this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 172 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The reason this is done is because you can see everything your browser is doing, but you can't see everything an application is doing without disassembling it.

I want very much to go back to websites. Apps are stupid.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago (25 children)

the reason is children. for some reason the most recent generation of kids requires apps instead of sites. god forbid they have to remember an address.

just look at the fuckload of people who cant use lemmy without an 'app'

this is one of my peeeves

[–] NorthWestWind 38 points 2 months ago (3 children)

My high school computer teacher once ranted about this to us. He said the younger students are lacking the basic concepts of computer stuff. They are spoiled too much to not even know what a file browser is.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's the parents fault too for not teaching the kids.

[–] MrQuallzin 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Eeh, I see it as a gray area. Majority of millenials, myself included, grew up learning about novel technologies as they developed. We learned how to use desktop computers and browse the internet during a 'golden age' of innovation. They became part of our everyday lives and are second nature to us. The next generations don't fully have that experience but are expected to natively know their way around a computer since they're so ubiquitous in our lives. In reality, they know how to use smart phones and chromebooks but aren't getting the experience of working on a real desktop computer.

Regarding teaching kids the basics, I'd put it on the schools, not the parents. Do schools still have computer labs? That'd be where proper computer skills should be taught. If parents can help at home that's great, but I don't think it should be expected that every kid is going to have a real computer at home to learn on (versus phones, tablets, chromebooks, etc).

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[–] Serinus 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

One of the reasons I like apps for Lemmy is for notifications.

Coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like apps is for notifications.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Your mobile browser supports notifications per site like an app. It even supports custom icons per site when the notification pops up.

You don't even know if the telemetry leaving your phone to the app server is using TLS encryption, you just let them hail-mary football-throw send it.

I don't understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

One benefit an app for something like Lemmy offers is significantly better customization.

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[–] [email protected] 143 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I hate that websites will purposely block a perfectly working website feature if it sees you're on a mobile just to refer you to their mobile app.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (4 children)

FUCK websites that require a login, i'm looking at you twitter, you need to be sued over this shit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Insta. Facebook. In fact all social media that only lets me see 3-4 messages before demanding I log in. Fuck. You.

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[–] shneancy 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

i wanted to download a singular PDF file yesterday, and apparently i needed to be logged in to do that? I'm not making a fucking account on whatever scribble.com is for a singular PDF that will help me find my Kojima-name wtf

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[–] primrosepathspeedrun 17 points 2 months ago

and that is when I just drop that company forever.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Go to browser settings on mobile and switch on desktop mode. Fuck them sites.

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[–] [email protected] 113 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (15 children)

An app for a fucking cemetary!? Nuh-uh

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago

I hear it's dead now anyway.

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[–] ajmaxwell 12 points 2 months ago

My most boomer opinion

[–] [email protected] 71 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Most of these memes are ironic, but this one is actually true. These apps could just be websites, but instead they're bloated spyware

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife 19 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Many of these apps could just be menus.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Even menu websites are chock full of Javascript for no reason. It could be a JPEG!

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 months ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Anybody who wants to offer me an open source app that doesn’t spy on me is totally fine, especially when the app kicks ass.

  • sent from Voyager
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Unironically this. There's nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn't do on a fucking browser from 2018. If you want people to use the stupid app over the site, then please have only the stupid app and ditch the "just pretending it works" site and for fuck's sake, don't make the stupid app a javascript mess, because THAT could've been a fucking site instead.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

The secret is that tons of apps are just web browsers in a costume.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Buddy, these apps could have been done in php and ajax 15 years ago

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[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife 11 points 2 months ago (4 children)

There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from ~~2018~~ 1998

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[–] Bassman1805 43 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is here a joke here? All I see is truth.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (1 children)

TFW someone makes a desktop app but it’s literally just a bundled chrome browser page

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[–] bitball 33 points 2 months ago

there is an alternate universe out there where every shitty social media website has good rss services and doesn't degrade you for not using the app

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I am really confused about this meme template, didn't its usage used to be satirical (not sure if that's the right word)? I remember seeing ones like "Nobody ever needed maths", but recently I am seeing them inverted where the subject matter is actually criticised for being useless. Instead of claiming something useful to be useless. Can someone explain? when did the usage shift?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

it's pseudo post-satire is how i like to think about it. It's satirical by nature, but it's gone so far, that it's not quite straight satire, some of the points made are genuinely accurate.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Please pair this with: Stop forcing me to make an account for your useless fucking service. It's a pain in the ass and only serves your corpo tracking while I get nothing in return

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)

One of the most ironic things is if you willingly download the app version of a website, hoping it would speed things up and reduce internet data usage, just for the app to be using WebView or some other micro-browser engine which will essentially be the same as if you were visiting the website using your browser as before.

Thanks for nothing.

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[–] adavis 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So I bought a new mouse, of course it came with RGB nonsense. Before purchasing I checked it could be disabled.

Software to control RGB? 300MB. Who knows what the hell else that'll be doing.

Plugged it into my Linux laptop, download OpenRGB, 1.7MB application that supports more than just this brand. Turn off the rgb, click save to device.

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[–] HexadecimalSky 24 points 2 months ago

Bro, my city just made an app it has a news button, a quick link to city code compliance and a quick form for reporting illegal fireworks. City is depreciating email newsletter and website for app and facebook. and I hate so many places advertising decent deals behind apps. I am not downloading an app for every fastfood chain and grocery store. Stopped going to del taco, mcd and Wendy's over shitty apps.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Controversial opinion. I love apps.

(Only because in my company, we created a app team to hire more developers and while our website absolutely doubles as a really fucking good web app, we hinder it in order to keep our app developer homies employed.)

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago (1 children)

im convinced 99% of app development is just for enhanced tracking and telemetry. Most are a browser in app anyway

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife 13 points 2 months ago

I used to work for a very large cable company. All of our apps were championed by VPs who had strong personal connections to InfoSys, who got most of the contract work to create and maintain them. Almost nobody actually used the apps - the developers used various tricks to enormously inflate the apparent numbers of users. So essentially they were a mechanism for one large corporation to siphon millions of dollars from another large corporation. My life became a lot happier when I finally realized this and stopped giving a shit about anything.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

As a side point, what the hell is wrong with Snapchat's UI? It's a mess of buttons arranged by a monkey on cocaine. How is this shit popular?

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I've avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. "Users have no idea what they want" was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of "only voted one star because you can't vote zero stars".

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

"Users have no idea what they want" was an actual, frequent quote from them.

It's because they're not designing for the users' wants, they're designing for the users' engagement (or whatever flawed metric they use to determine that). The designers mindlessly equate what keeps the user engaged with what the user wants.

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[–] _number8_ 18 points 2 months ago (4 children)

it's so depressing if you watch steve jobs introduce the iphone, he boasted how safari offered a rich browsing experience, beautifully rendering the full desktop version with intuitive controls to zoom and swipe around, no janky mobile sites. and look at us now. how we have fallen.

(honestly i think tim cook wrecked the company, he's a pure bloodless businessman, thinking only about numbers and value extraction versus innovation and changing the world, which jobs, for all his faults, objectively did)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (8 children)

I hate that I need an app to change the colour of my fucking lightbulb, give me a remote instead, damn.

That being said, I prefer using apps over the browser because they load way faster.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A lot of website use so much ressources, I couldn't visit its with my 5 years old laptop or my "smart" phone. The only way to access their services is with apps. Fortunately, I could choose FOSS apps on F-Droids

However, loading textual information shall not consume all my RAM and most of my CPU. There is an issue with today web

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

Yea this pisses me off!

-Sent from Boost app

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I always thought these were at least 50% ironic. Please don't tell me you don't actually want websites OP.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

I unironically do. I don’t use apps for almost anything.

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