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Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Not sure anyone actually read the article, cuz yall are talkin about apps vs. web sites, and data collection. Two points which are briefly covered, but ultimately shrugged off in favor of the larger thesis:

Smartphones … meant [companies] could use their apps to off-load effort. … In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.

I’d like to think that this hellscape is a temporary one. As the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or utility, won’t people start resisting them? And if platform owners such as Apple ratchet up their privacy restrictions, won’t businesses adjust? Don’t count on it. Our app-ocalypse is much too far along already. Every crevice of contemporary life has been colonized. At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can't escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.

It’s not simply the code delivery mechanism, and it’s not whether the data exchange is safe from prying eyes… It’s the fact that a digital UX has invaded every aspect of human interaction, including mourning.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can't escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.

Except that's just straight up not true. You can't escape it? You can't escape installing the Michaels app to get a $5 discount coupon?

I'm absolutely flabbergasted by what I'm reading here because I have no idea what the hell any of these people are doing in their lives where they're collecting this many apps out of necessity. This is entirely selection bias. They seem to be incapable of resisting the pull of trashy, useless apps, and insist the whole world is.

Nothing is stopping you from walking into any of these businesses, getting your purchase, paying with a card, and leaving.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

I think you’re presenting a terribly myopic viewpoint. A lot of companies make the process of interacting with them so painful if you don’t use their app, that you feel hounded, harassed, and yeah, in some cases, forced to use their app. Do you really think your idea here hasn’t been considered by the author? Of course it has, because like most older people (in their 30s and 40s), that’s how it always used to be. The author is complaining that the way it is today, it can be difficult or borderline impossible to do the very thing you seem confused about.

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