before I can continue either.
Let’s face it, the Internet today fucking sucks and it’s partly to do with these so-called news outlets like the Atlantic.
I miss the days when barely anyone heard of the web. Sure, it wasn’t as feature rich, but then again, those features are overly abused in the name of capitalism anyway. It’s like those strip malls that have nothing but shitty restaurants, nail salons, and tax preparers. Gone are the days of fun stores like hobby shops, comic book stores, local mom & pop toy stores.
They just sucked the fun out of it all. 😡
I have to look for datasheets quite ofen and every damn company requires you to log into their shitty login system to get them.
It’s exhausting
Nobody makes your download any damn app. You can just not do it.
Bro wtf. I can’t pay for a parking spot without a feckin app.
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.
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
Couldn’t even get into a baseball game recently without having to download an app
I swear that has to be illegal
Tell that to 2FA apps for banks and enterprise security systems.
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.
In many cases this means avoiding the service altogether. So long as you are good with that, then yeah by all means, don’t download it or use the service. I don’t use plenty of services because I don’t want their app. Instagram is one of those.
