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
I should setup a trash phone for all those spyware applications, maybe add all kinds of neat information there for them to steal too. It would be so much bother though as I would also have to get prepaid creditcard or something like that should I want to actually buy anything. I wonder if anything like that even exists. Maybe then I could use those stupid electric scooters lying all around, though I kind of dont want to even touch them since they most likely never get disinfected and are touched by hundreds every week or day.
NextDNS.io can block the trackers in the apps
I insist on doing as much as I can on my mobile browser to reduce the number of apps I have and only use apps that I feel are useful. Forcing me to use an app for trivial things just means I won’t use your service at all.
Works pretty well, and one of the things I like about Lemmy is that the mobile browser experience is perfectly fine, it’s good in its simplicity.
Yep. Firefox > Desktop Site > Add to Home Screen. Not perfect but works fine in most cases.
I went to join Planet Fitness, they insist on an app. They watched me leave. Kroger charged more than advertised, ooooh it was a digital coupon only available through the app. I left the item with the cashier. Order out? Only on an app? I guess I didn’t want to eat that so much anyway.
Edit to add: I don’t know how we are going to deal with apps that are forced upon you, that feels really gross especially if you are younger, like at your school. Forced commodification should be illegal.
Not going to do it, it feels controlling and abusive and I’ve worked too damn hard to let that shit go on.
i was looking for a new toothbrush yesterday… they have app enabled toothbrushes. bluetooth. why the fuck do i need an app to brush my fucking teeth?
Just put my oldest child in school this year and I had to download FOUR apps. Four fucking apps. Why? This could have been a Progressive Web App and a push notification service. There is no need for this.
PWAs still lock you into the Chrome ecosystem since Firefox doesn’t support them (without plugins and pain).
Firefox for Android does support them fully, it’s just desktop Firefox that doesn’t have pwa support.
Safari supports them.
AFAIK Safari Desktop for MacOS does not.
Have you considered refunding the child?
I think a lot of the time for universities it’s cause they’re not building their own custom tools for this stuff, just using off the shelf solutions that they can implement locally. So they just grab one app or system for each different thing they need instead of building one connected one.
Yeah I’m a programmer at a community college and this is like us. Although we don’t have any apps, we have different web apps that we use. My current job is trying to use the APIs for each of them to try and build cards in one central web app that bring in the functionality from the other web apps to minimize the amount of time you spend going from web app to web app
You often can use web apps (of sorts). Most of those apps mirror the functionality of an already existing mobile web page. Then you just make a little web app container of that mobile site.
Progressive web apps don’t work for shit on ios. Why bother developing it for Android users only when you’ll need an alternative regardless?
This won’t help in the above case so it’s a little off topic. But I got rid of Twitter on my phone and still use Twitter on my phone - Basically you just open twitter.com in Firefox, and go to the menu and click “Install”. Now you get a launcher icon to an “app” but it’s just the website hosted by the browser.
Instantly saves 150Mb, stops it doing evil shit and because it’s hosted in Firefox I get to block all the ads.
I would advise doing this with any app which has a desktop / mobile version and see what happens - Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. Some social media sites will nag you to install the app but some won’t or will be functional in spite of it.
If an “app” has a web version I’m definitely on that. My exception would be installing it if thats not available via a webpage or so. Plus having a full control over my device (magisk/kernelsu + modules) and app manager on fdroid, warden to disable such trackers with the help of adaway.
One thing pissed me off was my banking institution, disabled its normal functionality (now only acts like a cpanel for your account) over webpage and the full functionality was transfered to the app (which contains 20 trackers) why tf you need that for in a financial app? Im done with them.
All these forced cloud applications annoy the living shit out of me as well.
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…
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.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 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.
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’m going to proide an opposing viewpoint: apps will always have a more native feel, have better performance, have more capabilities, and have entirely different goals compared to web apps.
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You don’t need an app to do data harvesting.
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Users have very different expectations for websites and mobile apps. They look different, they feel different, they function different, and the UX is very different.
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Performance performance performance. Html/css/JavaScript/browsers/whatever are incapable of competing against 60-120fps natively written apps. That sidebar drawer navigation can NEVER feel native in a browser because swiping from the left to open it either works, but takes a second to open, or forced you to go back to the last page.
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The additional vertical real-estate cannot be understated.
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It is a lot more effort to deal with differing browser behavior on the web. Adding mobile experience into that is even more annoying. Developers work on a desktop and will forget about mobile devices at literally every possible moment.
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You have zero control and a user can leave at a moment’s notice even in the middle of critical flows. In an app, you can quick store this information away or continue it in the background. On desktop, you have zero chance to react to it since the browser will destroy-the-world the moment the user wants to go away, which leads to a ton of defensive programming, more chances for errors, and lower performance overall. Death by a thousand cuts.
I’m a developer, if you hadn’t been able to tell. I am responsible for mobile responsivity on the website and it’s a massive goddamn pain in my ass every waking hour of the day, and fixing it definitively is impossible with the actively hostile browser landscape leading to whack-a-mole bugfixing that needs to be done. I also point to my previous point of “devs forget about mobile constantly.” I’m tired. Don’t even get me started on the fixes for one browser breaking literally every other browser, leading to complete refactors of layout being necessary. This has happened more than a few times in the last year alone.
I’m actively pushing for a mobile app because we have complete end-to-end control of the experience. If something works, it just works, and it won’t be broken on a random Friday or Sunday when google or apple decides to push an update to their shitty fucking browser that breaks half of the site with less than zero notice. iOS is especially fucking terrible in this regard. Every single update to safari brings horrendously breaking changes that fuck my life up.
Playing to the higher-ups by enticing them with top-of-mind awareness and having a place on their homepage is a means to an end. I want my life to not be shitty fucking web dev. When something works, I just want it to work and not require checking against every single browser in existence dated back seven years because people don’t update.
This is a lot of nonsense. While it’s true that you can do tracking with websites, the level of exposure and kind of data that can be collected is vastly different.
Performance of a web app in this day and age is negligible. If your web app cannot run well on a device from the past five years, then your web app is awful.
The vertical real estate is a non-starter argument.
It is a lot more effort to deal with differing browser behavior on the web.
This is why web standards exist.
Developers work on a desktop and will forget about mobile devices at literally every possible moment.
This has nothing to do with coding, hardware, or anything technical. This is 100% a project management/attitude problem. Good teams deal with this properly.
You have zero control and a user can leave at a moment’s notice even in the middle of critical flows.
If you can’t deal with this gracefully then your app flow needs to be redesigned.
I’m tired
I want my life to not be shitty fucking web dev.
You need a new job. It sounds like you’re both under paid and over worked. You sound like you’ve hit burnout. You either work for some small company or even a startup that “can’t afford” more devs or you work for a larger company that has learned they can get more work out of you for paying less than a new hire that would either push back or outright quit.
When something works, I just want it to work and not require checking against every single browser in existence dated back seven years because people don’t update.
You need to invest in automation testing. Manually testing everything is just stupid. Even when developing a new feature or a bugfix, most of the work should be done by some kind of testing suite, like Selenium.
On one hand, I agree that a native app is a more integrated and seamless experience. But unfortunately that’s been ruined by all the crap out there, and it’s made even more egregious with everyone and their dog wanting an app for everything.
We don’t need apps for every little thing in my life! No, I’m not installing an app for my Bluetooth toothbrush. Get outta here with that crap.
And it’s even worse when these apps are riddled with ads when they have no right to be! I already bought the product, they advertised that it has an app. I didn’t want the app in the first place, so why am I seeing ads?
And there’s a really warm and scalding place in hell for devs that spam my notification bar with “we haven’t seen you in a while!” and “check out our sale on these things you do not care about!”.
It’s a complete violation of my trust and a complete lack of respect for their users.
So no, native apps can get lost. They have their place but for most things a web app will do just fine.
Others have pointed out things like paying for laundry machines and even paying for rent are now being forced to use an app. That’s 100% unacceptable.
It’s a similar thing with city parking. Most places where I live require an app now. And what makes it even worse is that each city and town use a completely different service! So if I want to park when I go to these places I have to have multiple apps installed JUST FOR PARKING.
Edit: btw, I’m a dev also, and I entirely disagree with most of your points
Performance of a web app in this day and age is negligible.
Hard disagree.
The vertical real estate is a non-starter argument.
Hard disagree. You lose much of the top and bottom of the screen to useless information, and different browsers do different things with them when you start scrolling which easily causes jank in some relatively common use cases.
This is why web standards exist.
Too bad it makes no difference and there are still differences in how browsers function. Just yesterday I discovered an issue in Firefox where
overflow: hiddenis required to get certain things sized properly inposition: absoluteproperly even though it shouldn’t change how things are sized. iOS also often deviates from the norm.As far as browsers are concerned, standards exist to be broken.
If you can’t deal with this gracefully then your app flow needs to be redesigned.
It currently CAN deal with it gracefully because we’ve specifically built it to be able to handle it properly. It doesn’t change that we’ve wasted many man-hours and tracked down numerous bugs for something that should not even be a problem in the first place. It also ended up significantly less readable and puts a higher barrier to understanding the codebase itself. We spend more hours putting up annoying safeguards for things that shouldn’t be a problem than we do making new features.
You need a new job. It sounds like you’re both under paid and over worked.
I’m not underpaid in any sense of the term and I’m not over worked. I just absolutely despise everything about the web dev and specifically JavaScript ecosystem, and the absolute distain towards writing anything performant at even the slightest expense of developer experience. I’m tired of the memory hog and leak prevalent garbage web apps that exist literally everywhere.
You need to invest in automation testing.
Too bad that’s not my decision. The architect is actively against automated browser testing because it runs too slowly. Even then it wouldn’t resolve the actual issue.
so why am I seeing ads
I fully agree with you on that front. If you’ve bought and paid for a product and the app is required to use kt, then the dev-required support for the app should be baked into the product rather than relying on subscriptions or ads.
They have their place but for most things a web app will do just fine.
Yes I absolutely love that I can have a total of four web apps open before my browser slows to a crawl due to excessive garbage collection for these shitty react apps that are forced to clone the universe every 2.7 nanoseconds. I adore my computer’s lack of ability to have any amount of ram available that’s not dedicated to Firefox or whatever shitty chrome reskin you decide to use. They start slow as shit due to 50MB bundles, have shitty caching, error every other day, and don’t feel at all like an actual mobile experience because desktop and mobile navigation are fundamentally different experiences which often requires supporting two separate versions of the layout anyways in order to have an “okay” experience. And even if you can miraculously ignore all of that or do some dirty JavaScript war crimes to make it less of an issue, then half the gestures you normally do either end up hard refreshing the page or forcibly send you to the last page in the browser instead of just opening the fucking navigation drawer. Don’t even get me started on electron.
Web dev is shit, chrome is trash, Firefox is barely better, and all we’ve successfully managed to do in two decades of browser and frontend framework development is centralize the web further, prevent any other browser from ever being created due to the absolutely ridiculous feature-set barrier to entry, turn browsers themselves into the kitchen sink with the entire house around it as well, and create a new shitty framework every other year that does the exact same thing with the exact same pitfalls because they still don’t fix the fundamental stain on the world that is JavaScript.
I’ll take a normal app over a web app any day of the week. I’ve never used a web app on my phone that was in any way better than the mobile counterpart. Even if they effectively look exactly the same. Not a single time had the web app been any better.
I think you’ve gotten a bit confused. He’s not saying that we should do stuff in the browser, he’s saying that a phone/computer doesn’t need to be involved at all.
They also said “everything” in the title multiple times.
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i want to go to a restaurant and get a physical menu, instead of having to dl an app using a QR code.
yeah, dining out is a pure luxury, especially these days; i want to feel the paper and see the typesetting and take in the whole thing at once, not scroll thru 3 items at a time on a shitty pdf that doesn’t render quite right, on my fucking phone, like i do everything else
Oh so much this!!! I hate having to use their QR codes. I was told that using most new QR through our phones give these sites using them, access to our recent photos on the camera app… I have a two year old I don’t want people looking at whom I don’t know…
It absolutely does not give them access to anything unless you install their app.
QR codes are okay. They may be an annoyance, but they’re not nefarious or harvesting your data. (Again, unless you provide that data in another way, such as an app.)
The website may ask for your location, but the browser will prompt you for that. If you’re at the restaurant it’s fine to hit “only this time”.
That is good to know. I felt like crap when my friend told me that the using most QR codes weren’t safe to use as they give the host access to some of your phones data and I felt dumb for not knowing…
Nah, don’t feel bad about it. I had to think about it a bit and I’m a developer.
Your camera app could potentially harvest the url, but unless you’re using a weird third party camera app, I think that’s quite unlikely for now.
Google and Apple have other ways to get the same data. Is your default browser chrome or safari? They’d get the same data from opening a link and having it in your browser history. There’s no reason for getting the same data from your camera app in a way that would make (tech) headlines.
I’m chrome… sadly… but only on my phone cause it’s through boost mobile and it’s moto G stylus phone… so I am lucky android stuff even work on it… but it’s still kinda of sketchy and I was not gonna be surprised if it was true QR codes were accessing my data because of the phone type I use
My favorite is when the QR code just points to their website, and you still have to choose a location, scroll through several pages of bullshit to find a menu, and select from a list of special menus to find the right one.
That’s IF you can get the QR code to even work, because it’s been sitting on a table for 3 years and has long since passed the point of usability.
As a musician, I have to maintain an artist account on all the major social media platforms. It’s frustrating that a lot of features for posting only exist on their respective mobile apps instead of making them available on the web version where I have all of them neatly arranged in tabs on my laptop browser. Instead, I had to install all their apps on an extra phone (because I don’t want those things on my primary personal phone). Not to mention how hard it is to edit content on a tiny phone screen instead of a full browser window on a laptop.
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All the big ones (fb, instagram, twitter, youtube). They all have their own pains on web. For example, you can’t schedule posts on instagram on its own. Profile editing is also limited. You also can’t create reels on both fb and IG, although at least Meta’s business suite allows you to post standard photos and vids on both platforms simultaneously. You can’t create shorts on youtube web too. Twitter is absolutely basic, and I can’t say much about the app because I refuse to install it even on my extra phone. Besides, it’s not really intuitive for posting anything other than links, static photos, and standard videos, and most musicians are more active on IG now.
Thanks for the interest! I do a different genre on every release so there are genre tags for each album. Just pick your preference :)
Thanks for sharing the link :)
Really cleanly presented.Mind you, I didn’t listen to everything, but I did poke around!
I really enjoyed Replication in Abiogenesis and the bass intro for Membranes was sick.In Luminescencity, Moondust Arcade was fire 🔥 Especially the piano rip at 1:37.
City Limits Outro was smooooth - need a longer version! HahaAre you out to cover ALL genres or do you have specific ones picked out? I feel like your style would lend really well to Funk if you haven’t considered it! Keep it up 😄
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Thanks for actually giving it a listen! I really appreciate the feedback. And yeah, I regret not making City Limits a full song lol. I’ll probably release an extended version next time.
The goal is to cover as many genres as I can, so I’m always open to trying out anything. Funk is definitely something I’d be interested in doing, so it’s on my list! Thanks again!
Maybe an Android Emulator can at least help with the tiny screen problem.
+ More isolation without the need of an extra phone.In addition to the emulator someone mentioned, you might want to try scrcpy, which lets you control and view your phone on your computer. No root needed and easier to use than an emulator.
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.
Also annoying: you can’t leave the house without your tracking device anymore :/
The worst part of that is if your apartment management company gets phished then that person can now get into everyone’s apartment without setting off red flags to other residents since they can just unlock and walk right in.
Or some hacker decides to change the code…
I seem to remember some lawsuits about that situation
You can get number pad locks, no app just press the buttons. But yeah battery.
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.
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!!
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.
I once had a dorm room lock run out of battery. It is beyond annoying, I’m sorry for your loss.
I had the same thing happen. I also found out that’s if I kicked the door hard enough the lock gave way rather than brake.
If only we had some physical object that could never run out of power, let’s call it a “key”…
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
It took me a a couple of years and 3 phones before I started using Graphene OS as intended without many extra apps at all. Doing everything in vanadium without any stalkerware is far better. After nearly a year of heavy daily use, the battery still lasts two days on a charge with a decent margin of battery left by day two.
If you ever take a deep dive into the AOSP user permissions space and learn how it achieve an idiot-user “safe” environment, you’ll see why everyone wants their own stalkerware user app for data mining. In a nutshell, the app dev is similar to a Linux user within their app’s sandbox. They have as much or more privileges than the user in that space. Additionally the zygote launcher automatically loads most apps into memory all the time on Android to supposedly save init response time. In practice, it is a fraction of a second and completely irrelevant on human time. It’s just an excuse to run stalkerware 24/7 IMO
