I have recently started university 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, for the dining plan, when it would literally work perfectly fine using your student ID and ordering to a real cashier, LIKE HOW IT HAS BEEN DONE FOR DECADES.
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
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.
They literally could not give one fuck less. They are probably being paid or otherwise are getting some other kind of kickback to push these apps. Colleges are…I hesitate to say greedy, but let’s call it “capitalistic”.
I agree with the sentiment, but if no one ever complains things are guaranteed to not change. At least this is, at the very least, an exercise in explaining your own viewpoints and understanding the workings of an institution. That is a skill and lesson that is valuable in the professional world.
via your student council or by yourself.
This is literally what the student council exists for! Also, OP could join student council! As a graduated student government nerd I highly recommend it!
Worth noting the college probably did it because they want to appear to be technologically advanced. As part of Student government I visited a campus that had no public water fountains but did have a gigantic touchscreen map about the size of a normal printed map that conveyed no extra information that a printed map would. It was very clear what motivations were behind those decisions
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.’
Dude same here for the Reddit prompt ! I browse incognito without a profile just to see some headlines… and every ten minutes or if I got to a risque sub, it will stop me and ask for the app download or if I want to stay on the browser… if I wanted the app… I would have gotten it… I am on the browser for a reason…
Just use third party apps. Oh wait…
Yeah… Iiss boost for reddit…
When something’s flagged NSFW, you can replace the “www” with “old” (e.g. old dot reddit dot com) to bypass :)
Fast food is about 30% more expensive if you refuse the app.
Personal experience:
Tim Hortons
Wendy’s:
That’s always the case in the beginning with those apps. And once they have market dominance and/or the shareholders want their ROI, they increase price and hope people still use it. See Uber for example.
This is why I hope to god when I’m living in my own we never get to the point where apps become 100% required to purchase shit from a store. I’d rather starve and miss a day’s worth of meals than order off an app.
Grocery shopping and food prep is always an option. Cheaper and healthier too.
If you have time to browse Lemmy, you got time to throw some shit in an air fryer/insta pot/slow cooker.
That I can totally agree, as someone who actually enjoys cooking. If I could get my family on board, I wouldn’t mind getting their help making and freezing meals on the weekend for days when we just don’t feel like cooking or my mother’s back is bothering her or whatever.
My bachelor days I’d make a tray of lasagna or a pot of beef stew and I had meals for almost 5 days. I will say that I was really sick of lasagna or beef stew by day 4 though.
Looks like you’ll be foraging for food in the woods
Jesus, it’s like they want you to order online from a third party instead of paying them.
All the best buys I know of are shutting down. Doing the ol’ circuit city.
Weird. I can just go to the mobile Best Buy site, pull up my order from my account, and get the barcode they need to scan from there. No need for the app.
I can do the same with the desktop site.
IMO people should not have to know a company’s policies and go through their website to make a purchase. Anyway, it would have been nice if they put that information on the sign in their pickup area, or their pickup reps or desk clerks mentioned it when I told them I didn’t have the app. Instead they made it clear that everyone should either already have the app or install it because they said so.
Way, way too many companies and organizations (like the OP’s) are pulling this kind of crap.
Reddit is better in our crappy Reddit app.
Oh fuck reddit for doing that.
I ordered online and picked up in store at best buy without their app. I showed them the email they sent with the info. No problems at all.
Could it be you went into a different store than I did? How about that!
My goodness, you’re right! 😁
I thought all best buys had the same policies for everything? Or do they differ between Canada and the US?
Policies and practices are often very different things.
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?
If something is trying to force me to use an app I don’t want, I don’t give my business to them. Also ignore any financial incentives they try to get you with. You save a couple bucks once and they have you.
- “Download our app and save 10% on your order.”… no.
- “Sign up for our email newletter and get a discount.”… no.
- “You need to download our app to order.”… no
- “If you download are app you can track your order to see when your package will arrive.”… no.
Say no. Fuck these businesses. If they have an app that is useful and you want it, ok, but if they are trying to push it on you, it’s a trap. Fuck em.
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Yet some local retailers somewhat insist on doing their own app.
One instead of a website where I could look at their course catalog and book had App Store/Google Play apps. They were terrible, and wouldn’t install on a still-supported Google Pixel phone, a friend with an iPhone tried the Apple version and said it was horrendous and uninstalled it immediately.
I don’t understand why they went with terrible custom apps, a responsive website would have been so much more convenient and easier to maintain! Also, call me old-fashioned but some things I just prefer doing from the comfort of my desktop with a nice big screen, keyboard, and mouse.
The 80s movie classic War Games has the answer:
STRANGE GAME…THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TOO PLAY…
In things where I can’t avoid an account, I use an email alias (personally I use Mozilla Relay, but Proton Pass offers logins as well if I recall.
Edit: for clarity, this adds at least a level of abstraction from my actual data. It’s not the only thing I do, such as blackhole DNS via PiHole, VPN in other scenarios, Tor for others (for those curious, pihole and Tor don’t work at the same time, and pihole and VPN generally doesn’t either without extra work and it’s not compatible with every VPN).
One way is to just lie and say you only have a flip phone. There are probably millions of old people that refuse to use smartphones because they don’t understand them and there no reason you can’t pretend to also have a dumb phone.
GREAT idea! I have both a flip and a smart phone.
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.
Does your lease precise you have to use the app or own a smartphone ? If not, get a cellphone, like those new 3210. Call them, ask them how to install, or visit their office. Play it dumb. Of they tell you to get a smartphone, tell them to provide you one.
Or use your bank’s bill-pay service. They’ll mail a check or send it electronically (which is effectively the same as using a debit card).
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I was visiting family in the city I grew up in and we decided to go to this place that now charges for parking. It’s a city lot. I figured I have to get this app to park. The city app.
First, it was a nightmare of horrible bad UX and half-assed customization. Second, it took about 15 minutes of bs to pay for parking (time outs, a couple 2fa’s, we need you to use a social but we haven’t set up that login path correctly). Finally, get parking paid, my wife is losing her mind thinking I’m an idiot because it took so long, and then the spam calls started. I literally wasn’t into the building and I was getting spam texts and robo calls. I’m not talking “goods and services I might like” , this was “Canadian border services has determined you have unpaid fines” voicemails and “hi, i just found your number again can u text” type stuff. Just wild.
Oh I feel this in my soul. I am pregnant and have a two year old… I was and am a huge customer of pampers (and enfamil formula for when my two year old was little) the apps have kick backs… and against my better judgement z I broke down and got these apps for the kick back… I regret it… my email is overwhelmed with spam suddenly… an email I worked hard to get all the spam out of a few months ago… I am also getting random calls and voicemails for services I would never use. It’s so frustrating… I just wanted to the points for the products I normally buy to save a few pennies… but can’t do it with out my data being harvested and being spammed with crap
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.
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.
Also annoying: you can’t leave the house without your tracking device anymore :/
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.
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.
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!!
Hopefully you’re looking at different place now
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.
I seem to remember some lawsuits about that situation
House insurance does not cover digital house lock
You can get number pad locks, no app just press the buttons. But yeah battery.
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.
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.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 wish I could disagree with you but the path does seem pretty clear.
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!
When you have a website, you also provide the processing power for executing JavaScript and rendering HTML+CSS.
Why they would prefer an app (that’s by definition less compatible) is unknown for me, but I can attempt to guess it’s simpler for some reason.
It’s about control. Websites cannot control the browser or browser addons. The browser makes it harder to track and control the user. An app by definition allows more hardware access, even if modern mobile OS can control it pretty good. But then again, most users allow everything anyways.
It’s not control as in “track and control the user”. It’s control as in “normalising the environment”… if the user can install your app then they can use your service - it’s not a weird issue with a browser add on or cookie or whatever.
If it’s proprietary then you can’t confirm what it’s actually doing or change it. Even if the uni has no intentions of being controlling they have unjust control of your computing.
Browsers work just fine. The add-ons they don’t like are the privacy ones.
They want your data.
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.
Good, that’s the only way people like that will change
That may be why he had no customers
Same thing but with a phone number. They were baffled that I didn’t want to give my phone number for a haircut.
Hell, I get annoyed at being asked my first name at the counter in fast food places.
Like, give me a break… I’ll be the guy who looks like me standing right fucking there waiting for it… We don’t need to be on a first name basis… We ain’t friends.
Give a fun fake name then! My wife and I did that when we ordered sandwiches on off days and they actually drew fun doodles on the sandwiches to go with it a couple of times!
Lol ok Boomer. Just say I’d rather not give that info
Well yeah, and his response was “sorry sir, but without an account we cannot serve customers…”
Then I’m an idiot.
Cute insult. Got any more you’d like to use?
Nah, it was a throwaway comment. Half a joke but it sure did make people mad.
That what he did, Zoomer… lmao 🤣😂
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.)
it means you can’t block ads without violating the DMCA. Browsers can have adblocker extensions, apps cannot (unless you hack them.)
I imagine this is just going to lead to more people using DNS ad blockers. My phone literally can’t access your ad server, sorry.
Private DNS FTW!
On Android:
- Swipe down and select settings (the gear)
- Search for: DNS
- Select Private DNS.
- Select Private DNS again.
- Select Private DNS provider hostname.
- Enter: dns.adguard.com
- Select Save
- Enjoy most ads being blocked in apps.
- Might work poorly on public wifi (Walmart wifi for example doesn’t work with a private DNS set).
On Apple:
- Fuck if I know.
Everytime I use this my WiFi stops working on my mobile.
For me it works 95%, then throws that error randomly.
Not sure why that would be. 🤷
Have you tried other private DNS servers? Curious if your Internet provider is blocking specific servers or DNS over HTTPS.
I heard there are security concerns with this as adguard cannot be fully trusted. Anyone got the scoop?
Ed: as in didn’t adguard get bought by some questionable company?
Your traffic is going through them instead of your ISPs DNS. Which do you trust more?
You are doing the lord’s work
Thanks!
As an app developer some people just get hard for an app and don’t know why they would want one.
It’s rarely some big plan just an ego thing
Unless someone makes a router that does that in firmware, there’s a lot of people who won’t bother.
Eero does but you have to pay a subscription fee and it’s an Amazon product.
So, blocks all ads but Amazon ads?
oh noo not the dmca. i love following the dmca with all my heart
This one? It came up as the next post on sync:
That’s the one!
Smart phones ruined the internet
No. The corporations have ruined the Internet
Smartphones is what gave them control. On the PC you can still filter most of the nonsense away. On smartphones the user is no longer in control and has to eat up whatever they get served.
Exactly why I don’t even bother with mobile games. That market feels so oversaturated with paywalls, scams, microtransactions and ads.
No, greedy people ruined the internet.
Yes and
Both are responsible
Smartphones are just tools that do what we tell them like computers or cars. We (being us non-corpos) didn’t tell or want them to track every aspect of our lives as data points, but now because of corporate and government interests we’re unfortunately in a position where we have to actively resist that.
Smartphones never were tools. They were from the start designed to remove control from the user and shift it to the apps and the manufacturers so they could feed you with ads and stuff.
Capitalism ruined the Internet
Money makes pretty much everything worse.
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 think we are the frogs being boiled in the pot of enshittification
I’ve been called a crazy conspiracy theorist since 2009 and my first Android. Hated all the sync/tracking Google was doing that was killing my battery then. Disable Google, and now I get a full day’s battery, back then.
People still don’t listen to me about this issue, 10+ years later.
Those google apps are also the number 1 reason of phones getting slower over time and leading people to buy new ones. Fuck google.
Yep. Currently setting up my next phone - Pixel 4a. It won’t have any Google services. Gonna just bite the bullet and move on.
That’s the reason I stopped using a smartphone in 2020. Never has much problem thus far except for Steam, which required using their app for confirming the trades (even for simple items worth fractions of a penny). I now use an Android VM for this.
If Steam could just do that with standard TOTP already…
2FA is the only reason I’d need the app, but installing it just for this one feature? Not the only service I have this problem with. Just let me use Aegis ffs
Well, I didn’t use it until I started trading items (and these were cheap items worth fractions of a penny, mind you! The ones that drop for free all the time!) I really wish you could confirm such trades as well by just entering your TOTP code from Keepass.
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 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.
To be fair, there are frameworks like Flutter nowadays that let you build your app once in one language and it will build/compile an iOS, Android, and web app for you.
True, I am all for Flutter and Tauri. However websites are better for sevices since it is not likely the company will release a fully open source app or APIs for developers to build apps for the service. There are many web clients out there that are open source and allow for a good private web experience.
And even if a company does release a FOSS app, it is hard to get the company to release the app on alternative app stores like F-Droid.
Also I do not want a million apps on my phone taking up space, that could be running in the background and harvesting my data. Websites or PWA are like one-time apps you load in the browser, use and the close to discard, especially when you use your browser private mode.
Oh yeah, I definitely agree. Just pointing out it’s nowhere near as difficult/complicated to build or maintain apps for multiple platforms like it used to be.
instead of creating an Android app, iOS app and a desktop app.
Why do that when you can just have a buggy and crappy experience taylored specifically for each device?
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!”
When you download the app, it’s just a web page packaged with all the tracking software.
If you try to read comments on reddit on their website it eventually forces you to use the app to continue.
And then that ends up giving you another reason to switch to lemmy and screw reddit.
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.
I’m still going to mention Zettlr and you can’t stop me.
Though it doesn’t have mobile apps and you’d have to use your own method of syncing the files, so not really what you’d need anyway.
There really isn’t a lot of FOSS apps than can replace Obsidian, while also being local-first and usable without an account, is there?
Logseq is really, really close. It’s basically a page I can start writing on, forcing minimal organization through bullets but otherwise freeform. Backlinking, plugins (meh), plain markdown. It’s just so good. It doesn’t require me to do anything other than write. It used to be entirely browser-based, syncing through a github repository. They could have released a self-hostable version of that and I would have been over the moon. Or, alternately, a self-hostable version with non-local storage so I could store my notes on a notes server I control. But they went with the app + sync service route. Understandable but sad.
So I just rolled my own sync through a git server and it works fine (other than iOS, which requires a maddening setup, but that’s not logseq’s fault).
I looked at Zettlr once or twice (thank you for mentioning it). Obsidian makes me crazy with all the UI fiddly bits and configuration. I tried. Oh how I tried. But it just didn’t work with my brain. (It’s the exact same reaction I have to KDE – there’s just TOO MUCH and it sets me off in unproductive directions, and that’s not a criticism of either project as such.)
I tried Logseq after looking for an Obsidian alternative, but I already failed at understanding how to import my notes. Can’t you just point the app to a folder? The import function seemed to only work for single markdown files, but maybe I was just missing something obvious.
That was a lot more straightforward in Zettlr, so I just kept using that, since it already does everything I need
Sort of, but the notes aren’t organized in the filesystem. So you point to a location where the files will live and it creates, e.g., journals and pages folders into which journals and pages are dropped. Each is one flat directory (which seems like a scaling problem after a while, but I’m nowhere near that being an issue).
Because logseq doesn’t do freeform markdown by default, you cannot just open any arbitrary markdown file in it. Or, rather, it will give unpredictable results if you do. If you’re used to a free-form editor that organizes files hierarchically, that is going to seem very, very strange and may not be what you’re looking for. My preference is to spend zero time organizing files and organizing text, so logseq’s choice to make both a non-issue is an absolute godsend. Open the app, start typing. It’s great (for me).
Yeah okay, no wonder I couldn’t warm up to it. I need that order and hierarchy in my notes
