Bitte zwingen Sie mich nicht, eine weitere App herunterzuladen | Unsere Telefone werden überlastet

>Their premise is, of course, quite reasonable. Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and custom-made. They helped companies forge more direct connections with their customers, especially once push notifications came on the scene. They also made new kinds of services possible, such as geolocating nearby shops or restaurants, and camera-scanning your items for self-checkout. Apps could serve as branding too, because their icons—which are also business logos—were sitting on your smartphone screen. And apps allowed companies to collect a lot more data about their customers than websites ever did, including users’ locations, contacts, calendars, health information, and what other apps they might use and how often.
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>By 2021, when Apple started taking steps to curtail that data harvest, the app economy was already well established. Smartphones had become so widespread, companies could assume that any customer probably had one. That meant they could use their apps to off-load effort. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta or American Airlines encouraged passengers to use their apps. At Ikea, customers could prepay for items in the app and speed through checkout. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app allowed each customer to specify exactly which salsa or what kind of milk they wanted without holding people up. An apartment building that adopted a laundry app (ShinePay, LaundryView, WASH-Connect, etc.) spared itself the trouble of managing payments at its machines.
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>In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.
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>I’d like to think that this hellscape is a temporary one. As the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or utility, won’t people start resisting them? And if platform owners such as Apple ratchet up their privacy restrictions, won’t businesses adjust? Don’t count on it. Our app-ocalypse is much too far along already. Every crevice of contemporary life has been colonized. At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can’t escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.

As someone who has always purchased a phone with the least amount of storage possible, this trend to the app-ification of everything has certainly been noticeable. It’s possible in some cases to access the websites of the relevant services through a browser, but sometimes companies severely restrict people’s abilities to do so even though their app is nothing but a wrapper for the web interface. This last point is the most contentious for me: apps that are nothing but wrappers for a web interface should be depreciated. Companies should be thinking hard about the value proposition that an app might bring, and it’d better be substantially more than the website otherwise why bother.

I just stop using whatever it was. It immediately turns me off.

If your app is literally just a web browser in a frame, it doesn’t need to be an app

Fight me on that opinion.

>Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and custom-made

On iOS, maybe, I don’t have an iPhone but I’ve heard they’re a bit more careful about what they allow on the app store.

But on Android ? Most apps are terrible, they freeze, they crash, they can’t handle 2FA (you switch to your banking app to authenticate and when you come back you have to start all over again), they keep sending you to actual websites…

On top of that every company seems to have “partners” whose apps you are required to install. You’re applying for a job ? App. Manage subscription ? App. Buy tickets for an event, concert, museum, public transportation system ? App. Registering before taking a plane ? App. Checking in an hotel ? App. I’ve been standing in the street trying to install an app countless times.

Such bullshit.

I got an email for some random sets of dice I bought off a Facebook ad. There’s a tracking link in it. I click it, on my desktop, opening in my browser. The same browser I used to buy the dice and open the email.

It flat-out refused to give me any tracking info, just a QR code to download an app. The purchase record on the store was the same way.

I just forgot about the dice. It took months for them to arrive. I wonder why they didn’t want to make it easy to track that.

Commenting from a crappy Reddit app. Are they ever going to roll out basic features?

It is for data gathering. You have access to a lot more data as an app on a phone than as a website on a browser.

It won’t stop

The push for apps is infuriating because for a lot of stuff there’s no reason it can’t just be a regular website. We already have this amazing free and open technology for transmitting information and for some reason every company decided that actually it would be better to force everyone to use their bloated app instead of a web browser.

I’m not stupid, I get that those companies want you to use your app because it lets them track you better. But I think it’s ridiculous that we all put up with it and that companies somehow get away with pretending the app is good because it’s a “better experience”. It’s not a “better” experience, they just made the website run like shit so you’d be pressured to use their app instead.

And a lot of these apps don’t work unless you make an account.  Instant delete.  

That was a ridiculous short article?

A few years ago I cleaned out a ton of apps off of my phone. I have a handful of non stock iOS apps and do a lot of stuff in the Firefox browser. Yeah it’s annoying to use Reddit on Firefox but fuck them, and anyone else, who tries to force us into using junk apps. 

I went to McDonalds not thirty minutes ago or so. I went to the kiosk and it said I had a $1.35 full fry. Hate the app and kiosk so much, it’s just been a boiling rage with all the forkin apps and kiosk. I said fork it today and just went to the desk and paid regular price, just so I didn’t have to fork with the app and kiosk. I can get a fry for $ 1.35 so long as you can track my spending habits eh? FORK YOU

They want an excuse to have access to all your phone’s data, that’s all.

Says [The Atlantic App](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-atlantic-magazine/id397599894).

Counterpoint: I like apps. They’re generally a cleaner experience, faster to load, keep me logged in longer, and I can organize them into folders for quick access. In a browser, it’s much easier to lose your place in a page by browsing to another one and forgetting you had the first page open in that tab, or closing a tab without thinking about what sessions you may have had going, etc. the difference is especially noticeable with any kind of form-based pages, like ordering food or filling out medical forms and such. Any time I start filling out a form on a mobile browser, I always wish it were an app instead. I’m on an iPhone, so maybe android is different, but I’m team App.

Pretty much every car privately run car park in the uk has it’s own app, and there is no consistency anywhere in one city could be expected to have 3 or 4 apps let alone if went to different city or region. It’s insane.

PCA in MN here. They recently decided pavilio is better than timesheets. Mandating use of an app grates on me so hard.

I admin a website that uses a third-party vendor platform. They offer a branded mobile app but I haven’t gone through the hassle of deploying it because it’s literally the mobile browser view in an app. It doesn’t do anything that takes advantage of mobile features like a camera, geolocation, or accelerometer. I’ve had a few business people ask why we don’t have an app, but no one that is actually targeted as a user has asked for it lol.

AliExpress, I feel icky enough visiting your site. I am NOT installing your app..

Whatever happened to Apple App Clips? I haven’t seen anything about since they presented it, and it was made to stop this very thing, was it not?