Source: @MrLovenstein@mastodon.social
I’m so sick and tired of every single website and service trying to push an app on me. No, I don’t want to download your stupid shitty app, I’ve got dozens and I don’t want another one that I don’t use that interrupts me to push stupid notifications. Now get off my lawn!
Hell yeah. I was furious when I learned that you “nEed To InsTalL tHe McDoNaLds ApP FoR tHe CoDe!” for their monopoly-game. Wtf?! Just give me my fucking mcsundae-coupon right now, goddamn.
What country are you in? Here in Canada you didn’t need an app for McNopoly
Germany. I’m envious!
Same. I have to use bill.com for a contract, I swear they made their website as mobile un-friendly as possible because they push their app so hard. Like, I use you to submit one invoice a month I don’t need an app to do that, fuck off.
They can’t track your every interest to sell to other assholes if you don’t use their software though.
Now, don’t you feel sorry for the poor companies who can’t make money off of you when you’re on sites completely unrelated to theirs?
It just breaks my heart.
I agree. At the same time I love webapps the provide alternate interfaces like wefwef/Voyager and Phanpy.
Android tried to fix this issue, no clue if anyone uses it through
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7683278?hl=en#zippy=
…what issue? It isn’t technical. I just don’t want another stupid shitty app.
The issue of companies wanting to force apps while you don’t want another app. Instant apps are a halfway point between a webpage and having to download an app, the app’s never actually installed on your phone. It’s not much different than a site with heavy CSS.
Screw a midpoint. Those sites push their apps by sabotaging their websites because they have financial incentives to fuck with people and they can scrape more data with an app. No middle ground, no compromise.
- sets browser to request the desktop site instead *
website immediately forgets this setting
Welcome new visitor! Have you subscribed to our newsletter yet?
You have run out of free articles
shudders
laughs in Firefox Mobile
Thank the gods for Firefox.
Threads is view-only without the app, so no using it on PC. Probably because they wouldn’t be able to get as much data. I would never use it anyway but it’s so stupid.
You can at least view threads without logging in? That’s better than instagram usually forces login. Still won’t use it.
And instagram is still a lot better than Twitter which just redirects you to nothing at all. Now I just wish news sites would stop linking to twitter because I can’t look at any of the garbage that’s been posted.
instagram usually doesn’t for just viewing profiles or posts but anything past that it’ll prompt you and there’s a big ass banner at the bottom asking you to sign in
After viewing a few posts it almost always blocks and asks me to login. For years. I just don’t go on Instagram anymore as a result. Twitter and reddit, take notice
Wow. Did not know that. That’s crazy. Let’s cripple something running on a more powerful processor and with a bigger screen and full keyboard? That’s just backwards and terrible.
Not backwards for them maybe. They will frame it as being a mobile-optimized experience that captures your (whatever), but of course it is monitoring your gyro right now to determine whether you’re sitting upright, lying in your bed, or … something else.
Safe bet if you are on threads, Lemmy, or Reddit, you’re probably pooping.
It’s fundamentally backwards. I miss times when tech people ran technology.
I meant threads in this case.
And yes I am literally pooping. Goddamn diarrhea.
We’ve got movement on this one, stay alert people!
I feel like an idiot for not knowing this, but website do you go to to read Threads?
I tried going to “threads.net” but it’s just a link to download the app?
You can view threads profiles by typing threads.net/@username, for example threads.net/@meta
Wow that meta profile is cringe. When did platforms start having personalities?
I will never use Pinterest because of this shit. I just want to see the pic I found on Google, I will not download your bullshit to see it.
Same with tiktok. they used to let you watch videos without the app, now they won’t let you unmute the video. one of my frineds keeps trying to send me tiktoks and i’m like, this is worthless.
No, it works. You just slide a puzzle piece over, then it reloads. Then it plays muted, you have to unmute it and then it’s half-way through so you have to restart the video. There see, easy! And by the time you get to watch it in a tiny ass screen you have already seen it muted about 3-5 times give or take.
I don’t have an account and I watched videos with sound today on both mobile and desktop and honestly that shit is better without sound.
I’m pretty happy to say I’ve only ever water one TikTok video and it was because it was the only place I could find that methed out crazy town fella sing butterfly
This is extremely true for modern social media sites. Normal news sites used to push their apps too, but I guess this fad has passed.
Social media? Bitch, this is the average restaurant experience now! OH We HaVe OuR meNu On OuR aPp
Yeah and you have no goddamn signal here GIVE ME A FUCKEN MENU
Yeah. Fuck restaurants that expect me to scan a damned qr code for a fucking menu.
And even then, I’m fine to browse a menu on a mobile-friendly site (as long as the restaurant is diligent about providing reliable wifi for anyone who might not have great signal). But when the code has me download a PDF, they can fuck right off. First of all, I don’t need the menu sitting in my cache or download folder. And when the PDF was clearly formatted for physical printing… Good lord. I’m not pinching and zooming this shit.
I walk into a restaurant that has an app, I’ll never go back again. What a horrible way to try to find food.
I used to feel that way but recently I was in Europe and https://www.qerko.com/en was everywhere. It was pretty great honestly. Instant app so I didn’t need to install anything. My party could split the bill however we wanted ourselves. If you had GooglePay or ApplePay it was one tap to pay. Pay and go whenever you want without having to flag anyone down. It was optional if you wanted you could ask for a bill.
As much as I hate installing restaurant apps I can get behind this experience.
I don’t really mind them pushing the app. Just don’t make the mobile site shit or redirect to the app
This is the meme that made me create an account here. Barely using reddit now, but I noticed these last days they were pushing lukewarm content to the top. And a lot of content on phone web browsers was/is locked, could only read the first 2 or 3 answers.
Check out https://m.lemmy.world
Oh my. That website is even better. Why isn’t that website the default in mobile browsers? I’m new, and I’m reading that now I need to create a new account in world (I’m in ml). Right?
No, you don’t have to create a new account.
Wait, the app is not on Google play?
It’s a web app
Thank you sir. Definitely I’m going to try the app. :)
And the quality of discussion gets lower every time I go on. Has been for years, incrementally, but the rate really increased after June 30. I used to be able to get pretty far down through 4 or 5 worldnews threads before I ran into something so stupid I closed the entire window, but now it happens on just about every thread I open.
Oh, they’ve gone full Quora?
It was some posts, a lot, not all of them. Maybe it was a bug at one time when they started to implement their new API changes. I don’t know, and I don’t care at the moment. :)
Just curious… When did regular comics become memes?
Around the time meme came to mean any joke in an image file format
Gary Larson was my favorite memer. Ever seen The Far Side memes?
See? Doesn’t sound right at all.
Oh come on, who doesn’t remember reading the meme strips in the Sunday morning paper?
When I got older I started enjoying meme books like Spider-Man, too.
Paper? You mean hard copy website?
This is some Idiocracy shit, I feel like this’ll be the vernacular in the next 20-30 years. Hopefully an asteroid wipes us out first.
It doesn’t, and it’s annoying that pretty much any image displayed online is called a “meme” nowadays.
Always has been by both the official definition of the word and the more modern internet use of it
That’s not really true though.
Now that I think about it, maybe they always have been, sort of? The earliest memes I remember are the rage comics
Though, I feel like “meme” = funny relatable thing nowadays.
About the time Saruman abandoned reason for madness.
We must join the memes, Gandalf. It would be wise, my friend.
I’ve mainly used Reddit on PC and only used apps for porn (because in-app autoplay is so much better). Them disabling NSFW from API completely makes it completely useless for latter. Really hoping lemmy becomes the new big thing where you can scroll, comment, and jerk off. Possibly at the same time.
It’s so easy nowadays to slap some bootstrap and Angular together to build a web frontend. It will work on every device if you don’t do crazy cutting-edge shit. I cannot comprehend why companies dig native apps so much.
D A T A H A R V E S T I N G
^ this. your browser is a user agent, it’s working for you, to protect you from any schmuck who you have the misfortune of visiting. it has strict built-in privacy and security guarantees, which, while in no way interfere with the app’s primary functionality, do interfere in their marketing bullshit and other kinds of spying.
with apps, you have none of that protective layer, instead there is a certain degree of implied trust which these parties love to abuse.
Maybe for some companies. For others the main draw card is push notifications and a big shiny icon for the product on your phone. Also, just FOMO when every other company has an app.
that’s also doable on the modern web without an app. service workers go brrr
in fact, the same companies do this all the time on their desktop sites, because no one’s gonna install kfc.exe to order some chicken
Apps without a bunch of trackers are few and far inbetween
With a native app, the only thing you really need to send back and forth is some JSON data and let the app do the formatting for you. It’s a much better arrangement when your target demographic includes those with bad internet.
How is that any different from a web site? There are multiple caches between the browser and the server. The initial load (assuming a prior visit and no updates since) may be smaller than 1kB.
you can do that with a browser too. with service workers, it can also run without an internet connection and/or indefinitely cache the ui part so that it’s also just a json api. most websites already work in a very similar way, and even if it’s not intentionally set up this way, your browser will do its best to make it like this to keep your user experience snappy.
your browser just also protects you from certain level of system access that shouldn’t be granted to any random website you visit, and that’s what these apps want.
I actively avoid sites that do this, if I find that I’m on the site enough to Warrant getting the app I’ll get the app. I actually didn’t realize that Reddit enforced this until about 5 or 6 months ago because they didn’t enforce that when I first started using reddit, I had already moved over to third party applications before they implemented the system. Not that it matters much anymore, I uninstalled any apps I had for the platform and blocked it for the house. I’m done with it
I wish I could act so decisively on that, but I still need Reddit access for the wisdom of others on solving issues.
So instead I just make sure I only browse it with Firefox, using uBlock Origin to prevent them from getting ad revenue.
That’s where I’m at with reddit, and where I’ve been with Facebook for years. Though, interestingly, Slim Social for Facebook has gotten around this quite well for Facebook, for everything except for messages until very recently, where you have to ask for the desktop site. Maybe someone can come up with something similar for reddit…
Try to convince them to move here. Maybe eventually they will.
Wisdom is starting to gather here. But in the meantime, there’s still the crazy issue with some silly software where I have to Google search and find the only helpful answers are in various Reddit threads
Goddamnit Reddit.
App-less bitch has a nice ring to it, I might start using that lol
Yea, I got a good laugh from this
Reddit in a nutshell lmao
Sounds about right. Their site is bad, the app is bad… pure profit driven.
Yeah, it sucks because you can do really cool stuff with web apps these days but no, instead I need 140 native apps for basically every mobile service because their mobile websites are abhorrently designed and basically only exist to point you towards the app.
Oh, don’t worry. All those “native” apps are just using chrome webview to display some webapp.
Oh, I’m fully aware. That’s honestly the kicker, they could host those apps on the web and have me be able to access everything through my browser, but no, instead I have to install their stupid apps just so they can harvest my data.
