this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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AssholeDesign
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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
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Fast food charges you around double if you don't use the app. I think it's mostly about tiered pricing. They want the money from those willing to pay $15 for a burger AND they still want the money from people who won't pay more than $10. This way they get both.
In the US, I guess? Not where I come from
In Italy it's also like this
You literally pay double the price if you order without using the coupons found in the app for McDonald's, Burger King and KFC
Makes sense. I don’t eat fast food, so I didn’t know. But no way am I installing apps for… basically any commercial thing.
Same here, but I do eat fast food on occasion. Their small discounts are not worth enough to compromise my phone's integrity and my privacy.
I just looked at their app permissions, and woof. It’s almost as bad as Threads.
It's not a small discount. Of course just using the app isn't the only hoop. You also have to order correctly to maximize the discount.
Those kind of apps have a special place on my phone: petercxy's shelter (don't install it from play store because in order to meet the Google requirements it has been nerfed). Apps installed there use a dedicated throwaway Google account and are completely disabled with a toggle on my launcher. (Lawnchair 2 has a toggle in the drawer for it)
If an app is installed in shelter it's on a completely separate partition and can't access any file or photo on your main one. And once you quit, they are all disabled like if the phone is turned off
It's just an incentive to install the app, the amount of data being harvested and sold/traded is basically the new economy.
You could as much harvest more data from a browser honestly. Most apps are sandboxed, a browser shares its cookies.
Phone apps have access to significantly more data than a browser does, especially when people haphazardly agree to any and all permissions.
If you believe that's really true I'm probably not the one to change your mind.
Browsers usually don't even ask for any permissions, where iOS and Android apps do, and explicitly state what data they'll steal.
It's much easier to fingerprint your behavior when using the web than it is when using apps.
Unless you're only talking about "the wrong kind of apps" but then I could continue about "the wrong kind of websites".
But hey, you do you. Happy tracking.
Edit: I feel sad that sites like The Verge et al. trick people who want to learn in those kind of directions. They're writers, not tech people. They earn from ads! Don't listen to them.
Yes, I'm comparing the threat level based on the maximum potential akin to the likes of "those apps". Permissions are straightforward and will protect users just like ad blockers, decentralized static frameworks (JavaScript/CSS/fonts), and clearing cookies. But on average users are not well informed and aren't considering permissions, add-ons, or even which browser or app they use so I compare based on the potential threat level.