Yes! So many things that where previously websites require apps nowadays. Makes it hard to function in society for me as I (with very few exeptions) refuse to install closed source software on my computer or phone.
My wifi router needs a app to change any settings on it, its so stupid too, if you try the normal method of changing settings via a web browser it just gives you a flat out “no download our app” and the app is functionally worse with less features than what the old wifi router settings page used to give, its so unnecessary and annoying how everything that used to work fine with a website is needlessly packaged into a (often inferior) app.
That’s hillariously bad… my condolences.
I would recommend getting a router that you can flash wrt or advanced tomato on. If you want to go hardcore, you can get a server with pfsense.
Are these shower thoughts or are they just thoughts?
Yeah. Restaurant I was in about a month ago. You need a phone to order, to pay, and to see the menu.
You can almost imagine the conversation
Boss: so we will move everything to app based
Underling: but what about people without cellphones?
Boss: people without cellphones have no money.
Relevant meme…
It’s a media art piece by Mark Vomit.
It how swift it has been. Friend and I went to a “mall” we hadn’t been to since we were kids. He pointed out "holy crap, this is where it used to be rows and rows of payphones. Even in 2010 I didn’t have a mobile, and only got one as all the payphones vanished.
Now so many things require an app or online sign-up.
I get legitimately excited when I see payphones now… It’s like coming across a spectacular animal from a distance in the wild.
Now so many things require an app or online sign-up.
US? Not here. And online signups (if no online service) provide an alternative way.
Sadly here a huge amount of government is entirely online. Even 4 years ago when I wanted to do my passsport, because of my age bracket, I was not allowed to use a paper or internet method. I HAD to use a web app, and then with the app someone had to take a photo of me for the picture. No “send a photo in” no email the photo.
It couldn’t be your normal passport photo eaither, full waist up photo, with full white background and neutral lighting… It was completely impossible.
It couldn’t be your normal passport photo eaither, full waist up photo, with full white background and neutral lighting… It was completely impossible.
Workaround for their stone-age face recognition software.
One of my favorite sights when I visited Yosemite National Park was the payphone and huge, empty newspaper vending rack that were still present outside one of the lodges. Like walking back in time. People probably thought I was weird as I giggled to myself while taking photos. It’s ok, I am!
And even if you have a smartphone, you are strongly encouraged to get WhatsApp and donate all of your data to Meta that way. Not too long ago someone told me about having sent me messages through a channel don’t even use. I wonder if WhatsApp still shows me as online even though I haven’t used the app in more than 10 years.
I hate that very much. I don’t use any of Meta’s apps, except for WhatsApp. Why ? Because everyone here in Italy uses it and without it I can’t contact basically anyone. Want to contact a medic ? WhatsApp. Want to send a document to a clinic ? WhatsApp. Want to make a group chat with some study collegues ? WhatsApp, because not everyone wants to download Telegram or anything else. No one uses SMS or iMessages. Only WhatsApp…
Tbf where I live it’s messenger and that’s way worse than WhatsApp.
I’ve been telling people around me to install Signal. If you want to send me messages, install Signal. I’m not installing WhatsApp, any time soon.
Doctor: Please send the exam results.
Lemming: Install Signal.
Doctor: What?I find it highly unprofessional when people use WhatsApp in a work related contexts. When it comes to healthcare matters, I find it completely unacceptable due to privacy and security concerns. Might as well ask me to print my private health related data on a post card and send that to the doctor.
Same in Portugal, it’s maddening
To the best of your ability, can you tell why WhatsApp is so prevalent? How is it any different than texting or calling someone normally?
Same is true for most of South America. In Brazil, iphones are very expensive luxuries, so the majority of the population had to deal with android phones. Which google, in their infinite wisdom, never made a decent messaging app that lasted more than 1 year.
Whatsapp had this great feature that it let you find contacts by phone number, plus you got to talk infinitely as long as you had internet, so the transition was very easy for people moving from feature phones.
In a very short time, the app reached critical mass. If you insisted on not using whatsapp, people would just ignore you, the hassle of having to use another app or, god forbid, sms you (sms used to be charged per message sent) was just not worth it.
In a lot of countries, especially in Europe, most texting happens over WhatsApp.
Cell providers took a long time providing free SMS/MMS, especially internationally, and lots of people in Europe have international contacts. So apps like WhatsApp became the go-to, since you could just use your data plan to message.
You should talk to your close contacts about switching to Signal
Want to contact a medic ? WhatsApp. Want to send a document to a clinic ? WhatsApp.
Pretty sure this goes against multiple EU laws.
Italian here! You just described our country!
Welcome to 2010.
I dont own a cellphone and get by through borrowing family member’s phones or asking strangers if I can make a call if I’m out on my own, it usually works out fairly well.
However whenever I run into online services that require a phone to make an account or whatever I usually get screwed- so I usually just use a family member’s phone # if I know they’ll never use the site or whatever or utilize a 10 minute/fake phone # creation site if I dont care about the site or service I’m signing up for.
To be fair you are the burden on your family here. This isn’t living without - it’s sticking everyone else with your problem.
Eh, I assure you the burden of buying a brand new 500~1000$ phone and then paying a monthly bill to provide it with service would be a far far greater burden then allowing me to use their phone to make important calls once a week if not less, and letting me use it to sign up to a site/video game maybe a couple times a year.
If you still have good computer access, you could make a Google phone number. Pretty much what it sounds like, gives you a free phone number, you can check messages / calls all on desktop
Sounds useful, albeit probably spyware ridden but what isnt these days eh?
I might look into using that for at least google’s services.
Absolutely, it’s definitely a bigger burden for you to shell out $1000 for a top of the line phone, and then pay hundreds of dollars a month for service…dude, An android phone from Dollar General is $30 and pay as you go. You’re just putting the burden off to others because you don’t want to be inconvenienced.
Well, to be honest I had no idea that cheap phones like that existed.
Besides costs though the main reason I dont decide to get a phone is just due to all the data collection they do, plus nearly every service and government/housing/job related thing connected to me uses the family phone #, switching them over would take hours if not days of calling, settings editing or paperwork to do.
I already pay for my family’s house, food and utilities so I don’t really see why its an issue to borrow the family’s # every now and then.
That’s how I read it too. It’s not “look how well I’m doing without a smart phone”, it’s more like “I don’t want a phone, but have no issues placing the burden of my actions on others”
It’s not him that gets consequences of a leaked number.
The one thing that really makes me sad about common cellphone usage is the lack of face-to-face connection. It’s a trip because I went through middle and high-school without smart phones, everyone did. I miss those regular, everyday connections with people.
Those that haven’t gown up a significant amount of time without smartphones don’t think the difference is that severe, or that the connections we’ve replaced them with are the same or superior, but it just… isn’t.
Is it really the phones or is it just that connecting to people after high school gets harder?
Well, connecting gets harder in the sense that we’re no longer all forced together into the same space, but phones have added a severe second layer to that. It disconnects us from those physically around us in order to digitally connect us with people not physically present.
Prior to phones, eye contact was pretty frequent. More small talk between strangers happened. People were far more aware of those around them. That’s just not the case now.
Again, smartphones have brought a lot of good to our lives, but the physical connection to people around us has been paralyzed. It really is sad, and I’m sad that it’s not something I’ll ever experience again: a space that physically connected. I’m sad that younger generations will never experience it their whole lives.
This is it. They don’t warn you in high school, but after school your friends will be in colleges or jobs miles away. This is just the way it is and if anything, cellphones would theoretically allow people to stay connected.
Smartphones turned everyone into chronic flakes though too. You can always bail at the last minute on flimsy plans you made when you were drunk because “you’re not feeling it”.
Both. It makes it easier to keep in touch technically, but whether or not they are responsive is a whole other story.
True, school is nice in that it forces you to hang out with your peers, and that isn’t really emulated later in life. But I don’t think that’s the point.
The point is that it’s just tougher to have non distracted conversations. Or even non distracted periods of time hanging out.
It just feels awkward when someone is sitting there texting with someone else in front of you. Or just looking something up on their phone “really quick”, and then is MIA from the conversation for five minutes.
I’ll tell ya, it’s getting a lot harder to drive around my horse and buggy with all these darned automobiles on the road. These iron chariots are making the simple pleasures a real humdinger.
fire-breathing dragons, they are!
Horses and iron chariots are evil capitalist ploy. Embrace walking bare foot.
Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I’m only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn’t have a smartphone? What if I didn’t want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren’t allowed to go to this gig without one, and it’s a small thing, but I don’t like how the option is out of your hands.
Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.
The most ridiculous part are services insisting you install an app when everything their app does could be in a progressive web app. PWAs are less work to develop as they can run on any device with a browser. For fast food and clothing brands especially, I think PWAs are a no brainer. (Unless you want to track your customers coughTimHortonscough)
Decathlon you need a smartphone for their loyalty card. Only upside is you don’t have to get receipts for their 1 year return policy.
In my country (Czech Republic) you can tell them your email address that is tied to your account
It’s your last point there. They want you to install an app because said apps can collect a lot more data points on a
foolconsumer than a web app.
It is pretty ridiculous. They started doing the same thing with app ticket at Red Rocks in Colorado. So I have an ancient android phone I use for that shit now, doesn’t even have a sim card in it. Has the ticket app and I may put a grocery store app on it at some point, but otherwise it’s factory fresh. They can keep their grubby apps off my real phone.
My family got a new KitchenAid stove and I wanted to set a stop time for the oven while we went for a walk. I am able to do this on my shitty oven at our apartment.
I had to connect the stove to wifi, download an app, make an account, and link the stove. All to set a timer. Even then of course there was an error linking them.
Usually I wouldn’t have done that but I was really looking forward to the walk. I was one of the first adopters of Hue lights and used to be excited for smart home stuff. But this is so stupid.
Wondering if it’s some sort of data collection thing and also there’s no way a kitchen appliance company focuses on security and making their wifi connected devices secure.
So dumb.
I never buy any appliances with WiFi or any IoT shit, I draw a hard line there. That shit is cancer.
It’s getting harder not to buy ones tbh
I’m willing to buy smart appliances, but only if they are LAN only and connect to HomeAssistant. No data collection, no privacy policy, no outside access
There’s always a way to get tickets without using an app.
It just takes LOTS OF MONEYYYYY
I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.
Yup. Ive spend a lot of time with backups and screenshots of my apps/home screen in case I need to replace it, and I still get weird when I think about it. Years of settings and customization built up, no way I’d be able to get it back 100%.
Why don’t you just back things up through iCloud or Google Drive?
I do, but it doesn’t back up everything. Android just doesn’t have the backup that apple has unfortunately.
Aw, dang. That’s annoying
I run a contracting business and have had straight panic attacks over not being able to find my phone as I’m rushing out the door for the day. I really need to set up an asterisk server and keep my sim cards there but I just don’t have time, nor am I paying a service a ridiculous monthly fee to run it.
I know Apple is restrictive, like that other guy who commented who likes to apply customizations, but I love that apple products talk to each other seamlessly. I could have gone on through my tablet, except that I don’t pay for it to have its own wireless signal.
That’s actually how I found my phone. My neighbor let me tag on to her WiFi and I used the Find My Phone feature with my iPad. Saved me from a meltdown lol
Uhm can you explain a little more about the asterisk server and the sims cards. I thought asterisk wasn’t for mobile phones.
I’m trying to remember myself, but I remember reading about a way to feed a sim interface into a digital telephony card for use with asterisk. It was basically like a modem the fed a voip/sip line into the system. This was years ago that I read this and I could be completely misremembering it.
I’ve heard the single most important purchase incredibly low income people can make is a phone, because without it they can’t apply to new jobs or network with people because all applications are done online these days
I’ve seen homeless people with smart phones. There’s definitely affordable ones out there
You can buy a Xiaomi phone that will last you for 4 years for less than $99, and there’s some “functional” phones for much less than that but they will be unusably slow for casual use and more like emergency devices. Then there’s the 2nd hand market…
Fortunately smart phone access is not that difficult
Then you have to work out a data plan. At least in the US, free wifi is t as ubiquitous as it is in Europe (at least in my experience).
Do you not have purchase-once prepaid cards? Internet access is expensive on them but they could work for emergencies when there’s no free wifi
Maybe not ubiquitous, but it’s in a lot of places like fast food restaurants and libraries where they are okay letting people spend long amounts of time loitering on their device.
I have been slowly setting myself up with as many alternatives as possible. We have a Garmin in the car so we don’t use Gmaps, I’ve ditched all corps like Google or Facebook even run my own search engine. Honestly as daunting as it is once your not tied to a phone life is so much better. Don’t fall into the trap
Interesting - I’ve been thinking about trying to decentralize lately, and been having fun collecting my data from sites to analyze my own behaviours in data and build unique recommendation engines for myself and was recently thinking about trying to build a crawler and DIY search engine for myself. Any tips/pitfalls on getting started with that?
Just replied above you. Thought I could dm anyone on Lemmy but not outside our instances it seems…
I’m getting DMs and am on my own instance…
Ah thanks, might be the app.
Kudos to you. I’ve tried to degoogle myself (I’d say I was moderately successful until my last company came along), although it’s been a pretty irritating ride. Now I’m still very sensitive when it comes to security and privacy but not to the extent I was before.
I misplaced my phone a few days ago and didn’t think of looking for it until just yesterday. The only reason I did was for OTP for my banking apps (browser and Paypal still asked me for them). If not for those, I think I can pretty much go without a smartphone, tbh. My PC and laptop, though? Can’t.
Running your own search engine sounds very interesting. How steep would the learning curve be? And is it feasible for only personal use?
Ye it’s the freaking bank and company login authenticator else I would have rooted and do whatever I want with MY phone
in case you didn’t know: it’s relatively easy to write, in just a few lines, a little program to produce the OTP codes on a computer instead of a phone app.
Searxng is my go to. Consider using a public instance or hosting off-site to increase anonymity.
This is how I go to. Hosted on a Linode that isn’t in my actual name. Not that that helps toonmuch
Most of the public instances I tried stopped working often enough to be annoying. Like if you set one as your browser default and then google blocks it, it’s just frustrating.
I’ve gotten into the habit of just searching directly on specific sites rather than just searching the whole internet - really when you search for things the vast majority of the time you know what site is going to have what you’re looking for.
For everything else I’ve been using bing. The results are fine and chatgpt really is dope. I know they’re just as bad for privacy as google but at least it’s not google having all my data.
Same goes with reading skills, which at some point weren’t needed in society I bet.
Except that skills aren’t at risk of being stolen, lost or stop working. Phones are tools, not skills.
Interesting perspective but then I think of the data on this phone as an extension of my privacy/private life; literacy doesn’t track.
Yeah, phones such, literacy doesn’t. But phones could have better software and hardware, then it would be fine.
I guess privacy is getting more and more popular nowadays. Hopefully private smartphones will become easier to get
