One significant problem with making your hardware dependent on an app is that if you are a washing machine company, you probably don't make mobile apps. So, you hire a contractor. They design an app without any expertise in the product or the domain, and program it on the cheap. It is trash. Later, the contractor goes out of business and you give the code to another contractor. They notice that the code is garbage, and not even garbage that somebody there made. Feature work is impossible, the app languishes. 1.5 stars in the app store. Every time there's an iOS update, people can't do their laundry for a couple weeks, until the one programmer working half time on the app can push an update. Later, you (the washing machine company) decide to sunset that product line, which means there's no updates to the app. iOS changes, the app stops working altogether, everybody has to buy a new washing machine.
I've been that contractor, which is why I will never be the owner of an appliance that requires an app to function.
Just a few months ago, I was still able to get Lyft rides using a desktop browser; but, despite the web page still being very functional -- letting me select the endpoints, see nearby cars, and get pricing-timing information for the various options -- when I tried to do that this morning they made the button to do the actual booking process say something like "book using the app" and presented a dialog when I clicked it telling me they no longer supported booking from the website and I would have to use the app on a phone. I am pretty sure the web site even correctly tracked my ride after I booked... this one just feels particularly egregious to me as it clearly is almost fully still functional but they decided to explicitly not allow this use case anymore?
On a trip to California last year, my wife and I rented a house in which the washing machine required a mobile app to start. I don't have a cell phone. Fortunately my wife has an iPhone, so we were able to install the app on her phone, connect it to my credit card, and charge it with the minimum mount (about $15, as I recall). I'll never use that specific app again, so we deleted it, meaning the app company got to keep most of the money.
Later we tried renting some e-scooters, which required the use of the Lyft App. My wife has the Lyft app, which let her pay for one scooter but then wouldn't let her unlock a second one for her non-cellphone-owning husband (I guess if you're a parent who wants to use e-scooters with your child, you're out of luck).
I sense that in the not-too-distant future, those of us who don't own a device running either Apple's or Google's proprietary OS will be pretty much excluded from many of the basic conveniences of everyday life.
This reminds me of my experience of getting the battery replaced for my iPhone.
The authorized repair technician at Best Buy made me turn off “find my iPhone” before servicing the device. Turns out, somehow, I had two Apple accounts, one with a user name that is tied to my email address, and the other one where my user name is my email address. To my surprise Apple considers these to be distinct accounts. While I remember the password for my user name, and I assumed it was the same for the account that used my email address as the user name, turns out it was not and I could not turn off find my iPhone.
Attempts to use my phone to reset my password lead to the settings app freezing up and giving me a gave a generic “could not connect to network” error message. Switching from cellular to WiFi did not help the situation. The technician was about to say that they would not be able to replace the battery for the day. Fortunately I had brought my laptop with me that day for unrelated reasons and after returning to the store with it I was able to reset my password with the web interface.
Modern technology has introduced a large number of seldom used use cases that are not well handled, but are essential when needed. Had I not had all the devices with me in my digital arsenal, I would not have been able to get my battery replaced. I have to wonder how many people face this issue and end up buying a new device to avoid the hassle.
This doesn’t sound right. You should be able to reset the password or at least start the process using the Apple support app or the website on the iPhone itself…setting is not the only way.
Thirty years ago I would have given anything for a pocket device that could tell me whether any washing machines on campus were empty and ready to use.
Because it sucked to lug my basket of socks and sweaty t-shirts over to laundry block only to find out there was a big queue and my options were either to lug the basket back to my room and try again a random interval later, or leave my backet lying around in the laundry block, at the mercy of who knows what and come back a random interval later.
Probably they should have reached out to smart people from somewhere available who could come up with some sort of booking systems like all shared loundry services of residential houses do in Sweden since perhaps the 70's and before.
You do not need pocket device for such. Do you really say that in the university - supposedly filled with loads of smart people - no-one was able to come up with a solution for this trivial problem before Steve Jobs introduced the smartphone? Wow!
Would you still have, if you knew the strings that would come attached? Tracking your every move? Enabling governments to surreptitiously snoop on your audio and camera? Constant exposure to experiences designed to addict and immiserate you?
Our apartment uses one of these "services" for laundry. It requires you to be online to start the washer and my phone can't connect to my wifi from the laundry room. FAIL.
There’s a lot of underground restaurants and bars in Sydney, and many of them have started using QR code only ordering. Only problem is phone reception is really spotty in a lot of the basement venues, and not all of them have wifi.
When I moved in 8 years ago, our laundry service accepted coins or cards. There was a nice box on the wall where you swiped your card, and then you could activate up to four machines at a time, which was great, because I usually ran three loads at once. They also had a fantastic web-based machine monitor page, which was accessible by anyone from anywhere, with no auth required.
Then they "upgraded" and every machine got a little bluetoothy card reader dongle on it and a QR code, and they "upgraded" the box on the wall so that it stopped accepting cards. So that's fine, I guess, but it was a pain in the ass to start 3 machines at once, because now I needed to run my card 3 separate times, and hope that the readers were all working OK. There was also a mobile app, but the Android Lollipop tablet I had never worked with the app. You needed to activate both WiFi and BT (and it would force those on) but it still didn't work, despite my valiant efforts to contact their Support idiots. They also shut down the good monitoring page, and the only way to monitor machines was to pay for a load and use the app only. That sucked. A major use case for monitoring was to see who was using machines already, before I lugged everything downstairs!
So I got a new Android 10 phone and the app worked okay. I didn't really use the app. Then I noticed that the laundry room was really going downhill. Machines went out of order and weren't fixed. The same with pipes and such. Seeing the hand writing on the wall, I began to outsource to a wash'n'fold service, which has worked great.
Then a few months ago, landlady announced that we were switching laundry services, so that was all swept away and new machines were installed. There is a new app. The little box on the wall now sells reloadable cards, too. And you can pick those up at the leasing office. I sort of used the app just to test it. Obviously, there's no world-readable monitoring page on the web. Thankfully, I think the machines are still accepting quarters. But I'm still going with my outsourced hassle-free laundry.
Speaking of the evils of internet-reliant devices and bad engineering: those MIT washing machines actually went down for two weeks. MIT changed the authentication configuration of their wireless network, the software couldn't re-connect, and all hell broke loose. They had to turn on some emergency operating mode that allowed students to use them for free, without any app.
During lockdowns my country required phone, to get permit to leave house. If I followed rules, I would not be able to buy food, and would starve to death!
A similar thing happened in Korea, to enter establishment there was a requirement to scan the business QR code then collect name and phone number on a government portal before entering, however the vast majority of people travel in Korea are assigned a sim with no number attached, so a lot of forigners just couldn't go out. To be fair, you couldn't enter the country for tourism at the time, but you could for business- so meetings at restaurants became a real challenge.
I want a safari private browsing mode equivalent for apps on iPhone. I would turn this on by default for all apps. And I would use Apple ID generated per-app user-id and iCloud private relay and private email for every app by default. I'm hopeful that Apple will do it as they are a privacy focused company. Basically iPhone should behave like TorBrowser for every single app. I also want the location service to feed an address based location or a previously saved location to the app. And I want to deny any attempts to fingerprint via device ids and names like wifi access point names or bluetooth devices etc. Someone at apple, if you are reading this, please get it done. Thanks!
Not quite the same, but Android has a Guest User mode (similar to macOS). If you switch to the Guest account, it'll create a new user separate from the main one. Then when you log out, it deletes all the data.
* Apps that offer any form of social login must also offer Apple ID login
* Apple ID login can anonymise your email address per-provider
* Every app already gets a distinct device ID, and indeed every app install gets one. Reinstalls regenerate it.
* Wifi APs and Bluetooth scans require location privileges, which you can decline.
* Apps are required to continue functioning (minus functions that clearly require the permission) if you decline them.
I recently landed on beeline's website (GPS navigation devices for motorbikes and bicycles). For bicycles, the tagline was "Simplify your ride".
I strongly disagree. I feel like involving my smartphone into any activity that existed in 1990 (like jogging, or riding a bike) tends to make things more complicated, not less. When I go for a jog wanting to listen to podcasts, battery status, headphones, Bluetooth and playlist ordering are additional complexities that, at the very minimum, add additional steps to the process and, at worst, require several minutes of problem-solving before I can get started.
In my experience, involving a smartphone can, but rarely does, make things simpler.
You think this because the cases where smartphones are worse stand out more.
Finding businesses that match some profile in the area, finding out that business' hours and offerings, then getting directions there from wherever you currently are -- all MASSIVELY easier on a smartphone compared to doing the same in 1990/pre-web. Doing that stuff with yellow pages and a map was a huge pain in the ass that took forever.
Grabbing a playlist to listen to music on a jog is also way easier in the age of music subscriptions and smartphones, compared to going around with a walkman+tape, especially if you factor in getting variety in song choice.
Also, remember communicating with people at arbitrary times? If they're at home, that's fairly safe, though if you're not home you may need to find a payphone. But if they're away from home on errands, lol, good fucking luck getting a message to them.
In my experience, involving a smartphone can, but rarely does, make things simpler.
Beeline is an alternative to a paper map, and having seen many people try to navigate with a map I'm pretty sure everyone would agree than a smart phone is massively less complicated.
If you're going on a journey where you wouldn't need a map, just adding in some tech is obviously going to be more complicated than not adding tech.
It was a huge hassle to have enough quarters 20 yrs ago when I last used coin laundry. These days when many people don’t use cash at all it’s far harder to find them. During the peak of the pandemic restrictions in the US there was a massive shortage of quarters because of limited commerce. There are a lot of people where I live in the Boston area who depend on coin laundry who had a hard time getting any done.
Personally I would have welcomed anything that freed me from rounding up quarters. Though would prefer tap to pay on the machine over an app.
>- tenants have asked for it because they never seem to have the right amount of change
I have a couple old change buckets that probably still have a fair number of quarters buried in them, but I don't get given coins in the US more than a few times a year. If I didn't have old change at home, I'd have to go to a bank.
Somewhere in HN there's a post about disrupting or revolutionizing the laundromat industry, where some person is showered in praise (and later money) for setting up this lousy system.
This feels like it could have been much better achieved through contactless payment than a proprietary app. Moving from coins makes sense, moving off standards less so.
- you get the money in advance
- you don’t pay commission to CC network for every transaction
- casual users will give you much more money than what they need to
Did this article trip anyone else’s “is this GPT?” senses? I thought the prose style was very strange - quite verbose with a lot of redundant descriptors.
It tripped my “trying to hard to write eloquent, witty prose” senses. I proofread a lot of papers in college and wrote a lot of columns in the school newspaper. This is a common style. Thesaurus-driven word choice.
1. stop putting software in things
2. especially dont put webshit in things
3. especially dont put smartphone shit in things
really, i'm not trying to sound rude, theres no other way to put it, you deserve it. its unfortunate that people value "politeness" over reason. this is the hard truth that people in this bubble have not been able to face for 20 years now. the web is an abomination which was never created for anything other than corporate interests and serving magazines. of course it's practically inoperable. same exact story for smartphones, it was created by some scum web company to carry out the old trope of making a software ecosystem where shitty devs that cant make their own software come to and said scummy company gets to rule over. none of this implies any good or even reasonably working software
also laundry is a trivial task, it was only hard before washing machines. also this is one example of where technology actually made our lives better but all kinds of idiots like environmentalists and corpos are trying to ruin it.
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
I've been that contractor, which is why I will never be the owner of an appliance that requires an app to function.
[+] [-] saurik|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThinkingGuy|2 years ago|reply
Later we tried renting some e-scooters, which required the use of the Lyft App. My wife has the Lyft app, which let her pay for one scooter but then wouldn't let her unlock a second one for her non-cellphone-owning husband (I guess if you're a parent who wants to use e-scooters with your child, you're out of luck).
I sense that in the not-too-distant future, those of us who don't own a device running either Apple's or Google's proprietary OS will be pretty much excluded from many of the basic conveniences of everyday life.
[+] [-] vegetablepotpie|2 years ago|reply
The authorized repair technician at Best Buy made me turn off “find my iPhone” before servicing the device. Turns out, somehow, I had two Apple accounts, one with a user name that is tied to my email address, and the other one where my user name is my email address. To my surprise Apple considers these to be distinct accounts. While I remember the password for my user name, and I assumed it was the same for the account that used my email address as the user name, turns out it was not and I could not turn off find my iPhone.
Attempts to use my phone to reset my password lead to the settings app freezing up and giving me a gave a generic “could not connect to network” error message. Switching from cellular to WiFi did not help the situation. The technician was about to say that they would not be able to replace the battery for the day. Fortunately I had brought my laptop with me that day for unrelated reasons and after returning to the store with it I was able to reset my password with the web interface.
Modern technology has introduced a large number of seldom used use cases that are not well handled, but are essential when needed. Had I not had all the devices with me in my digital arsenal, I would not have been able to get my battery replaced. I have to wonder how many people face this issue and end up buying a new device to avoid the hassle.
[+] [-] NoNoisle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nlunbeck|2 years ago|reply
I love how this would totally feel hyperbolic as a comedy skit
[+] [-] codeulike|2 years ago|reply
Because it sucked to lug my basket of socks and sweaty t-shirts over to laundry block only to find out there was a big queue and my options were either to lug the basket back to my room and try again a random interval later, or leave my backet lying around in the laundry block, at the mercy of who knows what and come back a random interval later.
[+] [-] mihaaly|2 years ago|reply
https://www.thenewbieguide.se/laundry-in-sweden/
You do not need pocket device for such. Do you really say that in the university - supposedly filled with loads of smart people - no-one was able to come up with a solution for this trivial problem before Steve Jobs introduced the smartphone? Wow!
[+] [-] brightstep|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|2 years ago|reply
Or someone could have written a small client/server app in Access or FileMaker.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mongol|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefurii|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnopgnip|2 years ago|reply
Also the washers and dryers take quarters too but that can be a pain too
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
Then they "upgraded" and every machine got a little bluetoothy card reader dongle on it and a QR code, and they "upgraded" the box on the wall so that it stopped accepting cards. So that's fine, I guess, but it was a pain in the ass to start 3 machines at once, because now I needed to run my card 3 separate times, and hope that the readers were all working OK. There was also a mobile app, but the Android Lollipop tablet I had never worked with the app. You needed to activate both WiFi and BT (and it would force those on) but it still didn't work, despite my valiant efforts to contact their Support idiots. They also shut down the good monitoring page, and the only way to monitor machines was to pay for a load and use the app only. That sucked. A major use case for monitoring was to see who was using machines already, before I lugged everything downstairs!
So I got a new Android 10 phone and the app worked okay. I didn't really use the app. Then I noticed that the laundry room was really going downhill. Machines went out of order and weren't fixed. The same with pipes and such. Seeing the hand writing on the wall, I began to outsource to a wash'n'fold service, which has worked great.
Then a few months ago, landlady announced that we were switching laundry services, so that was all swept away and new machines were installed. There is a new app. The little box on the wall now sells reloadable cards, too. And you can pick those up at the leasing office. I sort of used the app just to test it. Obviously, there's no world-readable monitoring page on the web. Thankfully, I think the machines are still accepting quarters. But I'm still going with my outsourced hassle-free laundry.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanjitb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bick_nyers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tee3993|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d-s|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cglong|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinay_ys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cglong|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwitaway156|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jon-wood|2 years ago|reply
* Apps that offer any form of social login must also offer Apple ID login * Apple ID login can anonymise your email address per-provider * Every app already gets a distinct device ID, and indeed every app install gets one. Reinstalls regenerate it. * Wifi APs and Bluetooth scans require location privileges, which you can decline. * Apps are required to continue functioning (minus functions that clearly require the permission) if you decline them.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UtopiaFans|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cseleborg|2 years ago|reply
I strongly disagree. I feel like involving my smartphone into any activity that existed in 1990 (like jogging, or riding a bike) tends to make things more complicated, not less. When I go for a jog wanting to listen to podcasts, battery status, headphones, Bluetooth and playlist ordering are additional complexities that, at the very minimum, add additional steps to the process and, at worst, require several minutes of problem-solving before I can get started.
In my experience, involving a smartphone can, but rarely does, make things simpler.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|2 years ago|reply
Finding businesses that match some profile in the area, finding out that business' hours and offerings, then getting directions there from wherever you currently are -- all MASSIVELY easier on a smartphone compared to doing the same in 1990/pre-web. Doing that stuff with yellow pages and a map was a huge pain in the ass that took forever.
Grabbing a playlist to listen to music on a jog is also way easier in the age of music subscriptions and smartphones, compared to going around with a walkman+tape, especially if you factor in getting variety in song choice.
Also, remember communicating with people at arbitrary times? If they're at home, that's fairly safe, though if you're not home you may need to find a payphone. But if they're away from home on errands, lol, good fucking luck getting a message to them.
[+] [-] onion2k|2 years ago|reply
Beeline is an alternative to a paper map, and having seen many people try to navigate with a map I'm pretty sure everyone would agree than a smart phone is massively less complicated.
If you're going on a journey where you wouldn't need a map, just adding in some tech is obviously going to be more complicated than not adding tech.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dano|2 years ago|reply
- tenants have asked for it because they never seem to have the right amount of change
- banks are declining to accept unrolled coins
- better accounting between owners and property managers
[+] [-] cogogo|2 years ago|reply
Personally I would have welcomed anything that freed me from rounding up quarters. Though would prefer tap to pay on the machine over an app.
[+] [-] twodave|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
I have a couple old change buckets that probably still have a fair number of quarters buried in them, but I don't get given coins in the US more than a few times a year. If I didn't have old change at home, I'd have to go to a bank.
[+] [-] syats|2 years ago|reply
If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
[+] [-] WeAddValue|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonjgreen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrighele|2 years ago|reply
- you get the money in advance - you don’t pay commission to CC network for every transaction - casual users will give you much more money than what they need to
[+] [-] acters|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lammy|2 years ago|reply
> Real Time Data
> Demand Based Pricing
> Real-time performance analytics
> Optimize price per load
> Shareable data & reporting
[+] [-] helmette|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truculent|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shijie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khiqxj|2 years ago|reply
really, i'm not trying to sound rude, theres no other way to put it, you deserve it. its unfortunate that people value "politeness" over reason. this is the hard truth that people in this bubble have not been able to face for 20 years now. the web is an abomination which was never created for anything other than corporate interests and serving magazines. of course it's practically inoperable. same exact story for smartphones, it was created by some scum web company to carry out the old trope of making a software ecosystem where shitty devs that cant make their own software come to and said scummy company gets to rule over. none of this implies any good or even reasonably working software
also laundry is a trivial task, it was only hard before washing machines. also this is one example of where technology actually made our lives better but all kinds of idiots like environmentalists and corpos are trying to ruin it.