The Tyranny of Apps
Apps have burrowed their way into seemingly every aspect of our lives and there are lots of reasons why companies are pushing us to use them. With an app, it is often “one click and you’re in”, rather than having to faff around online finding the website and remembering passwords. It is also for the “push notifications” that mobile apps send to grab our attention and get us to buy stuff. Many tech experts also argue that apps are generally more secure than websites and allow banks and others to carry out sophisticated ID verification using face, voice and fingerprint biometrics.
But millions of people who cannot afford a smartphone or have an older device that does not support some services are increasingly being locked out of deals, discounts and even some vital services, say digital exclusion and pro-cash campaigners.
They are missing out on everything from savings on their weekly shop, to some of the best interest rates for their cash. And not signing up to the app revolution is making activities including paying for parking and going to concerts increasingly challenging.
I do have a smartphone, so I can run the apps, but I don’t like it when they could have just been Web sites. Having a large number of these limited-use apps takes up a lot of space: in phone storage, on the home screen, and in the App Store’s list of updated apps. Sometimes an app will have lower quality images/maps than the Web site or will refuse to function, right when you need it, unless you install an update. They’re often less reliable, worse at remembering logins, or require an e-mail magic link dance.
Coming with iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 in April, Apple News+ subscribers will have access to Apple News+ Food, a new section that will feature tens of thousands of recipes — as well as stories about restaurants, healthy eating, kitchen essentials, and more — from the world’s top food publishers, including Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food, and Serious Eats.
With the new Food feature, users will be able to find stories curated by Apple News editors, as well as browse, search, and filter tens of thousands of recipes in the Recipe Catalog — with new recipes added every day.
I think Apple News would have a better user experience with a Web site and an RSS feed than as an app.
Previously:
- An Abridged History of Safari Showstoppers
- U.S. Sues Apple Over iPhone Monopoly
- Apple News You Can’t Use
- News Is Not a Normal Mac App
- Rejected for Being Too Similar to a Web Site
- Smartphones: a Single Point of Failure
- The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough
- Does Apple News Track You?
- Funneling Into Apple News+
- The New York Times Pulls Out of Apple News
Update (2025-02-28): Nick Heer:
If you do not have enough money for a smartphone, you might be locked out of discounts for basic goods. My local supermarket is currently offering a dollar off eggs if I use my personalized coupon — but it is only available in the app.
Even for those of us with smartphones — a majority of people in Canada in all under-75 age groups, for example — we might not want to install software to get grocery coupons or park their car. These apps are often clunky experience, and seem to usually be a website in an app wrapper. Web apps are not treated as mainstream citizens on iOS, in particular, so these bad apps are all we get.
Apple News is not only a mediocre app experience, but its existence also causes regressions on the open web.
Stories in Apple News have a permalink, like anything else on the web. However, unlike just about any link you have seen from a mainstream publication for the past, say, twenty years, these links are inscrutable. Instead of being in a format containing the source of an article and its title, all Apple News permalinks are something like
https://apple.news/Ayls8UZCzQnWfFNRugL3tPA.[…]
In MacOS browsers, I am prompted to open Apple News to view the article; if I decline, I have no next steps.
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Apple News seems to exist to be the opposite of everything Apple is doing to improve the user experience of ordinary web sites. Where I can hide distracting items (great feature) or use content blockers on a web site, on Apple News, I'm stuck with whatever hideous ads and horrible layout they inflict on me. I'm sure the combination of these two opposite movements is no coincidence. Undermine ad buys on the regular internet and try to drive people to buy ads on your own locked in system.
The thing that gets me most is how badly laid out and horribly designed the ad experience is in News app. But maybe they have data showing that obtrusive and ugly ads get more attention?
China has turbo charged this with WeChat and AliPay. As a foreigner it's really hard to get anything done without having at least one of them hooked up to a credit card, and then a data plan obv.
I find it really annoying that I have to order my coffee in an app, especially since I can't read chinese but speak it well enough to order a mid sized cup of hot coffe with no mil or sugar.
I solved it by handing my phone to the person at the desk, telling them what I wanted so that they could enter the order in my app and hand the phone back so that I could pay. Absolutely ridiculous.
ON the other hand there are a bunch of apps I really like. My banking app, my eID, my commutercard, the app that automatically unlocks my front door when I get home.
Isn't it the same tyranny where websites require the latest version of Google Chrome to display a page with just a "hello world" (and do not inform the user about this requirement when they are unable to display it on a good old browser)?
I recently had to approve the release of a research paper at JAMA (as one of many, many, authors). It is not possible to do this on Safari, because when you go to the URL to log in to approve, there is an overlay of some kind of privacy message. In Safari, this does not display, and there is no way to dismiss the overlay. There is no message — just the overlay background. I've complained about this several times, and the only response I get is "use Chrome".
And then you did and you could sign the document? Or did you try Firefox? Or turn off apples security measures for that site?
Meanwhile me and my wife can buy a grocery bag filled with yesterday's bread and pastries for 4usd. Something our 86year old former neighbor would love (she told us when we visited) but first she would have to buy a smartphone because Too Good to Go only works with the app.
There is no alternative for her. And when of she got the phone she would have to learn how to use it.
The bigger issue with Chrome is how Google jag learned from Apple that they can notorise plugins as a way to remove ad blockers.
So all of a sudden I got ads on YouTube. Then I switched to Firefox.
Apps are so much worse than the web.
