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If you want to get deals for the grocery store you need their app, cheaper deals for pizza, have to open the dominos/Pizza Hut app, I rarely go to Taco Bell, Starbucks, McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, etc but they all want you to use their app to get access to their coupons and order things. Maybe their points all add up on their websites, would just have to save all the logins in a password manager. Kroger comes to mind because they now use in store prices, price with Kroger card, and price with coupon from mobile app. It's crazy that that is allowed, but if they are going to charge 3.99 for a watermelon if you have the mobile app, and 6.99 regular, unfortunately I will cave and install the app.
Edit: seeing a product for sale with 3 prices listed below it is mildly infuriating
That's because they want to get their app on your phone so that they can perform data-mining using the data that the app can get from the phone environment.
I mean, I don't think that it's worth bothering with trying to game the system. I'm not going to give them my data, and I don't really care about the discount that they're offering for it. But if you want to do so, you can probably run an Android environment on a server and use the equivalent of RDP or VNC or something to reach it remotely.
grabs a random example
https://waydro.id/
Need to connect that up to VNC or RDP somehow if it doesn't have native support.
EDIT: I think that I'd take a hard look at how much it's likely to save you relative to how much time and effort you're going to spend on setting up and maintaining this, though.
Yeah that might be a good way of doing it, maybe someone else will pop in saying theyve tried one of them, I should have probably asked this on no stupid questions. I figure someone has already done it before so maybe they'll throw some insight about what to avoid. Thanks for the input!
Part of what you’ve described is market economics. They want your loyalty and they want to track your purchases to sell that data to advertisers. Do they need an app for that? Absolutely not. They can and do host websites with the same deals and all you have to do is login. The reason they push you to their app is because either the app is something they spent a bunch of money on and want to increase customer adoption. Or, they have added massive new tracking capabilities and want to spy on their users on behalf of advertisers, so they need you on their app.
None of this is related to the technical aspects of this question. In fact, most of these companies would resist you installing their app on an “app server” simply because then they wouldn’t be able to track your location and other phone details easily. Defeating the purpose of your idea.
Oh, and as for the watermelon - there’s a sweet spot between the prices which is usually $5 if you use their loyalty card and not their app. That’s the price you pay for your phone’s privacy and resources - a buck. Not a fair trade, but it is what it is.
p.s. I hear you about the three prices thing. It’s frustrating. Grocery shopping is not simple. It’s all about hunting for deals and accepting the time vs money trade off. I’m sorry you are in this situation. I am too.
Yeah, the location data wouldn't function right as you said. They wouldn't know you were at the store on 5th Street if the app is running on a machine at home I suppose. Could always manually search it.
Not your fault we are in that situation. Hope your life comes into many a cheap watermelon.
Part of the reason for all this bullshit is people will just do it instead of going to a different place that doesn't require bullshit but maybe costs a little more. 🤷♂️
This seems like your bed? If you're not willing to go to a place that doesn't do this to you, I guess you just gotta lie in it.
It’s also what the phone number club card has been about for the past few decades. I still type in the public phone number for my local store every time (after noticing that’s what the clerk used one time when I was “having trouble” entering my number on the pin pad). Grocery app on my phone? Hell no.