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(honestly i think tim cook wrecked the company, he’s a pure bloodless businessman, thinking only about numbers and value extraction versus innovation and changing the world, which jobs, for all his faults, objectively did)
I miss the old days where a macbook came with a bunch of creative apps that kids in the 60s-90s dreamed of.
That innovative creative freedom train is long gone from that company
Care to name some of those apps? Genuinely curious, mac computers were (still are) prohibitively expensive and I never knew anyone who had one before the iPhone launched
This was a choice by Steve Jobs for how it is now. This was also the time they were trying to push HTML5 as the future as removing dependency on specialty software. If mostly everything was only needing a website, then it didn’t matter what OS you were using. This would help allow iOS and OSX (at the time) be fully compatible against Blackberry and Windows Vista. But then Android got popular and Windows 7 was a major improvement, Linux was growing as well (netbooks, before MS tried to push into that market). Suddenly their push of any device would be on equal footing was not in their favor, so Apple pushed HARD on “There’s an app for that” to start the hard lock in of iOS leading to where things are today.
Both capitalist pigs
As a side point, what the hell is wrong with Snapchat’s UI? It’s a mess of buttons arranged by a monkey on cocaine. How is this shit popular?
I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I’ve avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. “Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of “only voted one star because you can’t vote zero stars”.
“Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them.
It’s because they’re not designing for the users’ wants, they’re designing for the users’ engagement (or whatever flawed metric they use to determine that). The designers mindlessly equate what keeps the user engaged with what the user wants.
Kids
Controversial opinion. I love apps.
(Only because in my company, we created a app team to hire more developers and while our website absolutely doubles as a really fucking good web app, we hinder it in order to keep our app developer homies employed.)
im convinced 99% of app development is just for enhanced tracking and telemetry. Most are a browser in app anyway
I used to work for a very large cable company. All of our apps were championed by VPs who had strong personal connections to InfoSys, who got most of the contract work to create and maintain them. Almost nobody actually used the apps - the developers used various tricks to enormously inflate the apparent numbers of users. So essentially they were a mechanism for one large corporation to siphon millions of dollars from another large corporation. My life became a lot happier when I finally realized this and stopped giving a shit about anything.
I am really confused about this meme template, didn’t its usage used to be satirical (not sure if that’s the right word)? I remember seeing ones like “Nobody ever needed maths”, but recently I am seeing them inverted where the subject matter is actually criticised for being useless. Instead of claiming something useful to be useless. Can someone explain? when did the usage shift?
it’s pseudo post-satire is how i like to think about it. It’s satirical by nature, but it’s gone so far, that it’s not quite straight satire, some of the points made are genuinely accurate.
it’s a meme just don’t think too much
Ugh even my weed dealer wants me to install their app. When will it end?
There was a website for a while that could emulate PS1 games in a browser on your phone.
That told me that there is absolutely no reason to have everything be an app. Even games
If it ain’t on F-Droid, chances are I ain’t usin’ it.
I think there are a grand total of 4 non-free apps installed on my phone right now. 2 are for smart home crap I don’t want to live without right now, and 2 are Google services I haven’t pried myself away from yet.
Voyager app users
Can you explain this? I’m a very stupid person.
Voyager is a Lemmy client.
Voyager started off as a website(wefwef.app) but is now also an app
website
.app
🤔
They have played us for absolute fools!
Anybody who wants to offer me an open source app that doesn’t spy on me is totally fine, especially when the app kicks ass.
- sent from Voyager
So I bought a new mouse, of course it came with RGB nonsense. Before purchasing I checked it could be disabled.
Software to control RGB? 300MB. Who knows what the hell else that’ll be doing.
Plugged it into my Linux laptop, download OpenRGB, 1.7MB application that supports more than just this brand. Turn off the rgb, click save to device.
Same energy - whole different thing. I remember in 2005 having to install a special printer software. You can install the drivers, but to understand error messages, you needed “the suite”.
So furious at the ordeal, I hoped that the future, we don’t have to deal with this.
Apparently the future hates us and we are STILL dealing with this
Is here a joke here? All I see is truth.
Unironically this. There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from 2018. If you want people to use the stupid app over the site, then please have only the stupid app and ditch the “just pretending it works” site and for fuck’s sake, don’t make the stupid app a javascript mess, because THAT could’ve been a fucking site instead.
Dunkin Donut’s website just doesn’t work. The app is mandatory. Noped out of there real quick lol
Dunkin: “fahk yah! Just wahlk in and Ahsk for yah damn cafee and egg bahgle.”
There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from
20181998Reminder that the original Space Jam site is still intact
Nice, talk about nostalgia
I love how the Concentration game has a (144k download) warning. At average 32k dial up speeds, you’d have to wait roughly 2 minutes for it to fully download.
It has moved URLs, the site is still there but they just moved the files to a new URLs.
The secret is that tons of apps are just web browsers in a costume.
Buddy, these apps could have been done in php and ajax 15 years ago
And the web versions have and constant lightbox that asks you to download the app every fuckin breath you take. Instagram and Twitter being the worst of them all. For the second I don’t even touch it. For.instagram I got barnista. And that’s cause my wife uses Instagram sometimes .
I know. It grinds my gears how sites of 15+ years ago worked better and loaded faster than the shit we have today.
this unironically
My most boomer opinion
An app for a fucking cemetary!? Nuh-uh
I hear it’s dead now anyway.
Laurel Hill is a historical cemetery with a few historical figures buried there. Actually, I think Adrian Balboa’s fictional grave is there, too. The app has audio tours and information about the architecture and stuff.
But I don’t want a app to get audio tours.
I want a app to make their body spin 360 degrees. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
could still be a website.
Probably, but making it an app allows users to pre-download the whole thing beforehand so they don’t need to depend on cell data when they’re out in a field.
but I… it… it’s a PDF, its stored on my phone. I downloaded it. I actually still have it, if I need to prove I was on the train. its not in the app anymore, but I still have it here.
you know you can’t make a PURCHASE on an app without network access, right? like, it has to interact with your bank and generate the code (and that’s done on their server, so you can’t make yourself free tickets) and update “this ticket is valid” in the system. the app is literally just a web site with fewer features. all the important math happens on the server. usually, not even a timetable is stored locally, and it still has to be retrieved from the network, it doesn’t even cache, I bet. I could check, but I would have to find my phone.
I think you replied to the wrong person?
download the whole thing
all the functional parts are server calls, app or website. all of them. buying a ticket involves authenticating with both the owner’s server and my bank. that’s a network thing. can’t download my ticket til I do that, site or app. even looking at a timetable (i dont see where in the app I can do that? but point to point trips) on the app doesn’t work when im in airplane mode, but I know for a fact my browser caches, and if I’ve looked recently or left the page open, it will still be there when I come back.
there’s no advantage of an app, unless you’re doing fancy graphics shit, which eats battery like a mother fucker and makes low end devices much more unhappy.
You can just download the HTML files
Hahaha
That’s how you get a haunted phone
The reason this is done is because you can see everything your browser is doing, but you can’t see everything an application is doing without disassembling it.
I want very much to go back to websites. Apps are stupid.
the reason is children. for some reason the most recent generation of kids requires apps instead of sites. god forbid they have to remember an address.
just look at the fuckload of people who cant use lemmy without an ‘app’
this is one of my peeeves
I prefer using Lemmy with an app because apps are better designed for my screen than an website. It’s kind of rare finding an website that looks good on portrait.
If it’s a service I use regularly on my phone like Lemmy then an app usually does provide a better experience. The UI is usually better optimised and they tend to load faster. However if I’m only using it once, or if I’ve just visited your site then stop trying to get me to use the fucking app! That goes for Reddit as well, I have the app installed but if I’m just trying to view a post because I googled something I don’t want to be forced into the app
They just haven’t seen the light yet - I feel like most people from every generation are app’d up.
One of the reasons I like apps for Lemmy is for notifications.
Coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like apps is for notifications.
Your mobile browser supports notifications per site like an app. It even supports custom icons per site when the notification pops up.
You don’t even know if the telemetry leaving your phone to the app server is using TLS encryption, you just let them hail-mary football-throw send it.
I don’t understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.
I don’t understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.
Some people are extremely averse to the discomfort of the slightest speedbump in their computer/phone usage and are more than willing to give their “worthless” data in return.
My high school computer teacher once ranted about this to us. He said the younger students are lacking the basic concepts of computer stuff. They are spoiled too much to not even know what a file browser is.
He’s the computer teacher. Maybe he should teach them about computers
He did teach them. He was just comparing different generations of students.
That’s the parents fault too for not teaching the kids.
Eeh, I see it as a gray area. Majority of millenials, myself included, grew up learning about novel technologies as they developed. We learned how to use desktop computers and browse the internet during a ‘golden age’ of innovation. They became part of our everyday lives and are second nature to us. The next generations don’t fully have that experience but are expected to natively know their way around a computer since they’re so ubiquitous in our lives. In reality, they know how to use smart phones and chromebooks but aren’t getting the experience of working on a real desktop computer.
Regarding teaching kids the basics, I’d put it on the schools, not the parents. Do schools still have computer labs? That’d be where proper computer skills should be taught. If parents can help at home that’s great, but I don’t think it should be expected that every kid is going to have a real computer at home to learn on (versus phones, tablets, chromebooks, etc).
My university was still teaching windows 8 for their computer science classes as of last summer. I was working at Microsoft when that was released, so you can imagine how angry I was that I had to take that class lol
I mean, I think part of it is because they grew up interacting with apps because parents were, mostly rightly, restricting their children from use of the greater unrestricted web. Every modern parent I know had children who knew which apps on mommy or daddy’s phone they were allowed to touch - their games or youtube kids or whatever. These apps provided easy safeguards for parents to rein in their child’s internet experience. Even if these methods weren’t perfect in their attempt (Elsagate and all that), this was still good practice for allowing your child access to modernity in the times you couldn’t fully devote your time to overseeing their activity with relative confidence they were probably not watching wildly inappropriate content.
In a perfect world parents and educators would also be devoting time to teaching their child to navigate the internet and allowing them monitored (with physical eyeballs, not tracking) online browsing time, but I don’t think we can rightly fault the kids for not having received that. Rather than grumbling about the situation, I think we’d be better served accepting it for what it is and instead approaching the topic from a stance of: how do we teach them better behavior and help them unlearn these bad habits?
edit: typo
You don;t need to put “edit: typo” in your comment. /lh
I’m aware, but I do it to ensure readers that the content of my message hasn’t changed in the time since the edit, I’m just cleaning up the syntax. It’s a matter of attempting to provide a consistent face.
I’m not a child. But I already have an entire OS running on my phone. Why would I run a browser on top (with all of its UI clutter) so I can use an app.
If I’m going to use an app often, for more than a couple minutes each time, I’m gonna use an app. If I’m just visiting a site for the first time, or I’m just going to stay there a couple seconds (search engines), I’m using the web browser.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
hahahahhahhaahahha
im deep in the corporate, non-app web-based environment. this comment is so out of touch. i get that its your POV, but its not even close to the broader reality that most apps are just packaged websites and that browsers are nearly fully virtual machines and incredibly capable.
again, the apps exist generally because they want to capture more data than the browser allows (they are exploiting you). theres very little functionality that cant be run in the browser directly.
A large quantity of apps are thinly disguised browsers “stuck” on a specific web page and with extra tracking and data collecting capability. I’d wager all shopping apps are this.
One benefit an app for something like Lemmy offers significantly better customization.
thats a copout for the site sucking. lemmy looks like someone forgot the css. one of the reasons i chose mbin, its not fugly and very user-configurable.
no app required
one of the reasons i picked dbzer0 is that the layout just looks Better (ie doesnt look like someone forgot the css) :]
That, but also about marketing and having your personal data. A few years ago, I used to work for a large company that rhymes with Schmipotle. They wanted to know more about their customers so they could target them with advertisements. The problem is, their customers don’t say “hi I’m jballs and would like a burrito.”
So they created their app so they could target people with advertising and push notifications to drive business.
no they’re brilliant, for exactly the reason you said.
I would also like to go back to websites, which are much less evil.
Bro, my city just made an app it has a news button, a quick link to city code compliance and a quick form for reporting illegal fireworks. City is depreciating email newsletter and website for app and facebook. and I hate so many places advertising decent deals behind apps. I am not downloading an app for every fastfood chain and grocery store. Stopped going to del taco, mcd and Wendy’s over shitty apps.
TFW someone makes a desktop app but it’s literally just a bundled chrome browser page
Lychee, a slicer software for 3D printing, immediately comes to mind. It’s a fucking electron app. It also only works if you login to a fucking account, even the free version, because fuck you. Oh, and free users have to sit through 30 seconds of advertising whenever they click “Slice”, because fuck you again
But also, MFW somebody turns a perfectly usable desktop application into an internal website that ends up only working on one browser…
