I hate how everything requires you to download a shitty proprietary data harvesting app nowadays when everything can be done just fine without an app.
I hate how everything requires you to download a shitty proprietary data harvesting app nowadays when everything can be done just fine without an app.
I have recently started a new position and am required to use an app that has three Facebook trackers, one of them being a Facebook location tracker according to Exodus App Privacy in order to get your food when it would literally work perfectly fine ordering to a real cashier or shit even a website rather than having to download an app.
I have also read many stories of people that live in apartments that require them to use a mobile app for god damn LAUNDRY. All you need, is a card reader, and it will work perfectly fine like it has been for the longest time.
Privacy concerns aside, it is just annoying that you need this app and that app and this app and that app and it just clutters space on your phone. Security concerns too as now they have all of this additional info on you online, such as your phone number your email your real name, instead of just your credit card info like a card reader would have. And I am willing to guarantee that their security model is absolute horseshit because they have such a small team of engineers working on the app and the servers.
Literal enshitification
Magne
A person's music taste seems to crystalize at some point in their teenage years. The bands you loved at 15-17 are probably the bands that you'll love forever.
Likewise, I'm finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago, and the new era of "apps for every individual thing" is just wholly unappealing. Give me a web browser to interface with your information. If I can't get it done with that, I'm more likely to move on to some even older tech and skip your product altogether.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm late to bingo. And get off my lawn.
Me: "seems to" "at some point" "probably" while making a minor, secondary point. Others: Severely Triggered
I realize you may just be venting but consider complaining to your college administration either via your student council or by yourself.
It should not be the norm to have to tell a stranger where you are to eat food.
You are paying for your education even if you are doing so via a loan and that gives you the right to tell them how you feel about them invading your privacy. In college and in jobs authority figures routinely try to control you and it is worth learning to take a stand against such abuses.
I went to college before it was app everything and our student id's were smartcards. Dining plan associated with the smartcard. Just stick it in the reader when you show up and you're good. You could put cash on your card then use it for the vending machines or laundry or any little incidental on campus. If you needed cashed added to your account, your parents could go online and do it, or you could. That was the only online component. The entire system just worked without any fuss or privacy concerns or anything.
The number of business that just expect that everyone has already downloaded and installed their app has become ridiculous.
Best Buy now demands an app be installed for order pick up. They are so sure you'll have already done that there are no instructions in their parking lot for pick up that don't include the app, no way to call them, and the lot employees say, "Just use the app and we'll get your order." It's like the 20% tips programmed into just about every payment machine these days. No, I won't leave you a 20% tip for handing me a receipt.
Even when going to Best Buy's service desk the reps looked at me like I was crazy. "No, I won't install your app to pick up an order" was met with confusion and open irritation. Fuck that.
And don't get me started on 'Reddit is better in our crappy Reddit app.'
My apartment complex wants me to download some third-party app just to pay my rent, instead of using their perfectly serviceable web portal. I assume they're getting a data harvest kickback that's buried in several layers of fine-print legalese, which will be used to send me targeted spam and junk mail. And that data will be sold and re-sold to other parties ad infinitum. Whatever they can collect about my personal life, for sale to any asshole with enough cash in their pocket. Fuck that. I shouldn't have to deal with this bullshit just to keep a roof over my head.
My favorite barber was booked out recently, so I just walked into the next one across the road, which looked new and had no customers inside. Asked for the haircut, and he said sure, what's your name and email address? I was confused and asked why he would need that, and he said it's for his app to book appointments and charge customers.
I walked out without getting a haircut.
And furthermore: Most of these shitty apps are nothing more than overblown API clients. Which means they didn't want to build a website and operate a webserver, so instead you provide the processing power for the UI yourself. These apps usually can't do anything on their own, if you are offline, becaue all the value is generated remotely by the actual server.
The modern software experience sucks much!
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..
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.
Can't agree more. And the issues go beyond data harvesting. For example, recently, I lost my phone and carried on for a while without it, only to realize we're building a society in which we are slowly losing our citizenship rights if we don't have a phone. I found myself locked out from many things, and having to go so many alternate routes, that I had to get a new phone quickly.
It all happened so subtly, and I saw it happening, but still, it's hard to believe we came to this point without the people manifesting some sort of opposition. I get even more worried about the developing countries, where not everyone can properly afford a phone.
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.
I'm sure we've all experienced this...
Go to example.com
"Ooops! It looks like you're on a mobile device, which we for some asinine corporate reason don't support on our desktop site! No "enable desktop site" won't make this message go away because we make an unreasonable effort to deny you access to our site. Go to mobile.example.com instead."
Goes to mobile.example.com
"Just kidding! What, you think we were actually going to let you access this without installing something? No, fuck you! This page is literally just a full screen ad for our app and has no access to any other part of platform, download it and agree to it's fifty permissions before we'll even give you a glimpse of our content!"
Yes, this is a trend I've been commenting on for...well it seems like a very long time.
It's clearly enshittification in nearly every single case; the more clueless johnny-come-lately tech-trendsters want to label me as just being old-fashioned or something when I bring it up. Trying to explain to them what is going on is usually a pointless exercise, as they have been steeped in a new==better mindset that is nearly ironclad and since they didn't use reason to get themselves into that position, but instead, emotion, trying to reason them out of it is not going to happen...
A while ago, I started keeping a personal library/journal/etc. using Logseq. I could fire up Logseq in any browser on the planet, connect to my notes, and jot down whatever idea I had in the moment, all in a FOSS journal that stored my notes in plaintext markdown.
Then ... I don't know what happened, but 100% of their effort went into building an app, which then required them to build a (paid, proprietary) sync service, all rather than just releasing a self-hosted build of the web interface so I could spin up my own note-taking server. (Please don't suggest alternatives; I've probably tried them all.) To "preserve privacy" and promote "local first", I had to download an app and rely on a closed-source backend to do something I could trivially accomplish on my own. If my platform doesn't support the app, no notes, unless I rely on the increasingly unmaintained web "demo" that does exactly 100% of what I need from the service, despite dozens of features missing compared to the app version.
But the kicker is that I cannot install things on my work computer. At all. Not portable apps, nothing. I will get a phone call from infosec if I even try, because we are a heavily regulated company. So if I have a bright idea at work, a thought I want to preserve, find a good article, etc., I have to go to another device. I have to interrupt my workflow, change my focus completely, and, probably, lose half of what I wanted to capture.
The thing is, I don't think they're data farming. I think they're running a really good project! Users were begging for an app. "When are you going to release an app?" was a common question forever, because a whole generation of dingleberries cannot be bothered to go to a website that does the same thing, faster, and better than any app.
Need an account just to use my new gaming console. Another account to play Diablo IV. I bought the goddamned console and game. I had to sign into an app for the console. Why can't I just play the game? The Samsung display that I got for the console (I have a projector, so I needed something for daytime use) is a "smart" display. That wanted me to create an account with an app on my phone. I just woke up, so if I rambled, oh well.
I think we're at the point where everything will suck to the greatest degree from now on. There's no room left for business not to suck (Amazon ads on Prime unless you pay more, as an example). Goodbye anything that isn't terrible.
And related, if your hardware product requires me to create Yet Another Account just to plug it into my computer and have it work, I'm returning it.
I opened a bank account at Bank of America. Apparently it was just a matter of course to make people install the BOA app before opening an account. I practically had to fist fight them to get them to drop it. It was like they got commissions for every app install or something. Scary, honestly.
At least I learned from the experience that "I actually don't have the Play Store on my phone" isn't a good way to get them to drop it. I guess next time I get hard sold on an app, I'll go the "I'll decline the app, thanks" route. We'll see whether that works or not.
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.
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.
Reminds me of the Always Sunny ep where Dennis tries to get a bubble tea
Sounds very hackable. Have you considered getting a degree in information security and penetration testing? All you have to do is hack all the systems to give you free lunches and access your neighbor’s laundry and anything else you can think of. Then write a thesis about how you spent several years messing around with the world around you. It’s science if you write it down.
I remember when no one had an app. 2011ish, only fucking banks made Android apps since corps were still unsure if Android (or the other competing standard app stores) were going to be worth their effort to develop.
I remember reading the permissions required by apps on install and committing to mobile web browsing if I was on my phone...and this was before most companies even understood every consumer had walking geolocation in their unknowing pockets suddenly.
Reminds me of the episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where they pick up people in the "Paddy's Wagon" and Dennis forces them to use a painfully overblown app just to buy a couple of beers. It seems to have cooled off a bit but the rush for every little business to have its own app reminds me how every pizzeria and dry cleaner felt the need to have a website and social media presence.
I have 3 goddamn parking apps I have to keep on my phone, each with its own account, just so I can park in various cities when I travel. I'm sure my data is 100% secure too...
Anyone with any power or any product is going to milk every single penny they can out of every single interaction they have. There are no ethics in business. No one cares about your privacy, and they only care about laws if they think they'll lose money by breaking them. Otherwise, these laws don't exist for them because they get in the way of more money.
We're a world where the biggest fucking cunts also have the biggest market share of our culture.
I took an old phone and fully reset it to use for all these shitware apps. I've looked into buying an anonymous SIM card so it won't be at all connected to me, but the underlying assumption seems to be if you want that you must be a drug dealer. Best I've found is mysudo, which requires payment, but it's really not much, and only stores the minimum on their side. Gives you an anonymous email and phone number. The other problem with all these apps is the engineers are given at best half the time they need to do a good job, so they're always buggy, insecure, and have a shitty UI. But some project manager managed to show Impact and get a bonus.
All these forced cloud applications annoy the living shit out of me as well.
This idea actually turned me off using Sync for Lemmy or other apps that have their own ad injection capability, as you have to pay to turn off ads but the ad tracking payload is still baked into the app, so is it really off or is it on but not showing the ads that it is still tracking data for in the first place?
I'm about to suggest another app for you to install. :p
If you're using an android phone (I don't know if it exist on iOS) install the DuckDuckGo app. It has a feature called "App Tracking Protection". It is supposed to block all trackers. I think it works as one of the games i have installed on my phone takes about a minute longer to load, compared to without the tracking protection. I think this is the next best course of action (apart from not installing / using the required apps).
It really makes me sad more of these services haven't embraced PWAs. Being able to run your app protected by uBlock origin is truly the best of both worlds.
Swiss Post did that too, you used to be able to buy "stamps" (well codes you would write on the envelope serving the same function as stamps) over plain old SMS. They they stopped that since they have that new whatever service. That service works on a PC browser, but on the phone browser the function is not available, no there you need the app. For fucking no reason at all.
Seriously email your IT and/or privacy team at the university level. I work at a university and that would be removed ASAP for sharing PII. If you're in the US or UK it's a major violation of your privacy. Unfortunately most IT offices aren't involved in many of the decisions and many of the people making those decisions are complete ignorant to the situation.
My response to this is that I refuse to use apps like that. For example, the only app I have on my phone is a OSM+ (maps). (As well as core basics: clock, contacts, camera, phone app, etc.).
I've never once scanned a QR code, I don't have any phone apps that require an account for anything whatsoever.
...
And I can say that as time goes on, I feel more and more like I'm in the minority. I'm seeing restaurants where you are meant to order with a phone; and I'm seeing people paying for stuff with their phone; and during covid contract-tracing times, there were a lot of different things that assumed the use of a phone... I just hope that there are enough people in the world with values similar to mine such my life doesn't get harder due to phone apps being required for more and more things.
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.
If you're feeling angry, there's an app for that :-)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calm.android
Is there not an app that can partition these apps that we are made to download. So the companies are happy that they are installed. But they have no real access to your real data. The app could feed it fake info when requests are made.
But when you have the app actually open maybe give it real GPS access as they are store specific on most of their apps.
I work on the enterprise apps team at my university. We'd dump that so hard you'd think we were using it to get liftoff. Definitely complain. Also, it's not inclusive to students without smart devices (they exist!).
If they do still have the option for manual use (with ID card scanners), there are a number of membership card / ID card wallets that are free on most platforms. You can just type the barcode into the app, and it'll make a virtual card that can be scanned. Same convenience, no physical plastic. If you're not offended by Google products, Google Wallet works pretty well. Or Stocard, but I'm not sure what level of tracking they implement. Granted, you're still installing an app, but you get to pick your poison a bit, instead of being railroaded into Facebook shenanigans.
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
All I can say it's the fault of marketing and the statement of "we want more information from our users, but we don't know exactly know what information to collect, so we collect everything possible in hopes to see some connection and predict what the user wants". I wish companies would actually ask the user what they want. Do users want to use their phone? Cool, make a nfc enabled card that can be added to the phone's wallets, and give users a portal to manage their funds if needed, no more app needed.
I use the work profile via Insular/Island, and certain apps I don't like but do want I put in there, and freeze whenever not in use.
It was so much better 20 years ago when all the shitty proprietary data harvesting apps came pre-installed with Windows.
(Yeah, I know they still do that, just slightly more covertly.)
Honestly its fucking annoying literally had to make several user profiles just for my work life and my other invasive activities
I also hate apps which request for unnecessary permissions. I have a dashcam which has an app to view the recorded videos. The app requires bluetooth as well as gps location info. Bluetooth is understandable but I don't see the need for GPS. Unfortunately for me I can't seem to get mock locations working properly on my phone. It also refuses to work if i do not give it location permission. :(
I'm totally sure all these shithouse apps adhere only to the strictest standards in regards to data security also...
Wait until you need an app to visit your child's grave
Feels like we're in a TechnoFuedal society
I've moved mostly to progressive web apps that truly stop when you close them. For sure they will try to use trackers when they're running but you can stop that with pihole or NextDNS if you're on the move with your mobile. You can regain some control if you have the motivation to do so. If you have to install an app, you can still block tracking via these methods and more.
Lol. This is how I know I'm old.
From 2013. https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/1e5acw/ha_i_dont_want_your_fucking_app/
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.
I got an apartment from a housing company that came with a "smart" Bluetooth washing machine. Of course it works just fine without using Bluetooth, but if I so were to wish to use such services, I would need to provide access to Bluetooth, WIFI, and location all the time. As in, I'm not allowed to turn that off.
The thing I really can't understand, and a likely consequence of the ubiquity of apps, is all of the people who can't seem to function without them.
Like when the Reddit exodus to the threadiverse happened, people started immediately crying for Lemmy apps. And it doesn't seem to matter that much how bare-bones or unstable one might be - the important thing is that it's an app. That's all that seems to matter to them.
It's as if they aren't even aware of the fact that these are all websites, so they all work in a browser - as if to them, an app is a necessity and they can't figure out how to accomplish anything otherwise.
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.
I still find it kinda funny how everything was made to be run on some sort of browser instead of in its own program, and now they want you to use an app to run these things instead of the browser, that in turn opens a browser in the back ground....
Tangentially related, but I hate eating at Chili's because they have little screens on every table. I don't mind restaurants having a ton or TVs because they're playing sports games and people want to watch them. Each of these POS machines has constant ads playing though. You can pay with it (and probably order stuff) but you can also pay to play games. It's insane.
This is why if a service cannot be used in a hardened browser, I usually pass.
I am okay-ish about a service collecting some of the data I generate while using the service, but not much beyond that.
I figured out that at my local university still technically gives out physical ids. Know one wanted to tell me how but eventually a figured out that a local debit card from my bank could be counted as an ID
I'm guessing the reason for most things forcing you to use an app is less because of data harvesting, and more because it increases repeated use.
When you have to go to your browser and remember to check a website it's harder to create a habit. If you have an icon flashing on your home screen every day it's much easier to remember to go to their site. Sure you can "Add to Home screen" functionality, but average users don't even know that exists.
It also feels like a bespoke app is more "professional" than a website, despite many apps secretly just being a website anyway.
That said, they are definitely harvesting your data. I just don't think that's the main reason for most apps.
NextDNS.io can block the trackers in the apps
Not sure if you're on iPhone or Android but I root my OnePlus 9pro and use several ad blockers and privacy apps. A good one is xprivacylua, because it doesn't just block trackers but instead feeds them phony data so it interferes with the function of the app as little as possible. I would recommend you install shamiko as well to prevent apps from detecting that your phone is rooted. I'm sure there are similar options for iPhone but I'm not familiar it's been too long since I've had a jailbroken iPhone.
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.
-
You don't need an app to do data harvesting.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The additional vertical real-estate cannot be understated.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I find most apps provide a much better experience.
I guess unpopular opinion but experience of a good app is significantly better than the experience of even a good mobile website. Especially if I’m frequently going back and forth between pages and whatnot.
The data harvesting is a huge issue but it’s clear that most people don’t give a shit and / or aren’t savvy enough to understand what’s actually happening. Though I think iOS and Android have both done a good job exposing what data apps are collecting on your and if you are conscious of it, the info is there for you.