technology

i have a deep and irrational hatred for the fact that some people call computer programs "apps" now of days

The browser represents a political statement that the rendering of the web page ought to be under the control of the user. The app is a capitalist reaction to that statement.

I weirdly get depressed about this a lot. Like I just imagine some programmer guy, with the best intent in the world, adding in code to let websites know you're using a phone so that you can make super good content that fits a phone perfectly and increase experience to every user.

Only for the next day some rich monopoly company being like "lol let's use it to block access to our website, and force people onto our app". :(

"This website would look better if you downlo-"

NO! YOU WILL FEED ME IDIOT FASCIST TAKES FROM MY LOCAL CITY SUBREDDIT ON MY MOBILE BROWSER, AND YOU ARE GONNA LOAD IT!

Having to keep using the "desktop site" setting on mobile Firefox so that every website can just work without needing an app.

Even worse nowdays is shit like react native apps. Some of them are so slow and buggy it's unbelievable. I installed one of these apps for a supermarket chain (only because they said I'd get free stuff if I install their app, and free food is free food), and it said my balance on my supermarket card was NaN. And it scrolled though the catalogue of groceries at around 15 frames a second. To think this is the delivery and purchasing app for the biggest supermarket chain in South Africa!

I miss when absolute cranks had their own websites. Give me ten Time Cubes over any website app

Personally I would be okay with "make every single goddamn bit a software an 'app" if and only if this shit actually worked. 99.69420% of app don't even do what they they say on the tin. So many of them are either mobile version of websites but their APIs don't work correctly or just better off going to the actual mobile version of the website and just doing it there.

I also forgot to amount of the amount of digital snooping and snitching these apps do. They all talk to each other hand-off your data to some cabal of E-demons whose soul purpose is to make your life annoying. Don't even get me started on locking features behind paywalls either.

Tech was supposed to make the future cool.

I am waging protracted people's war against installing apps and creating accounts in order to do things that shouldn't require a fucking app or account. I have used my browser's console to scroll wepbages with JavaScript when shitty sites would disable scrolling to force me to sign up. Death to enshittification.

oh yeah it's so fucking cool we had a perfect system for representing hypertext and then they added multimedia (cool) and interactivity (okay) and eventually just decided that it should have a cross-platform language for sending any and every possible computer application over the internet and simultaneously it become so totally unusable that developers needed 999,998 different frameworks to make anything with it and they just gave up and made shitty reduced functionality versions for toddlers and called them "apps" and now the web browser takes up 14GB of RAM and no one can ever program a new one again unless they have 20 years and a billion dollars.

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remember when "apps" were called programs?

The "app" also has extra built-in user tracking capabilities, beyond the dreams of what they can deliver with a mere webpage.

Here in the outskirts of the Bay Area, charging stations each have their own specific bazinga app and each app is hostile to each other app and expects space on your phone to charge your vehicle. It fucking sucks and there's no reason for it except

Threads is a good example. I'm a hog for scrolling, so obviously I wanted to check out threads... but am greeted with a QR code to download the app. Why the fuck can't I just look at it my desktop web browser like literally every other one of these?? The obvious answer is: the actual purpose of these apps is to just sell more advertising data, and a browser version doesn't have the same access to the panopticon.

But then you get deep enough into the app and find some function you need to do isn’t available through the app and then you’ve got to go back to their website to do it.

Yeah it sucks and I've been against appification since it began.

responsive web design has brought this back a little. I can do almost everything I need to on my linux phone natively or through the browser. it is a hassle tho. frequently need a user agent switcher, etc

This was actually Steve Jobs original idea for the iPhone. Instead of native apps everything would be a web app.

I’m torn because I do hate responsive design to the max. But I also hate how the web has evolved into a pseudo os with everything in JavaScript. Don’t get me started on electron.

I like the native app approach so I can actually use the is as intended it many apps these days are just a wrapper for the webapp anyway