There should be a warning label on any establishment or product that requires a smartphone to use.
How about this:
At the apartments I recently moved out of, there were no quarter slots on the washing machines. They were an app that required a bluetooth connection to pay.
So if you lived there and didn’t have a smartphone? Go fuck yourself, you don’t get to do laundry.
Unless you bothered to check the laundry room when you were looking at the apartment, you wouldn’t know. No warnings.
That…
Is that not illegal where you live?
It’s not even required that apartment buildings have laundry services at all. There are commercial storefront laundromats in the US which serve as the ground floor for where people do their laundry. Until landlords are required to provide laundry, it will be hard to legislate what payment forms they must accept.
America has next to no protections for tenants, only landlords.
Tbf, my building also uses an app for laundry. However they also have a machine in the laundry rooms where you can purchase an NFC payment card and put money on it. So you can use it without the app. Is that not the case with yours? If not, that’s 100% fucked
If you don’t have a smart phone in the US, even temporally, your almost a second class citizen.
Then if you don’t install corporate apps on your phone, there are even more problems for you.
You can still live in the US without apps… For now
Any time I’m required to use an app for something that could be a website, I leave the app a one star review.
Phone apps are nothing more than modern toolbars. And in case you forgot or missed this phase of the internet…
Peak internet wdym
Click to win a FREE LOBSTER Dinner 🦀🦞🦐
Man I miss this era of the internet. It truly felt like a new frontier.
I clicked, but all I got was a dancing stripper and something called Conficker.
I flat-out refuse to do business with any that requires I use an app. I won’t even scan a QR code for a restaurant menu; that’s my cue to go eat elsewhere.
I don’t mind the whole online menu thing. It’s probably an environmental net positive, but it’s bs if they don’t have ANY physical copies for those who can’t or don’t want to for whatever reason.
If they wanted me to install something, though, that’d be a 100% instant nope.
I mean I simply refuse to as QR code phishing is a thing
An online menu requires power to be used (on people’s phones and the server). Is that really a minor contribution in comparison to printing paper and maybe laminating it?
Considering your average printer is a piece of shit that needs to be replaced quite often, yes, using a website is probably more energy efficient.
This person has never seen the power bill for running a high-availability server with several failovers once in their lives.
I literally had to switch bank accounts because I couldn’t reset my password “on the web” and required me to use Virgin Money’s app.
Customer service agent(s) on the phone after prolonged discussions why their app wouldn’t work on three Android phones right in front of me surfaced, and I shit you not
Well sir, I have my iPhone here and can login just fine maybe you should buy one of those instead
That day I found out about this
also those who dont want to install that spyware shit on their phones. Even if you dont care about the data collection it still consumes battery faster as more and more data is being transferred
McDonald’s (in Germany at least) needs your location to “see when you arrive at the restaurant”. What the hell?! That doesn’t even work properly and they force it on me! I uninstalled the app and now I am actually happy, because without the promotion and discount stuff, I don’t eat McDanks that often anymore.
I use GraphineOS on my Pixel 7 and even I feel penalized for caring about my privacy. Its absolutely nonsense, not everything needs an app.
Yeah. My bank is one of the few UK banks whose app won’t work with Graphene, which is irritating. Also, the lack of Wallet access for payment cards is annoying.
But all in all everything else works fine.
Lloyds? they’re closing my local branch as well really need to go in and close the accounts tbh.
Yep, Lloyds.
They were absolute bellends when I tried to get it sorted to transfer the money to another bank as well, sat there insisting my “phone had been hacked/had a virus” and only actually moved my bloody money after I threatened a official complaint.
Not having a phone really sucks in this day and age. Imagine getting out of jail for something stupid like marijuana possession and then a parole violation due to a missed appointment. No one will hire you with your rap sheet. You live in a halfway house with a bunch of petty BS every day. And you can’t keep up with your parole demands because of how much your lack of a phone gets in your way. At the end of the day, there IS a way to succeed if you make the right choices, but shit, it’s just so much harder for some people to make the right choices when every day is crisis mode. And all because of WHAT?
As I’ve been making an effort to replace apps with the browser version of the service. It’s so abundantly clear that companies don’t want you using their website.
Even if they don’t outright cripple functionality, they’ll hound you endlessly to install the app.
It’s infuriating to say the least.
Even if they don’t outright cripple functionality, they’ll hound you endlessly to install the app.
Still don’t understand the logic of doing that.
It’s like saying,
“Our website is nigh unusable, please install our app instead. We pinky promise our app works”.
Even if I was willing to download all of those apps I don’t have room for them. They chew up 50-300mb each (why!?) and if I installed all of them I’d run out of memory. Since most phones now don’t support memory expansion I have to be picky about which ones I use.
I have THREE separate parking apps because I travel.
The reason they’re so huge is
- They’re generally not well optimized by the creators.
- They all contain their own dependencies
- There’s a LOT of stuff in them (both code and dependencies). Which is kind of an optimization problem, but potato potato.
Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.
Same thing with rendering/layout/functionality frameworks. And each app has their own.
My favorite Android app, Trail Sense, which has the ability to know when sunrise and sunset are without Internet, is like 10MB
they make older phones become useless after ditching their support
My S21 is on the verge of losing regular security updates, and I hate it. The battery is fine, the camera is more than adequate, I do not want to upgrade.
So would you not recommend me getting a refurbished s20? That’s the most recent model that still has microSD slots and I’ve seen them for 200. But I’m not sure about security…
How about you get some courage and drop your brand loyalty?
That’s what you get, honestly.
Hopefully you can learn from this and not waste your money on garbage.
I’m young and I fucking hate apps. I have android phone without a google account which works well for the most part. I’m too dumb to install LineageOS. and Linux phones aren’t really an option in the US.
Yep, the homeless pay more!
everyone wants to force you to use apps instead of websites, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of apps are just websites…in a app wrapper, because normal websites and normal browsers have inbuilt protections for you.
Apps don’t.
Idiots install apps, give them the 400,000 permissions they ask for, then go on their merry way…ignorant to the fact that they just installed a data vacuum on their phone thats siphoning everything off of it to be used and sold and resold for marketing purposes… Even the phone itself its not safe, cause its sitting there, listening to your conversations, even when not on a call, to more “Accurately” spam you with bullshit.
because normal websites and normal browsers have inbuilt protections for you.
Ding ding ding.
Phones are not listening and if you have proof post it. No security researcher has ever posted this.
