There are downsides with downloading their app just to input bad data, but it's a fun thought.
edit: While we're at it we might as well offer an alternative app to people.
I posted in [email protected] to collect recommendations for better apps
The post: https://lemmy.ca/post/32877620
Leading Recommendation from the comments
The leading recommendation seems to be Drip (bloodyhealth.gitlab.io)
Summarizing what people shared:
- accessible: it is on F-droid, Google Play, & iOS App Store
- does not allow any third-party tracking
- the project got support from "PrototypeFund & Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Superrr Lab and Mozilla"
- Listed features:
- "Your data, your choice: Everything you enter stays on your device"
- "Not another cute, pink app: drip is designed with gender inclusivity in mind."
- "Your body is not a black box: drip is transparent in its calculations and encourages you to think for yourself."
- "Track what you like: Just your period, or detect your fertility using the symptothermal method."
Their Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@dripapp
Absolute worst case you could always keep track of it as a raw text/markdown/excel/Libre calc/whatever your preference is. You're not going to get any predictions or useful data out.
But it would at least provide a record for your doctor if need be. And as long as you encrypt the device you store it on, or the directory its stored in, it's relatively safe to do so.
How does this work with non technical people?
Non technical people are not raccoons, they can use a text file.
The number of people I deal with at work that have no idea what a file is...
And forget about folders.
I CAN'T FIND MY DOCUMENT!!!!
Okay, where did you save it?
I DON'T KNOW, I JUST CLICK SAVE LIKE ALWAYS!!!
*remotes into workstation and clicks save only to find the file was saved in their temp directory*
I had that conversation hundreds of times when I was doing desktop support...
Why would you blame them if they have all those "conveniences" like the default save location, file managers focusing on pics to click and and not directory structure, and so on. Of course they don't know, they don't know they have to know and thus don't think they could choose or something.
These things were not invented for computer-literate people. The way they were being made in year 1999 they were usable for common folk.
Blaming normies as people who can't do things is delusional. Modern UI\UX, which is plain stupid and unprofessional, is the problem. Normies are fine. They can be taught to navigate a paper book, right? Then they can do this.
By the way, I still remember my fury when auto-complete suggestions, AJAX search on webpages, default locations for saving files and other such things started becoming the only considered way to do anything. Because I knew where this all leads. It's not hard to imagine how a person who've never had anything else will form their habits.
And not only these "simplifications" are everywhere, but also they UI\UX has become more cluttered everywhere! It's an unusable mess, and it being that is justified by having some "convenience" magic that makes it even bigger mess.
This is why Windows should have remained a shell for DOS. On Unix-like systems the competition between various desktops slows down this degeneracy. That's what they are trying to solve with Wayland, so that people could only use Gnome, KDE and a couple of half-functional compositors with too long config files to set up with my ADHD.