My dad was trying to get a grooming appointment for his cat something that should take all of 5 minutes over the phone, checking a calendar and penciling it it, but no gotta do it through a web portal then an app, and make sure you put in your credit card number!
ofc my dad got more and more angry as even I was messing around with this crap going over fields over and over because I put in the wrong number, ugh. Bring back simple shit please.
I recently had to call a help line because my parents washing machine had an app instead of manual. The app was discontinued.
It sucks. It’s all bullshit to steal attention. It could all be websites. The whole latest iteration of the internet was to make it possible to do stuff that used to require dedicated programs using websites. I loath it.
If everything becomes an app you can eliminate the web browser entirely, and thus the “public” internet itself, completely and totally.
A digital enclosure and elimination of the commons.
But capitalists would never! That doesn’t sound like the behavior of the rational market
It’s been running through my mind ever since we had a bunch of threads here discussing the fact capitalists might crack down on social media as being too far out of their control.
The whole concept led me to wondering how I would go about it, what would be the most efficient and least visible? What would feel like a natural transition? And this is what I came up with, it’s what I would be discussing in their little private golf games about how to solve their little “problem” with the internet being such an untameable beast.
Even if they do it slightly differently, the concept of enclosure-but-digital works all the same.
You aren’t permitted to not own an android or apple smartphone with an active number and internet access. You aren’t visible as an individual to corporations or even many governments without one. I don’t see this getting better any time soon either.
The Pinephone probably does everything you actually want a smartphone to do (modulo crappy hardware), but not the things you are required to have a smartphone to do. Like depositing a check at your bank, or your work’s 2FA that uses Duo Mobile rather than something standard like TOTP.
At this point, your best option is probably GrapheneOS, followed by LineageOS for MicroG plus all the hacks needed to get it to pass SafetyNet. The writing is on the wall for the latter at least, and the best option going forward will probably be a sacrificial phone you keep turned off 90% of the time and only use for those things.
from my experience tinkering with it years ago the OG pinephone has awful performance due to its very old SoC. No matter what distro or GUI i used it was unbearably stuttery and slow even just swiping through the home screens.
the pinephone pro theoretically should be a lot more modern and performant (its also more expensive), but i dont have one yet so i cant say too much on it
I daily drove the PinePhone for around 3 years, and only just a few days ago switched to de-googled android. It was really cool, and I had fun with it, but it wasn’t exactly the most pleasant experience if you wanted to actually do anything besides texting or phone calls.
Which phone are you using rn? I was looking at a couple different options since my crappy Samsung is on its way out
Nobody’s pointed out the fact that this is also literally offloading clerical work to the customer.
Everything is such a giant pain in the ass now.
99% of companies want you to download their app just so they can push notifications to your phone on an OS level even when the app is closed or the phone is on sleep, unused. You can’t do any of that with a website that’s closed out
The other 1% are Google Maps, Uber, Snapchat, etc. where you actually need an app to handle all these features
I tell all my doctors/therapists/bank tellers how much I hate apps every time they try to get me to download something that could easily just be a website
