Yeah, I love my phone and the whole world it opens up, having access to so much information in my pocket. But I also hate how tied we are to them now. I bought tickets for a gig recently and the only way I can access them is by downloading an app (that I’m only going to use for this one gig). What if I didn’t have a smartphone? What if I didn’t want to take a smartphone to a gig? You aren’t allowed to go to this gig without one, and it’s a small thing, but I don’t like how the option is out of your hands.
Pretty much every supermarket in the UK now requires you to download an app so you can access their offers. I hate this so much.
It is pretty ridiculous. They started doing the same thing with app ticket at Red Rocks in Colorado. So I have an ancient android phone I use for that shit now, doesn’t even have a sim card in it. Has the ticket app and I may put a grocery store app on it at some point, but otherwise it’s factory fresh. They can keep their grubby apps off my real phone.
The most ridiculous part are services insisting you install an app when everything their app does could be in a progressive web app. PWAs are less work to develop as they can run on any device with a browser. For fast food and clothing brands especially, I think PWAs are a no brainer. (Unless you want to track your customers coughTimHortonscough)
It’s your last point there. They want you to install an app because said apps can collect a lot more data points on a
foolconsumer than a web app.Decathlon you need a smartphone for their loyalty card. Only upside is you don’t have to get receipts for their 1 year return policy.
In my country (Czech Republic) you can tell them your email address that is tied to your account
My family got a new KitchenAid stove and I wanted to set a stop time for the oven while we went for a walk. I am able to do this on my shitty oven at our apartment.
I had to connect the stove to wifi, download an app, make an account, and link the stove. All to set a timer. Even then of course there was an error linking them.
Usually I wouldn’t have done that but I was really looking forward to the walk. I was one of the first adopters of Hue lights and used to be excited for smart home stuff. But this is so stupid.
Wondering if it’s some sort of data collection thing and also there’s no way a kitchen appliance company focuses on security and making their wifi connected devices secure.
So dumb.
I never buy any appliances with WiFi or any IoT shit, I draw a hard line there. That shit is cancer.
I’m willing to buy smart appliances, but only if they are LAN only and connect to HomeAssistant. No data collection, no privacy policy, no outside access
It’s getting harder not to buy ones tbh
There’s always a way to get tickets without using an app.
It just takes LOTS OF MONEYYYYY
I thought I lost my phone before moving states and nearly burst into tears. It has my insurance, the map, what if something happened to me on the road, etc. It was an awful spiraling feeling. Thankfully I found it, but it was a hard reality check of how much I have tied to this little device.
Yup. Ive spend a lot of time with backups and screenshots of my apps/home screen in case I need to replace it, and I still get weird when I think about it. Years of settings and customization built up, no way I’d be able to get it back 100%.
Why don’t you just back things up through iCloud or Google Drive?
I do, but it doesn’t back up everything. Android just doesn’t have the backup that apple has unfortunately.
I run a contracting business and have had straight panic attacks over not being able to find my phone as I’m rushing out the door for the day. I really need to set up an asterisk server and keep my sim cards there but I just don’t have time, nor am I paying a service a ridiculous monthly fee to run it.
I know Apple is restrictive, like that other guy who commented who likes to apply customizations, but I love that apple products talk to each other seamlessly. I could have gone on through my tablet, except that I don’t pay for it to have its own wireless signal.
That’s actually how I found my phone. My neighbor let me tag on to her WiFi and I used the Find My Phone feature with my iPad. Saved me from a meltdown lol
Uhm can you explain a little more about the asterisk server and the sims cards. I thought asterisk wasn’t for mobile phones.
I’m trying to remember myself, but I remember reading about a way to feed a sim interface into a digital telephony card for use with asterisk. It was basically like a modem the fed a voip/sip line into the system. This was years ago that I read this and I could be completely misremembering it.
Just give me the bloody neurolink already, I’m ready to ascend into the hivemind
My uncle doesn’t have a cell phone and he has to borrow everyone’s phones all the time and it’s gotten to the point where people are just refusing to let him borrow their phones.
I love those qr codes at restaurants. No need to interact with waiters. Just browse and order at my leisure.
Personally, I hate it. they’re only ever in places with terrible cell reception and no Wi-Fi.
Or the Wi-Fi is so damn throttled because they’re being overwhelmed by everyone trying to look at their menu at the same time.
I wish there was some universal app or website template for restaurants with functionality just like Wetherspoons! selecting a table number then ordering everything directly from there. no social interaction with the staff required… it is heavenly.
All the qr I’ve used are just web url. I just scan them with my brave browser app. No need for a separate app install. In fact I think that’s what people mostly gripe about, needing to install another app just to make an order.
I’m SzPD and not from the states. Had to go through Houston last year on a connection flight, when I first saw those tablets in the airport I thought it would’ve been the bees knees. Thing is, those things are so overloaded with useless shit (like ads) I just wanted to talk to a waiter. So many clicks to get to the main courses on offer, and there wasn’t any available space for notes, in case a costumer had a specific need (allergies for example). Plus, signal was so damn slow it took a while for it to load the dishes’ pictures.
No contact ordering has potential but it needs UX designers on top of the whole thing in order to make it more convenient and faster than just telling the waiter what you want.
I can see how it can get annoying if that’s the case for you, or in America in general. Maybe that’s how shitty the experience is in the US that people really love to complain about it. Seriously, every single time a thread about how deeply smartphones are embedded into society comes up, someone will gripe about qr code incessantly. Be it on reddit, fb, and now here.
I’m from Malaysia and eateries here are very good at it. None of those ads, no pesky additional install, really good ticketing system, and easy payment process at the counter with ewallet (also qr code) once you’re done. All I bring is my phone and car keys. Data and coverage here is very good and cheap on all carriers, so photos and menus loading time is never an issue.
I don’t need to call on that single waiter in the restaurant to make an order or to see the menu. I just sit my ass down and scan. The order goes straight to the kitchen and they only need to send my food to the table.
In my corner of the world we’re not there yet, a handful of places have adopted online menus but even those are a hassle. Most places just upload their physical menus as a pdf and call it a day, the others ignore basic principles of design and make the site overcomplicated.
If it were to be implemented in some new restaurant, I hope it gets implemented as you describe it, sounds like a dream.
Funny I just was thinking if I could go a weekend without my phone. And if I did it how many people would I have to tell before I did it so I didn’t get a bunch of crap for not answering texts for 2 days!
Yes! So many things that where previously websites require apps nowadays. Makes it hard to function in society for me as I (with very few exeptions) refuse to install closed source software on my computer or phone.
My wifi router needs a app to change any settings on it, its so stupid too, if you try the normal method of changing settings via a web browser it just gives you a flat out “no download our app” and the app is functionally worse with less features than what the old wifi router settings page used to give, its so unnecessary and annoying how everything that used to work fine with a website is needlessly packaged into a (often inferior) app.
That’s hillariously bad… my condolences.
I would recommend getting a router that you can flash wrt or advanced tomato on. If you want to go hardcore, you can get a server with pfsense.
It’s a good thing and a bad thing imo.
People now can keep and relive moments easier and faster than ever before, but it does suck how big companies now just use it to do anything and how ads are just thrown everywhere to make every possible penny they can.
As someone who grew up before computers and smartphones were commonplace, for the most part you could still life in the same way as you did before computers and smartphones, because all the things you’d need still exist. You’d just be horribly out of the loop of the way modern life functions… But you could do it.
What’s interesting is that pretty much no one wants to live this way any more. It was pretty damn boring a lot of the time.
I’m trying to not spend too much of my time online and I’m going kinda successful on that. But I can’t say the same about living without smartphone. I need it to study through PDFs and reading EPUB books. I’m 31 years old, so I picked a tiny part of the “pre terminally online era” during my childhood. However, I’ve became a sort of internet addict in my teens. I should be avoided it, but it’s a bit to late. Can’t fix the past, but I can fix my future.
Yeah but maybe a bit of our problem is people don’t get bored anymore. The feeling of boredom is an important one and we stuff it down with dopamine doping and doom scrolling. When I was a child, if I got bored I went outside, or I saw if my friend could play, or I got a toy out. Once smart phones came along suddenly being bored was just an invitation for Reddit— Lemmy— to fill in the void.
I’m glad that Lemmy is not as addictive as Reddit was. I want to be bored a bit sometimes. Boredom makes me do chores instead of ignore them. Or play with my kid more. Or go hiking.
I don’t imagine 80s kids would have said they had boring childhoods, just because they weren’t completely soaked up with phones demanding their attention 24/7.
My childhood wasn’t boring, but I was bored an awful lot. And I agree, boredom can be a great motivator. But I can’t say that I miss being bored.
I think nobody would really say their childhood was boring. But if you were to take a kid from the 80s and a kid today and compare their daily lives, regardless of what interests they have, the 80s kid would find their own life pale in comparison. You’ve got video games, movies, social media, news, books, and music on the entertainment front. There’s so many paths to express one’s creativity, whether in art, music, engineering, film. And of course nothing is really stopping you from doing anything you could do 30 years ago and doing it today.
This. It destroys real life community and severs local bonds between people. It makes one ungrounded.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
I’m having to work on a safety plan for a trade school. There is no good way of establishing communication across campus in the event of a disaster outside of A) Walkie Talkies or B) Cellphones. And honestly I can’t entrust faculty and staff to grab a walkie talkie in such an event. What I can trust is that they’ll have their cellphone on them.
To take a step back and think of our parents letting us out of the house to roam where we did without having any way of getting into contact with us is absolutely bonkers to me as a parent now.
You’ve bought into paranoia. In the US, most areas are far safer than they were in previous generations. Crime rates are largely down from their highs in the 70’s and 80’s. And even the 90’s wasn’t a safe time, by comparison. Even in the 90’s, the whole “stranger danger” crap was so overblown that it probably did far more harm than good. The problem today is that news, both traditional and online are a 24x7 feed of “doom, DOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” which give a horribly skewed perspective on how bad things really are. For my own kids, they disappear with the neighbors’ kids for hours at a time, and we’ll call them in when it gets dark. This usually involves either yelling from the front porch (I really wish I could whistle like my mother did. I could hear that whistle a mile off); or, calling around to the various houses until we find them. They don’t have cell phones yet, and probably won’t for a few more years, as they just don’t need them. Also, I don’t want to worry about an expensive electronic device ending up left somewhere or smashed.
Oh no, I agree with you entirely. That’s my point, I know it’s safer than ever and yet I still want that connection. You can call that paranoia, I call it an overabundance of caution for the soul that means most to me. How my parents did it without that connection during a time that wasn’t safe by comparison is amazing to me.
I’m not worried about my child’s safety in terms of other people. I’m worried because I know all the dumb, outright dangerous shit I did as a child and that they are as predisposed as I am.
A bit of things are harder to do now, without smartphone or especially without computers. I have no idea how this is going in the US, but here (France) there’s been a big push for “all online” stuff, including mandatory administrative tasks. Less digital alternative are still mostly available, but the trend of being able to handle thing without computers is clearly dying. And yes, this means an increasing number of people is lost and can’t do stuff we expect them to do; it seems not enough people care.
And, even outside of that, having a bank account these days can require having a smartphone, more specifically an iOS or Android; the “bank app” being used as an authenticator and required for anything from logging-in on their website to performing money transfers.
We still can operate offline, mostly, but there’s a huge push toward changing that. And I’m not sure there’s a way to make that without leaving a lot of people behind.
Yes we are probably at the tail end of the time where you can still pay with cash, go to the bank branch, handle things at government offices, etc.
I strongly believe we will evolve around the technology we created.
What made sapiens evolution unique was our ability to communicate. We are exponentially increasing that ability.
I went from a wallet with a bunch of cards and a bit of cash to my phone. nothing else. haven’t used cash or my physical card in years
I dont own a cellphone and get by through borrowing family member’s phones or asking strangers if I can make a call if I’m out on my own, it usually works out fairly well.
However whenever I run into online services that require a phone to make an account or whatever I usually get screwed- so I usually just use a family member’s phone # if I know they’ll never use the site or whatever or utilize a 10 minute/fake phone # creation site if I dont care about the site or service I’m signing up for.
To be fair you are the burden on your family here. This isn’t living without - it’s sticking everyone else with your problem.
Eh, I assure you the burden of buying a brand new 500~1000$ phone and then paying a monthly bill to provide it with service would be a far far greater burden then allowing me to use their phone to make important calls once a week if not less, and letting me use it to sign up to a site/video game maybe a couple times a year.
Absolutely, it’s definitely a bigger burden for you to shell out $1000 for a top of the line phone, and then pay hundreds of dollars a month for service…dude, An android phone from Dollar General is $30 and pay as you go. You’re just putting the burden off to others because you don’t want to be inconvenienced.
Well, to be honest I had no idea that cheap phones like that existed.
Besides costs though the main reason I dont decide to get a phone is just due to all the data collection they do, plus nearly every service and government/housing/job related thing connected to me uses the family phone #, switching them over would take hours if not days of calling, settings editing or paperwork to do.
I already pay for my family’s house, food and utilities so I don’t really see why its an issue to borrow the family’s # every now and then.
If you still have good computer access, you could make a Google phone number. Pretty much what it sounds like, gives you a free phone number, you can check messages / calls all on desktop
Sounds useful, albeit probably spyware ridden but what isnt these days eh?
I might look into using that for at least google’s services.
That’s how I read it too. It’s not “look how well I’m doing without a smart phone”, it’s more like “I don’t want a phone, but have no issues placing the burden of my actions on others”
It’s not him that gets consequences of a leaked number.
My phone borked on me recently but I got it up with a complete system upgrade and install from scratch. Meanwhile I realized how dependent I am on it for everything from communication to identification to transportation to deliveries to intercom and beyond. I don’t like it with this single point of failure.
I guess so but they are rather helpful still, so…
I’ll tell ya, it’s getting a lot harder to drive around my horse and buggy with all these darned automobiles on the road. These iron chariots are making the simple pleasures a real humdinger.
Horses and iron chariots are evil capitalist ploy. Embrace walking bare foot.
fire-breathing dragons, they are!
I regularly live with a dumbphone. All it can really do is makes calls and text. Its only difficult if you give a shit about social media and chat apps. I don’t so its easy
I can’t do online shopping without accepting a notification on my bank’s app. That’s not “social media and chat apps”.
Can’t you set it back to sending you a text with a code to input back? That’s what I’m doing with my bank, my dumbphone is on its way.
I have no actual idea, but I don’t think so as it’s an “online” bank where you set up the account on the mobile app. There’s no other way to set up an account with this bank.
Oh. Here in France, even online banks still have web apps.
Anyway the assumption that every user has a smartphone is now very prevalent and it’s going to get harder and harder to not have one, but I really want to go against the trend.
Yes, web apps, yes. But to confirm online payments you usually need the app. That’s true at least of N26.
If you use a a third party processor for payments like privacy.com or PayPal does it still need the app?
May be. I have no idea.
I dont own a computer. My whole internet access is through my phone. It’s necessary for me
That definitely makes it harder. When I was first switching I still kept my smartphone, I just had it turned off in my bag. If I ran into something that needed it, I would use it and work out a long term solution later.
Now I split my time between a dumbphone and a de-google smartphone with very restricted apps. I take the smartphone out when I know its gonna be a busy day or I have errands, but for a basic day of going to work and back home, a dumbphone is fine
