There’s a ton of reasons to hate having to have an app to do simple things.
First, a lot of these apps require permission to access certain features of your phone. E.g., you contact list, your phone logs, your text messages, your location and on and on.
No, you do NOT need to do this to manage a light bulb.
Even if they aren’t explicitly asking for such permissions, the app can be doing all sorts of mal-warey things to grab information on you.
They are also bloat ware. Taking up a lot of space on the phone.
And of course they need to be updated every 2 and a half days. Which means before you know it your phone is “out dated” and can’t run the app anymore.
There is a lot more going on here in terms of avoiding apps than just being a Luddite.
Nah, I got this phone for free for signing up for a 2 year service contract, back when they did that to entice customers. About the time I was contemplating upgrading because ooohhh, shiny they had quit subsidizing phones and they’re just too dang pricey for me to justify the expense when my old phone does everything I need. Mostly.
I have an SD card in my phone, 32GB, I think. Maybe 64GB. Whatever the largest size the phone would support is. Problem is, a great majority of apps are not able to be moved to the SD card unless you phone is jailbroken, for whatever reason. I’m not keen to do that. I’ve never heard of Adaptable Memory. I’m intrigued. I will have to look into that. Thank you for the tip!
This is why I only have a flip phone. I am very familiar with Android and iOS, but I don’t like the fact that they use up gigabytes a week doing nothing other than tracking me and selling this data for profit. Even if you don’t put another app on the phone. I fix other people’s smart phones but use a lame LG flippy for myself. Yeah, I can text faster than a lot of people with a smart phone too. Siri doing the texting for you, though, is pretty sweet if it can understand my East Texas accent.
I used to work at a place that wanted you to use a smart phone to clock your hours in and out. I told them that if they wanted to do away with a paper record, they could buy me a smart phone. This company had about 30 employees. I informed them that I would leave it in our workshop, I would use it to clock in and out on and that was it. After a bunch of hubba bubba, they elected to ditch the entire software package (which cost them over $5,000, plus had to pay for 24 months of software support) because they refused to buy me a phone.
Its kind of a funny story. The HR lady that insisted that the new “hours tracking smart phone bullshit” was implemented threw a fit when I told them I was not about to go under contract paying 30 bucks a month, plus a data package ATT or Verizon or whomever for the latest version of iPhone at the time that would support the application (you had to use the iPhone thumbprint scanner). The owner of the company called me into the office and asked me, “What the hell is your problem with this new time clock system.” I told him what the hell my problem was, and explained to him that he was an idiot for buying into this garbage so his vastly over paid HR lady could do less work while I functionally got paid less because I was taking out a debt to make her fucking job easier. I reminded him that the stupid over paid HR lady didn’t generate any revenue to pay for his frequent trips to Destin, Florida, it was me and the rest of the technicians that brought home the fucking bacon. I offered to do everyone’s payroll and bet him that I could get it done on the day before pay day in about an hour and a half with our old quick books system. He said something to the effect of “Now that an answer that makes sense to me. Thanks.”
He ended up firing that lady before the month was out and did the payroll himself. Looking back now, I kinda feel bad for the lady, but if she wasn’t so much of a twat in the first place I wouldn’t have protested as hard. What goes around comes around I guess.
Well, I didn’t think I needed to spell out all the exceptions to “all.” I go on backpacking trips to get away from the technological world from time to time. That doesn’t make me part-time homeless.
That said, a smartphone is a little different in that it is light and unobtrusive and can easily be put in a mode where it will not bother you. And yet it is still there in case you need to call someone in an emergency, find out where you are via GPS, take some notes after a flash of brilliance from your cleared head, or just take a picture of some remarkable thing. If none of those things are useful at the moment, then the phone just sits quietly in your pocket.
Print vs. eBook isn’t a valid comparison here. Both have positive qualities, and one may prefer either depending on the circumstances. The comparison is eBook vs. nothing, since we’re talking about not carrying a smartphone at all, and there’s no “analog” equivalent to a smartphone’s capabilities in most cases.
You didn’t bring up cost, but someone will. Even quite poor people can afford them. Almost all the cost in a phone is in the voice/data plan, and yet most of a smartphone’s capabilities are there even without a plan at all. Free WiFi is available all over the place, and you need only an occasional data connection to get most of the utility out of one.
What gets me is the app for the local public transit system (and for a bunch of other urban transit systems across the country-- The same company makes the apps for them and just changes the branding on it). It wanted permissions for absolutely everything on the phone, with just one exception. OK, I can see why a transit app might want access to your location: You want to be able to ask it “What’s the quickest route from here to…”, or “When is the next bus arriving at the stop I’m currently waiting at?”, or whatever. But why on Earth would it need access to the camera? The microphone? My e-mail and phone contacts? If you’re harvesting all that data from me, I expect you to be paying me, not the other way around (the app itself is free, but you can use it to pay fares).
Which brings me to that one exception, the one thing it didn’t ask for access to: Google Pay. The primary purpose of this app is paying fares, so it needs some way of processing money. I trust Google to do that securely. I don’t trust some skeevy company’s half-baked in-house method for doing it. What’s to say that they don’t have some glaring security holes that will result in some hacker taking a thousand “bus rides” an hour as me? What’s to say that (given that they’ve already proven that they can’t be trusted) they won’t just rob me themselves?
I’ll see your TV and raise you…outdoor Christmas lights. No, really.
We bought red and green holiday spotlights for the trees. Set up on the lawn, direct as desired, and turn on…with an app on your phone. They are wireless and you can only turn them on by downloading the app, a feature we did not realize they had when we bought them. Why in the name of Clark Griswold did they feel that extension cord technology was obsolete? This sounds exactly like the “who cares what they want, we’re doing it because we can” attitude mentioned above.
I’m reminded of an episode of Celebrity Apprentice some years back where the assignment for the week was for a hair salon products company. The CEO was lauding his newest innovation - the first hairdryer with a touch screen. That’s right, the buttons on the device to operate blower and speed and heat were touch screen buttons. :smack:
My thought was Why? Does the world need this? Apparently because we can do it we must do it.
Just because I have a smart phone doesn’t mean I want to load it with apps for every little thing, or that I want to have to use it for every little thing.
And yeah, I’m a bit technology adverse. I’m a slow adapter.
By the way, since we’ve established what a millennial is, what do we call the generation born since 2000?
I’ve also occasionally heard Homeland Generation. Right now, it does seem Gen Z is winning out. We’ll see if it sticks or not. Hard to tell, as when Gen X was coined (early 90s), the Millennials were Gen Y, and it wasn’t until the 2000s that Millennials became the accepted name for the generation.
shrug
They don’t exist yet and aren’t influencing culture or the economy so there’s not a lot of point to talking about them as a demographic cohort yet.
I’m sure when they do exist, there will be plenty of articles about how they’re the worst for you to read though.
What, no mention of Generation X? As usual, we’re forgotten…
During my career, whatever that is, I’ve had the privilege of working for an “old school” company (Xerox), developing and releasing product that anyone could use, because it always shipped with a manual.
Fast forward a few years*…actually not that many, and in software, particularly gaming, the trend is to ship without manuals of any kind. The assumption seems to be that users will just figure it out, or seek answers online. Eventually the fan base builds a wiki of info about the game.
Other technologies, smartphones, remotes, garage door openers, have all their info including answers to common problems available online. If the tech-savvy population is able to figure it out, then maybe the incentive these days is to just assume it’s not a problem to release product with minimal instructions?
We couldn’t have done that at Xerox, but times have changed.
*This fast forward was only 5 to 10 years, believe it or not.
When I hear of an app asking for wide-open permissions like that, I don’t think that they are actually harvesting information. I just think that they are probably not very good app developers and just threw the permissions wide open so they don’t have to deal with them.
No. There are grabbing your data because data = $. It takes work to put in all the stuff necessary for an app store to clear your app for each “bonus” permission. It’s easier, cheaper, faster to skip the extra stuff. Remember, the default is no permissions.
Now laziness explains the unbelievable size and other issues apps have.
I must be a strange fellow, but when I buy a device the most important thing is the remote control. If it is not well designed and does offer the right functionalities I know I will be frustrated, so this is my KO-criterium. I cannot buy on line devices that have a remote control (TV , set top box and stereo, in my case). I have to touch that.
You ever heard of GE’s lightbulb resetting procedure? You don’t need your smartphone for that, it is for the unlikely (sic!) case that the smartphone or the lightbulb hang themselves up.
GE has even made a video explaining how to reset the connection between your light bulb und your smartphone. I think it is funny, though I guess the producers from GE meant that in all seriousness.