Not having a phone really sucks in this day and age. Imagine getting out of jail for something stupid like marijuana possession and then a parole violation due to a missed appointment. No one will hire you with your rap sheet. You live in a halfway house with a bunch of petty BS every day. And you can’t keep up with your parole demands because of how much your lack of a phone gets in your way. At the end of the day, there IS a way to succeed if you make the right choices, but shit, it’s just so much harder for some people to make the right choices when every day is crisis mode. And all because of WHAT?
There should be a warning label on any establishment or product that requires a smartphone to use.
There was a food truck I went to one time that required you to download some app to look at their menu and order your food. They refused to accept a credit card or cash. I walked. So fucking stupid. I don’t know why people allow shit like that to exist.
How about this:
At the apartments I recently moved out of, there were no quarter slots on the washing machines. They were an app that required a bluetooth connection to pay.
So if you lived there and didn’t have a smartphone? Go fuck yourself, you don’t get to do laundry.
Unless you bothered to check the laundry room when you were looking at the apartment, you wouldn’t know. No warnings.
That…
Is that not illegal where you live?
It’s not even required that apartment buildings have laundry services at all. There are commercial storefront laundromats in the US which serve as the ground floor for where people do their laundry. Until landlords are required to provide laundry, it will be hard to legislate what payment forms they must accept.
America has next to no protections for tenants, only landlords.
quarter slots on the washing machines
Thank god they decided to keep these free where I live
I understand its probably the norm where you are but why aren’t they just free to use? You pay rent…
That depends a bit on if it was advertised or not to have a laundry room. At least here in NL it is more common to have your own washing machine than to use a shared one so having a laundry room would be an extra to start with.
Still sucks though
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It’s actually incredibly common in US apartments for laundry to be a common area.
Having a unit in your apartment means you’re at least well-to-do. Poor people can mostly go fuck themselves.
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US hates poor people. I’m poor, I know from experience. They hold homelessness over us as a threat to keep in line.
We went from during the pandemic, treating “essential workers” as “heroes” while not increasing their pay for risking their lives, to now, straight back to how it used to be, screaming at overworked underpaid people “You’re lucky to have a job!” as they break our bodies and then discard us once our bodies are broken. I know caregivers who have broken backs because they have to lift 350lb people without the proper equipment and they don’t get paid enough to afford to live in an apartment alone.
The number of people trapped in outright dangerous relationships just to afford a place to live is too damn high. It’s a massive human rights issue, and the US will never address it under current leadership. They treat poverty as something that happens to bad people. They believe that their wealth proves that they are good people. They are myopic fools.
They fucking hate us. Anything to make us feel low, they will do.
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You’ve never seen The Big Bang Theory?
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Well, I was merely asking because I know about shared laundry rooms being a thing in US because of that show.
Tbf, my building also uses an app for laundry. However they also have a machine in the laundry rooms where you can purchase an NFC payment card and put money on it. So you can use it without the app. Is that not the case with yours? If not, that’s 100% fucked
I’m open to hear if you guys disagree with me, but that is not simply about not having a smartphone as much as it is about not having cell service, not using data service. If a person uses a libre VoIP app, there is no need for cell service, and people actually can live happy lives disconnected from internet when they are outside or in public.
Society must revert their mentality and not expect constant immediate access to everything. Absolutely nothing happens on the internet for personal activity that can’t wait a few hours or the next day.
I use phone only for direct communication, zero multimedia, zero social media on phone. Everything else is done on computer. Especially banking, that is on computer website only for security, never on phone. I despise and resent using a phone for websites
Society must revert their mentality and not expect constant immediate access to everything. Absolutely nothing happens on the internet for personal activity that can’t wait a few hours or the next day.
yeah ok so, counterpoint, you pull up to an EV charging station (it’s tesla because of course it’s tesla) please show me where the card reader is. I’ll wait.
oh but what about the non tesla charging stations you might say. those are still iffy right now, i’m hopeful they’ll improve in the future, but a lot of them have readers (that may or may not work) and a phone app (that may or may not work) also whose to say they don’t just fucking disappear.
Bad example. Tesla chargers don’t use an app, they assume you have an account set up with a credit card on file. Most people do that through the app but I don’t think you have to. Once it’s set up, it just works with no further interaction.
Or are you doing this as a non-Tesla customer? Yeah that’s not as smooth yet
Bad example.
what are you going to do setup android emulation so you can install the tesla app (which might not work in emulation because that’s sus, but maybe they dont have good security anyway lmao) sure, you can set it up once, but like, what do you do if your credit card is cancelled, or the app suddenly stops accepting purchases because “you haven’t been online in a week” and it’s for “security purposes” or some other stupid shit like that. This is the entire reason card based payment exists lmao. Why are we just reinventing it.
i guess theoretically if it’s a webapp you could do it on the browser, but then like, how is it going to link information back to you personally? Unless you own a tesla, where you basically just save your payment info on the car directly at that point. Maybe they will invent credit card 2 electric boogaloo. Are they going to start installing NFC/RFID into charging ports for payment link info? Seems silly to me.
If you own a non tesla, this is as you mentioned, a huge issue, considering that NACS is the charging standard for all of north america now.
Worst case scenario, call support to put a credit card on file with your account. This is what I did when I ran into problems with the app (turns out I was too eager trying to use it before they were done setting me up).
When you use a supercharger, at least as a Tesla, there is a handshake where your car identifies what account to use, then it just works
You definitely lose a lot of convenience features if you don’t use the app, but I believe you can do it, if you want it enough
Edit: just use a web browser. I verified I can login through my web browser to manage my account, my products, my payment method. Not the car features though. I have no idea if this is new, but just use any web browser
i’m really not sure how the non tesla super charger experience looks, that concerns me. Though i assume that must be a somewhat solve problem, if people are using it so.
just use a web browser. I verified I can login through my web browser to manage my account, my products, my payment method. Not the car features though. I have no idea if this is new, but just use any web browser
that’s good, there should definitely be some available features for the card, but you can at least handle payment. Though i would still prefer not needing to provide my payment info to a third party anywhere except for time of transaction. Just opens me up to more bullshit.
For sure. Most of my objection is when the purpose is automatic renewal of subscriptions (which ought to be treated as a type of theft because it’s non consensual stealing my money), and at least it’s not that.
My credit card does rotate the numbers a bit but I keep meaning to find one that can generate different virtual cards per service so I can turn a virtual card off when they get abusive with it or when they leak it
my two biggest concerns are accessibility, and privacy. I want it to be both, accessible, and private, card readers accomplish this to a significant, and universally accepted degree. I can understand a subscription service being based on something a little different, or an auto charge mechanism similar to tesla super chargers, but that should be an option, not the sole means of interacting with it, because then it lends to really shitty behavior on the side of the company operating it.
The subscription thing is understandable, but the unfortunate reality is that this is going to be a contract law problem, rather than any other problem, you are legally agreeing to a monthly payment model at some point in the checkout, otherwise it wouldn’t be legal. Shitty laws and consumer protection problems really.
My credit card does rotate the numbers a bit but I keep meaning to find one that can generate different virtual cards per service so I can turn a virtual card off when they get abusive with it or when they leak it
it’s funny actually, i wonder if checks will see a comeback, with all the shitty services that exist now, it’s a very explicit way of paying for a transaction. I don’t really have a huge problem with auto charging systems, most of the time banks can even unfuck some really funny shit if you need them to, though that gets into a different world very quickly. The subscription problem is an interesting one though, my solution is just avoid them at all costs, because it’s a parasitic drain. So far i’ve succeeded in that. Also having a minimal amount of subscriptions really helps you to keep them in check, because there are only so many that can exist.
If a person uses a libre VoIP app, there is no need for cell service
I don’t follow. Don’t you need internet for VoIP? Unless the point is to have a phone that gets zero connection while outside a wifi, which sounds kinda pointless?
Correct, use VoIP with wi-fi service instead of cell and data. It also makes the calls untraceable for location for best privacy practices. There’s no way to trace where in the world a phone is if using wi-fi to call standard phone numbers. For personal calling, not a work phone, some people don’t care about messages and calling when they are out walking, shopping, attending events. They want to focus on the real world around them, not phone stuff.
It is more about being able to constantly spy on everyone. Funny how this exact sentence would have labeled one as a conspiracy nut not too long ago.
Constantly online means constant (more or less) analytics, means constant data to throw in the big computer to make you buy more shit or vote for the shit party.
I think I would agree due to when I have been sitting in public somewhere with others sitting around, they have clearly been programmed by their phone, subservient to their master. I do also wonder if there is an IQ element to it. Having a lower level of personal intelligence so they have been conned into believe that they must have a phone that is connected to internet at all times everywhere.
Spend 2 months without cell service, without mobile service, and you will see how far gone many, many people are. I’m fully serious about live without cell service for 2 months, the world does not look the way you think it does.
As I’ve been making an effort to replace apps with the browser version of the service. It’s so abundantly clear that companies don’t want you using their website.
Even if they don’t outright cripple functionality, they’ll hound you endlessly to install the app.
It’s infuriating to say the least.
Even if they don’t outright cripple functionality, they’ll hound you endlessly to install the app.
Still don’t understand the logic of doing that.
It’s like saying,
“Our website is nigh unusable, please install our app instead. We pinky promise our app works”.
It’s because you have control over your browser, but they control their app and all its trackers, ads, etc
Yep. They want you to use apps, cause all the permissions you give the app makes it much easier for them to harvest all your data for marketing and selling purposes.
That’s exactly it. Easy to block ads and trackers on a website, but more difficult or impossible on some apps.
One of the banking apps won’t show the total balance of the account unless I’m using the app. How ridiculous.
They know that a lot of people would rather have it work a little better by getting an app, if they keep reminding people it’s an option.
Even if “better” is just lack of nags.
It’s sad. We need a digital privacy law so that an app can’t be more invasive than the website.
Even if “better” is just lack of nags.
Well, they just swap nags from “download out app” to “rate our app” no matter what you do, you’ll be nagged…
Get out of the stone age.
I’m probably gonna get clowned for feeding the troll, but - this comment comes off a lot more harsh if you’ve ever experienced not having access to the Internet and a smartphone or computer.
I spent the better part of 16 years of my life with no TV, MP3 player, phone, Internet, or computer - and it has negatively impacted me in immeasurable ways. I couldn’t find work, because I couldn’t apply for jobs but also I didn’t know you could do that on the Internet - I also didn’t know YouTube existed, so I missed out on learning the things I liked, and I didn’t know I was being abused because I had no way of knowing that it wasn’t normal until I got access to help, via the Internet.
I wasn’t in the stone age - if I’d had options to do any of the above without a phone or the Internet, I’d be a different person today. Shut up, mate - not everyone can afford or has the opportunity to own a smartphone and data plan (which are rare and expensive in abusive situations like my past). Making services available in places like libraries and community centers without requiring smartphones and Internet would help so many people who have no ability to use them - those people are just as human as you.
and by the way while we’re at it: if we’re effectively paywalling access to basic human rights behind an IP address and cellular radio, those should be enshrined as human rights too.
I was raised in the boondocks. You couldn’t get reception there back in the 90’s, and there weren’t any kids or neighbors that I could visit without having to be driven. My parents didn’t have any community at all, so I in turn never learned how to socialize properly. To say the least, I never became comfortable with phones, even after moving into civilization. It just wasn’t part of me.
Isolation from people is a huge disadvantage in life, you don’t get to make friends, network, or learn what it means to be part of society. Here’s hoping that cellphones and whatnot become rights, as you have said.
However, some states might provide SSI recipients a LifeConnect program. You get a free smartphone and low-end plan.
yep, I know this feeling all too well - having a community and friends is important but even more so in cases like ours. Thank you for the comment, I hope you’re doing better nowadays.
Someone make a smartphone that isn’t a steaming pile of shit then. The pinephone was so close but struggled with SMS when I tried it.
this comment makes me wish for a Carrington Event in the 21st century
the problem is also apple’s slow adoption (or outright refusal) to open up various web apis to make web apps more prevalent.
I use a dumbphone. I’m not buying a smartphone just so I can play these stupid games, and I’m installing an app for every fucking business I interact with. I realize there will one day be a point where I won’t be able to do things I need to do without one, but until then I have no desire for one. Fortunately they haven’t made the parking meters here require a smartphone yet.
My grocery store still uses loyalty cards for most discounts (which is irritating enough), but also has “digital coupons” that require an app so I can’t get that. Theoretically I could go to their website and print them off but that’s not worth the effort. I have to pay close attention to the price signs they put up because some of them say “with digital coupon” in small print, meaning “not for you, bitch”. You know who doesn’t pull this kind of shit? Walmart. So I wind up getting a lot of my groceries there so as not to be discriminated against.
Walmart doesn’t let you use contactless pay unless you use their app. several times now I’ve gone there to grab a few things, not realizing i didn’t have my card with me, and had to leave a full cart behind because i will not install their adware.
Walmart doesn’t let you use contactless pay unless you use their app.
By “contactless pay” I assume you’re talking about paying by using a smartphone app? Obviously I don’t care about that because the whole point of my post is that I’m not using a smartphone, so obviously I have no apps of any kind.
But if by “contactless pay” you meant paying with your debit card by tapping it or holding it near the card reader, yes they do have that like everyone else.
Flipphones… I want a full keyboard phone again. Maybe even a slider full keyboard. Those were the days.
Apps… I evade most apps as much as i can or if i must use closed source apps, i will put them in a secondary profile.
I have a flip phone with a touchscreen so I can type via the onscreen keyboard. When I bought it I wondered how well it would work since the screen is so small, but it works great! So much easier than using the keypad. BTW it also has maps with voice navigation.
Oh that is pretty cool!
holy balls that thing looks amazing, is it good?
Those are laptop keys on a phone, i have seen one of these before, i wonder if there are those with older “phone like” keyboards?
Do NOT give these fucking cunts any fucking money. I was a backer for this phone on indiegogo.
They are liars when they eventually did communicate any updates during the project. They produced around 2000 units, most of which were sent to people who backed the project years after the first backers on indiegogo because they backed on a different platform.
Ultimately they just shut down the kickstarter giving no actual details. They stole thousands of peoples money through that. They made a product with the money people contributed to back the project and then just shuttered the project so they wouldn’t need to deliver a device to these backers.
I didn’t realise they were now trying to sell them again but the units that did get shipped were massively out of date and barely worked as it is.
If you want a keyboard on a phone Unihertz are about your only option right now.
Fuck planet computers, thieving fucking cunts
Didn’t know, thanks for the info
Yeh sorry for the little rant there, not aimed at you personally, just being reminded of it pissed me off a new xD
It’s probably too late to do anything about it, but what you described there does directly violate Indiegogo’s TOS in regards to perks, so I’m surprised that people weren’t able to reach out to the platform itself and issue chargebacks against the Creator in order to get their backers payments back.
They are actually obligated under the campaign owner obligations that in the case they can’t fulfill a perk, they are supposed to issue refunds to any contributor that was not fulfilled
It’s also a gigantic information harvesting ploy.
A mobile app requirement is an easy excuse for me to nope the fuck out.
My old apartment had gates that could only be opened with an app. They took out the card reader and made it app only. Should have gotten out of there much earlier than I did.
Yeah, that’s a nope from me. I’m trying to eliminate as many apps from my life as I can.
the gates that slide over using a chain, they often have a removable link at the end. If you unhook the chain on the opener side, it will open one more time, then spit all the chain out trying to close it. I used to take that link out when living in complexes with those gates. Made life easier for most. Would take months for it to get fixed. They are just standard 1/2in x1/8in bike chain.
I don’t live there anymore, but if I did this would be useful information.
I think I forgot to mention that they had cameras pointed at the gates, and I have an extremely identifiable appearance.
I’m shocked.
Right off the top of my head, I can mention an entire finacial institution that only exists through an app. No website, no physical locations, no nothing. It’s one app and that is it.
I mean I use Cashapp, but I could also not use it and my life wouldn’t be much harder
I don’t know what Cashapp is but I’m going to take the risk and say it’s a fintech that handles direct money services. How off am I?
But I’m talking about a bank. The institution only exists through an app. Let’s say you do a odd job and you get paid cash. You can’t deposit that money: there is no place or way to do so.
No way would I use that app.
We’re talking of what is, technically a bank (Moey), that entered my country through another bank. What is even stranger is that you can’t even go to one of those banks and make a deposit on you account.
I use the services of what you can consider the most de-materialized bank in my country, which has less than twenty physical locations in the entire country, but they have a very robust help line and you can use the locations of another bank in the same group to deposit money to your account.
But Moey? Either the money is wired in or your stuck.
The whole using your phone for everything from grocery shopping to just doing whatever Like getting deals or whatever?, Can it please go away?
They’re collecting our data anyways.
For some things it’s more convenient for customers. For others, it’s more convenient for businesses.
We, as customers, need to promote what’s convenient for us while ignoring what’s convenient for businesses.
Keep in mind: we are not on the same side as the people taking our money.
I keep seeing this headline and thinking it’s a slur
This affects me a lot day to day. I have a phone, but it runs postmarketOS, not iOS or Android. It really shows me the importance of open standards. I feel that every business should be required to support open standards for each of the services they offer.
For me, buying train tickets used to be ok, but is getting harder now. Some train operators are really pushing you to use their app now, and getting rid of the option to download a PDF. It really frustrates me: it’s not like it costs them more to offer PDF download - if anything, it’s much cheaper to offer that functionality than to build and maintain an app for iOS and Android.
Back when I had an Android phone, I used Monzo, and it was so easy to send money to friends, set up standing orders etc. I wish they offered a proper web interface. Now, I use Natwest’s online banking, and it’s a real pain - I use the card reader to authenticate, then the website logs me out seemingly every 2 mins of inactivity. Some features, like pre-notifying that you’ll be travelling abroad, are only available on the app. I only see this trend continuing.
The concert tickets example in the article is insane to me. I can’t think of a use case that is better suited for PDFs, and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 10+ years without any issues. It really is user hostile and excludes people on the edges of society who don’t fit, for whatever reason, with what the 80-90% do.
apps allow user tracking and advertising though. Much more valuable to the corpos than a few lost customers.
Also mich More valuable to Google, as they are the biggest Advertising company. I looked it up and according to this source they have ~70% of the pay-per-click market.
The reason venues don’t allow PDFs is so that you’re forced to use their own platform for resale where they take a commission.
Get $50.
I flat-out refuse to do business with any that requires I use an app. I won’t even scan a QR code for a restaurant menu; that’s my cue to go eat elsewhere.
Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day is probably the most accurate portrayal of me ever written.
I don’t mind the whole online menu thing. It’s probably an environmental net positive, but it’s bs if they don’t have ANY physical copies for those who can’t or don’t want to for whatever reason.
If they wanted me to install something, though, that’d be a 100% instant nope.
I mean I simply refuse to ask QR code phishing is a thing
I mean you just need to audit the URL before going there.
You might enjoy SecScannerQR then. It makes it easier to vet QR codes by giving an option to search for the URL instead of going there directly.
Isn’t that standard behavior though? I’ve never seen anything that opens a URL directly instead of just showing it to you with an option to access it.
Ooh. Now do iOS.
Ew
No, you stop doing iOS.
An online menu requires power to be used (on people’s phones and the server). Is that really a minor contribution in comparison to printing paper and maybe laminating it?
Considering your average printer is a piece of shit that needs to be replaced quite often, yes, using a website is probably more energy efficient.
Most companies will be using laser printers, some of which may outlive me. Toner is cheap and lasts an age.
Inkjet printers are cheap for a reason. They’re a scam.
Generally companies use service contracts to keep those things working so mo they wouldn’t be replaced often. They are just a piece of shit
This person has never seen the power bill for running a high-availability server with several failovers once in their lives.
In fairness neither have I - though I suspect it’s not as insignificant as other’s claim.
It’s not insignificant at all. Servers are beefy and take more power than a standard PC… a lot more. Further, failover servers mean you have to have exact copies of the same server up and available, which means you’re doubling, tripling, quadrupling power demands. Finally, you also have to have Uninterruptible Power Supplies, those take an amount of power as well.
It’s a huge power draw. I know because I have a bunch of low-power devices runnig 24/7 as microservices and it still increase my power bill and use by a lot. I regularly get letters from the power company about how I’m using like 3x the power of the average person in my type of unit.
I regularly get letters from the power company about how I’m using like 3x the power of the average person in my type of unit.
I’m also using a lot of self hosted things but have never received any of those.
Where do you reside generally where they’re sending them because it ain’t a thing here in the UK?
I had not considered that an uninterruptible power supply would be consuming power after charging. I suppose no electronics are 100% efficient at what they do.
I’ve been playing with a Proxmox server on an ITX system for local services and rare game hosting for friends. I’d love something low power I could have on all the time.
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You can host a webserver on a Raspberry Pi. I don’t know what you’re doing with your setup but you absolutely do not need hundreds of watts to serve a few hundred KB worth of static webpage or PDF file. This website is powered by a 30 watt solar panel attached to a car battery on some guy’s apartment balcony. As of writing its at 71% charge.
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An Ampere Altra Max CPU has 128 ARM cores (the same architecture that a raspberry pi uses), with a 250 watt max TDP. That works out to about 2 watts per core. Each of those cores is more than enough to serve a little static webpage on its own, but in reality since a lot of these sites get less than 200 hits per day the power cost can be amortized over thousands of them, and the individual cores can go to sleep if there’s still not enough work to do. Go ahead and multiply that number by 4 for failover if you want, its still not a lot. (Not that the restaurant knows or cares about any of this, all this would be decided by a team of people at a massive IT company that the restaurant bought webpage hosting from).
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That and those servers are going to be running anyway. Powering a simple restaurant website is a grain of sand on the beach of internet usage.
Yeah, exactly. If you’re worried about the power draw to host a few hundred KB PDF file, you probably shouldn’t be using Lemmy, because scrolling through your feed probably uses 100x that in energy costs.
You have to remember that the shared hosting or aws, or wherever is going to be cheapest to host a simple website is also going to be very power efficient. Wasting power is just throwing away free money, and if there’s one thing corporations don’t do, it’s throw away free money.
Worst thing about qr menus for me is that when I finally order, I have to give my phone number and address. Bro, I’m sitting across from the kitchen and just want dumplings. Why I gotta dox myself for that?
Scan QR code. Order on your phone. Pay on your phone. Asks for a tip.
So uh, what exactly am I tipping you here for dawg?
that stuff is nice as an option. There’s a bar I go to that I can order my food and drink to the table my friends are at, while I’m walking to the place, and everything just arrives shortly after I sit down. Other people get offended about how fast I get served, it’s always amusing. I also enjoy not interacting with the staff, nothing against them, brain just doesn’t brain sometimes.
But what if I didn’t have a phone? or if I left home without it? 24/7 pocket rectangle is not natural.
Losing your phone now is like losing not just your wallet but simple access to everything.
Can confirm. Brother had his phone stuck in LA for 2 weeks.
- Hard time signing into some sites as they only had text for 2 factor
- Modern alarm clocks are awful, you only get two options and must be plugged in, so if you want 3 alarms while you’re outside of your house? Fuck you.
- Harder to track public bus routes as not only can you not call dispatch, you can’t check with the app.
There’s probably more but those affected him the most. Genuinely weird that in 2025 alarm clocks are stuck in 1985.
The funny thing about qr codes for restaurant menus to me, as someone that studied menu design. Is that actual menus are designed specific ways make the restaurant more profit and make it easier for people to find what they want. Whereas qr codes often bring one to a hastily designed list of categories which are not only less intuitive but also less manipulative. So people will end up taking longer to order less profitable dishes.
Hell yeah, consumer win. I like selecting an item and it offers me changes or addition options that I never would have considered!
But really, it means they can hire less people so they gain profit anyway.
I’ve been to some that try to upsell you during the checkout process. Big pop up comes up “Add x to your order for $y.99!” Shut the fuck up!
One of these seems to be one of the best ways to order pizza from Papa John’s.
They usually have a special for a Large Pizza for pickup, and at the checkout, you can ignore the add-ons and choose “make it extra large” and it’s the best deal I’ve seen for papa johns XL pizza.
