Technology

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.

How can people push back on this insanity? I don't want 500 goddamn apps on my phone nor do I want 500 accounts on "portals" or what fucking ever your calling it today.

I agree with OP, but how do we resist the borg?

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 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.

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.

I refuse to use services that demand you use their app.

Services only need a website for the most part, not only is this easier for development cost but it is simplier to create a mobile friendly website instead of creating an Android app, iOS app and a desktop app.

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.

Funny you mention enshittification, I just watched a talk from Cory Doctorow who coined that term and he pointed out the reason for insisting on an app is that it means you can’t block ads without violating the DMCA. Browsers can have adblocker extensions, apps cannot (unless you hack them.)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

i want to go to a restaurant and get a physical menu, instead of having to dl an app using a QR code.

Are you using apple or android? If you are using android check out adguard. It runs a local VPN and filters that shit out. I've actually had to white list some apps like geico because it broke them and they weren't using (as far as I can tell) any fb or other data collection trackers.

If you're feeling angry, there's an app for that :-)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calm.android

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!

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.

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.

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

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 neighbors 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.

Honestly its fucking annoying literally had to make several user profiles just for my work life and my other invasive activities