download our app
Nah
delete account…
Literally me
I wish sites that do have PWAs would stop funneling people towards their app.
Especially Patreon, where patronages started using their app would be 30% more expensive for their users than patronages started through their website because of the Apple (and probably Google) tax. Patreon is aware of this tax but keeps advertising their fucking stupid app! You have a Progressive Web App that’s works perfectly! Stop it! Get some help!Twitter had some great outcomes when they rolled out their PWA: https://web.dev/case-studies/twitter
Twitter Lite is now the fastest, least expensive, and most reliable way to use Twitter. The web app rivals the performance of our native apps but requires less than 3% of the device storage space compared to Twitter for Android.
65% increase in pages per session
75% increase in Tweets sent
20% decrease in bounce rateyet they kept pushing their native apps, probably because they can collect more data through them. The web is way more sandboxed than regular apps.
That’s less an endorsement of PWAs and more a condemnation of how garbage the native app always was.
I have never encounteted a PWA that works better than a website OR an app - this from users actual usability viewpoint. They are a cancer, that sits right in between the worst of both worlds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
That’s because you don’t have enough zigbee devices. They have to be everywhere so that they can mesh. Have you considered a zigbee carpet? It’s great to link rooms together and it can share data with the zigbee vacuum cleaner.
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.
They need to switch to Webauthn. SMS-based 2FA should’ve been big 10+ years ago, not today. I don’t really understand why this old style 2FA has been just now becoming popular lately.
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
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.
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!”
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 of cashier mentioned it?
It’s not that they’re going to convince me, it’s that it’s annoying they keep trying (likely by management)
I just tell them ‘no’.
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.
and sounds like more fun!
Not gonna lie, it was. lol. That’s one of several reasons I decided to keep it as my daily driver. It’s technically a smart phone, though, I just had all the smart stuff disabled for that challenge. I’ve since enabled those back, but it still looks enough like a dumb phone that I can convincingly bluff with it.
Which phone is it? Might have to check it out.
Cat S22 Flip. Not without it’s quirks, but I like it well enough. Had to digital detox, and it was great for that.
What apps do you have on it? Maybe some stuff like email or messaging app like Signal?
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.
Same.
Cashier: “What’s your phone number?” (For the store tracking/rewards/whatever)
Me : “Don’t have one!” (As I remove the credit card from the case on the back of myphone)
Nobody has questioned it once. They don’t want to ask in the first place but are forced to.
Huh. Doesn’t happen often I guess but typically when I’m asked for a phone number or email I refuse or say I don’t have one and it really throws people off and they usually refuse to complete the form or do whatever the hell it was they were doing.
Might vary by locale? Around here (South US) it seems like every single store has their own rewards/discount/whatever system that requires your phone number but it’s not necessary for the transaction… It’s just an extra info grab.
Sometimes the user facing POS/credit card reader will let you handle it (enter/skip) but many places rely on the salesperson to ask and then enter it or skip.
But, I also don’t get around much so my experience is limited.
Just say ‘no thank you’
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.
I don’t go to CVS because they make the whole experience exhausting.
May I introduce you to RadioShack? Where they used to prompt you to sign up for a credit card, ask to record your personal info on a RadioShack loyalty card system (that nobody seems to remember), and one time, the lady asked me to impregnate her. I’m unclear if that was RadioShack policy, or if she was just itching. Either way it was kind of messed up, because I was 14. I looked and sounded older, but I was 14. She was like 30ish.
Gonna just leave us hanging on this one?
I stopped going to Radio Shack when they made purchasing a hassle too. Loved them as a kid in the 80s when I was doing build your own electronics.
What on earth are you people talking about?
I got CVS all the time for random things, I’ve never once been pushed to use an app.
Really? You never used kung-fu to disarm swat teams, killing dozens with their own guns, while never taking damage yourself? You never sped through your local streets as tanks shot mortors at your toyota geo?
You’re telling me your wife never saved you with rockets fired from a helicopter in a high speed highway chase?
Yeah…you didn’t read a single sentence of the comment you replied to, did you? Aw hell. What makes me think you’ll read THIS far into the message??? Tiktok is just what this generation has been needing. An entire generation of kids who don’t waste their time reading!
Nobody makes your download any damn app. You can just not do it.
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.
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.
My bank demands sms.
I want my own authentication app so I can access my account even if my phone is missing/dead
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.
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.
Bro wtf. I can’t pay for a parking spot without a feckin app.
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.Yep! Most of my “apps” are just web app shortcuts or self hosted PWAs
This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world. Using a mini-app from the internet running within another app is far preferable to downloading a whole app you may never need to use again. The way they do it in China is so seamless even if you’ve never visited the business before. There’s never any special account creation or entering of payment information.
Obviously it’s pretty terrible in terms of user privacy since the everything app has basically unchecked access to all of your personal information and habits, but the convenience is incredible and feels decades ahead of how apps work in the US.
Us lemmings will never be comfortable with this level of centralisation.
How is that better than a web browser? Web browsers were supposed to be the “everything app”.
Web browsers don’t integrate to a single account and payment system, nor do they preemptively load entire websites before you start browsing. So you’re always waiting for actions to complete or for images to load which feels slower. Mobile websites also tend to be very bloated slowing things down further than if the same functions were done natively in an app. There’s also no consistency between websites so you never know when something will/won’t work nor how far away you are from checkout. And then to top it all off there’s browser compatibility, which is typically pretty poor for anything that isn’t Chrome/Safari.
If a web browsers could really do the same thing all these companies wouldn’t feel the need to make their own device specific apps.
This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world
What’s wrong with a web browser? I know it’s not as seamless, but it’s far less limiting and literally any company can create a site, regardless of their size. There’s systems like Google Pay that avoid you having to enter your credit card details on every site.
Among other things said, you lose access to push notifications / scheduling which a lot of apps are reliant on.
You could have those come in an email instead, but now it’s not personalized to the app or notification type, and if you’re like me, I actually disable alerts on my gmail because most of the things in there aren’t important and it was too disruptive.
you lose access to push notifications
Web apps have supported push notifications for a long time now. I think even Safari supports them now.
Those aren’t the same, they require the browser to be open.I don’t know if that means it works with a tab in the background though if the browser is open but you aren’t on their page, but it’d make sense if it did work that way.Edit: Further looking at this, maybe that’s just on Android. They might work on iOS as expected but only if you add the web app to your home screen as an app, and that’s only in 2023 when iOS 16.4 was released.
Edit: Okay it looks like it should work on Android too, I saw some older stuff. I’m seeing some complaints about delivery times though not being immediate.
Even the best websites don’t feel as smooth as native UI elements, and somehow browser compatibility is still a very common issue. Signing in with Google and using gpay for checkout is kind of close, but each website has different design elements complicating the experience while giving up the same amount of your personal data as if using an everything app.
A huge number of apps these days are web sites compiled into an app, and it shows. For example, an app should be able to remember your address and payment information without signing into an account, yet so many don’t. Almost like they want to force you into signing up. Why might that be?
Just give me a mobile web page if you’re going to do that shit.
I have an app for my sprinkler system and it’s a fucking nightmare. Not only is it basically just a web API, it’s so transparently just a glorified browser with access to exactly one site that frequently my phone thinks that app will work for whatever else I’m trying to open.
Document? Sprinkler app. Web Page? Sprinkler app. Installing from a source other than Google? Oh you better believe the sprinkler app can do that.
Doing anything takes longer to load than it would take me to walk from anywhere on my property to the fucking box and hit whatever button I need to hit.
It frequently forgets what I entered for preferences. I can tell it a week ahead what days I want it to skip but if I do that more than 24 hours on advance I might as well not have done it at all.
Oh you want to make a payment online? Let your sprinklers do that for you. YouTube video? Sprinkler app. YouTube video about fixing your fucking sprinkler system? Sprinkler app.
Apparently the one thing it can’t do is effectively manage my water usage. It’s ONE job
Just request a copy of the source code! Oh wait
Yeah this is begging for !homeassistant@lemmy.world to replace that app.
shit that’s amazing
Is it actually opening up the Sprinkler app for all those other purposes, or giving you a choice dialog? If it’s actually opening up the app, maybe installing Intent Intercept would at least make it a choice dialog, as it also tries to open everything (just to show information about the request; it’s a dev tool).
I have never actually tried, it’s just suggesting it as an app that can do those things.
So, giving you what I called the choice dialog. That makes sense. Intent intercept wouldn’t help then, it would just give you one more basically irrelevant choice to do all the things (although it’s useful for developers).
Can !homeassistant@lemmy.world help with that?
Document? Sprinkler app. Web Page? Sprinkler app. Installing from a source other than Google? Oh you better believe the sprinkler app can do that.
Android apps tell the system which URLs they can open. If you click a Google Maps link, it can prompt you to open it in the Google Maps app. It sounds like whoever created the sprinkler app misconfigured the app and it’s saying that it can open all URLs, not just the URLs it cares about. They probably read a tutorial about how to make a webview in Android and didn’t know what they were doing :)
Almost certainly. If the guy who was making yandere simulator was tasked with a sprinkler app, it wouldn’t be much worse than it currently is.
I don’t know shit about fuck when it comes to programming, but I know bad programming when I see it.
Just give me a mobile web page if you’re going to do that shit.
There’s some apps that just load a site, but the site refuses to load if you load it in a regular browser? Why?? Spoofing the user-agent would probably work around that, but I haven’t tried.
Do most people even know what a phone app is??!
But I mean, you gotta install an app if you want that functionality. The key thing is if you do or do not have full control of that app. While you allow it freedom in your 🤳📱, is it doing stuff you are not aware of that you don’t want it to do. Like I found an app to do a sound sweep. Great, but will it go thru my contacts while I’m at work? It is going to learn about who I work with because it has blue tooth access. That’s just nefarious shitty business that should be illegal. Either tell me what it does or don’t do anything other than want you say it does. I also write my own apps for photography stuff and I wouldn’t want to have to go ask a judge if I can please use my phone for specific programming I want to do.
I recently switched to GrapheneOS and decided to avoid the Google Play store entirely, and honestly, the inconveniences have been pretty limited. The only bank I’ve had trouble with is Citi, everything else (I’ve tried several others) work fine through the browser. Likewise for most services I use, the web version works fine, though occasionally I’ll need to use the “desktop” version.
Some services just don’t work properly on the web, but most of the ones I used to use through an app work just fine. Give it a try, maybe together we can send a signal that apps should only exist when they provide value.
It still depends. I live in China and the internet here suckass. Every product, say taobao(Amazon), xianyu(eBay), Alipay(PayPal), WeChat(instant msg), banking, etc. that is crucial to your daily usage mandatories an application. The API is closed and the webapp has no functionality other than a banner with “go fuck our mobile app”. The only way to bypass these privacy beast apps is to live in an isolated wood cabinet with self-sufficient agriculture.
Doesn’t WeChat do more than instant messaging, though?
Yes, it steals your soul, spies on you for the cccp and sells your privacy to anyone with a buck fifty (except to you).
You mean the built-in browser with shitty nonconsistent API? Yeah it’s used widely. Some crazy dudes even put earthquake forecast on it.
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
This piece has no real point. No hidden info, no resolution, no exposé, no call-to-arms really.
It’s just “there are way too many apps”, which we already knew.
What a weak article.
Yeah. The Atlantic kinda sucks.
