this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024

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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

inspired by this post. the app was €300.

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[–] [email protected] 253 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Hi what do you do for work?

Well, I work for a healthcare company that creates electric wheelchairs and apps to use them.

Wow that is amazing, that sounds so rewarding! What specifically do you do?

Thanks! I designed the pricing structure so that each aspect of the wheelchair experience is gated behind carefully designed paywalls that are significant enough to help ~~me~~ my boss get a good bonus at the end of the year but not significant enough that all those poor people out there can’t afford it if they have too. Ideally the cost is always a bit more than people can afford to pay since usually people have more you can squeeze out of their social connections if the need is desperate enough (we are optimizing right now for pricing structures that most encourage customers to make gofundme’s to engage with our products which is cool to be part of a new project).

………….

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 months ago (3 children)

This is America 🇺🇸

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 months ago (2 children)

*Netherlands

[–] [email protected] 73 points 6 months ago

*capitalism

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

damn dutch - nigel powers

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Don't catch you slippin' now

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

Yeah, if you fall and break a hip and need a wheelchair this guy is gonna gouge you for it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

You aren't properly using metric but somehow euros you do adopt. Smdh

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Honestly the only response to something this callous is "Wow, hey do you wanna check out this really cool blender?" and then shove your Defense Blender into their face.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

God this sent me haha.

Fuck the 1%

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I genuinely don't understand how people that work for companies like that can sleep at night. Like no matter how much evidence I see that the vast majority of people don't put any effort or conscious thought into being a "good" person and only think about themselves and maybe their close family, I just can't accept it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

A spouse, housing, and 2.5 kids is quite a lot of motivation for people to work in the coal mines knowing they'll be at high risk of lung cancer.

Now switch the damage to groups unseen instead of yourself. Yep... People just trying to survive.

It fucking sucks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I guess it’s up to us to make it a bit harder for them to sleep at night.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

All the stuff like that is done by folks on the Bastard Committee. While the programming and stuff is done in pieces small enough to not get recognized, and then later assembled by the Bastard Programmer.

[–] [email protected] 226 points 6 months ago (1 children)

My wife and I went all out for our first born and as a baby monitor we got a MIKU. It is able to track the baby's breathing without any accessories and one of the key reasons I chose MIKU was that even though it was expensive it did not have a subscription model. BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE SUBSCRIPTIONS. Fast forward to Summer of 2023 and MIKU went bankrupt. The company that bought them tried to salvage it by including a $10/month subscription for everything except for the main camera function (which they cannot legally remove). And the way they tried to enforce it is by pushing an app update that blocks said features. I just went on APK Mirror and downloaded the previous version and turned off auto updates. And everything works perfectly. Thank you android and thank you APK Mirror.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I wish android natively has a roll back option to un-update apps... But that would be too user-friendly, I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago (1 children)

No, that would use up too much storage lol. Also, 99% of people don't update their apps manually, instead, they just let the Google Playstore handle it whenever it feels like it

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

Feels good to finally be part of the 1%

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Android doesn't allow you to install an older version of an app over a new version. F-Droid has the UI for it but it doesn't work, the security policy prevents the install.

There's probably a good reasons for that, but I can't think of it other than the flawed reasoning of "it can't be a good idea to roll back an update". I'm sure even Google can imagine a situation where, say, an app update got infected with malware or something like that and it's in everyone's best interest to roll back to the previous version until a clean update arrives. Preventing rollback means the only way to do that is for the user to manually uninstall the app and reinstall the desired version.

Okay, I can think of a possible reason for that policy: it prevents malware from downgrading a target app to a former (official, signed) version which can be exploited. I don't know how realistic this scenario is, though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You don't need to implement support for rollbacks to handle those "emergency" rollbacks. You could just push a "new" version that's actually the last known good version, and the phone would happily install it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

You can only do this if you have the signing keys. If the store wants to do this for users (say, if the developer is incapacitated somehow) they can't.

Edit: I'm actually not 100% sure if the signing keys are required for changing just the version number, but I assume so

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

That sounds about right for Google play. That said, the point still stands. If Google wanted to implement such a feature, it could probably be done by onky patching things on their store backend. I'm sure it wouldn't be a trivial change, but still it wouldn't need to touch the OS itself. Probably. As far as the phone is concerned, it would still be disallowing rollbacks as usual.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Apps (almost) always take upgrades into consideration when it comes to migrating data. However they (almost) never take downgrades into consideration.

This is part standard across all software. Migrating forward can already be difficult, but backwards can be impossible, especially if data was lost in the move forward.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

300 euros, not dollars. This also means the America jokes aren't quite right in this case. 300 euros is about $326

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago

oops my bad! thank you

[–] [email protected] 57 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I once interviewed at a (very) big usenet provider. The job was perl, I knew perl, must be fun.

No.

The job was to implement the byzantine B.S. "discounts" and plan-pricing "deals" that the sales team came up with to most effectively screw the customer.

I declined.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Which is especially hilarious, because Usenet is such a niche thing that the only people using it pretty much already know what they want from the service and know how much it should cost.

“Hey, we’ve made this super niche, not at all necessary, and easily avoidable service. Let’s do everything we can to be hostile towards our customers!”

[–] [email protected] 49 points 6 months ago

We are disgusting.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

CAPITALISM BABY!

Edit: European capitalism bad too but I can't find a funny GIF of the EU flag so this one is staying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago

Yet the price is in euros...

Point being, the US is fucked but we don't have the monopoly on it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I swear none of the American technobros went "paywalling a wheelchair with Bluetooth bullshit and doing screwy insurance shenanigans? damn, that's a little bit too fucked up, even for us". Instead, they went "that's ingenious, why didn't we think of it first?"

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You wouldn't run a script to ensure the proper functioning of your lungs.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

cyberpunk af

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

You wouldn't download an APK just to get free coins in hill climb racing

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Umh....when you install it from Play Store it's still downloads an apk, you probably meant pirating

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago

thank u for reddit splaining my own post to me 🙏 whatever would i do without you

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Uhm, aaactually

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Balls