I have recently started a new position and am required to use an app that has three Facebook trackers, one of them being a Facebook location tracker according to Exodus App Privacy in order to get your food when it would literally work perfectly fine ordering to a real cashier or shit even a website rather than having to download an app.
I have also read many stories of people that live in apartments that require them to use a mobile app for god damn LAUNDRY. All you need, is a card reader, and it will work perfectly fine like it has been for the longest time.
Privacy concerns aside, it is just annoying that you need this app and that app and this app and that app and it just clutters space on your phone. Security concerns too as now they have all of this additional info on you online, such as your phone number your email your real name, instead of just your credit card info like a card reader would have. And I am willing to guarantee that their security model is absolute horseshit because they have such a small team of engineers working on the app and the servers.
Literal enshitification
Magne
Just put my oldest child in school this year and I had to download FOUR apps. Four fucking apps. Why? This could have been a Progressive Web App and a push notification service. There is no need for this.
Have you considered refunding the child?
I think a lot of the time for universities it’s cause they’re not building their own custom tools for this stuff, just using off the shelf solutions that they can implement locally. So they just grab one app or system for each different thing they need instead of building one connected one.
PWAs still lock you into the Chrome ecosystem since Firefox doesn’t support them (without plugins and pain).
Firefox for Android does support them fully, it’s just desktop Firefox that doesn’t have pwa support.
Safari supports them.
AFAIK Safari Desktop for MacOS does not.
You often can use web apps (of sorts). Most of those apps mirror the functionality of an already existing mobile web page. Then you just make a little web app container of that mobile site.
Progressive web apps don’t work for shit on ios. Why bother developing it for Android users only when you’ll need an alternative regardless?