I hate smartphones. I fucking hate them. I hate apps. I hate how apps and smartphones ruined the internet. The truth about apps is all of them fucking suck. I just bought a new phone because my old phone was dying and finally I replaced it. I am currently locked out of quite a few very important apps on my new phone. In fact, for some of them I am locked out of them on both phones. This always happens and it’s fucking annoying. For security reasons, I can’t specify which apps, because apps are such pieces of shits when it comes to basic security that mentioning what apps you’re having login issues with makes you easier to hack.
One of the major things I hate about app culture is how everything must have its own app. This is a massive security risk. Some of these exclusive apps are required if you want to use 2FA. This is another massive security hole. We have well established 2FA apps. Your app does not need to be one. In fact, I would never use some apps if they didn’t require the app to be the 2FA. The reason companies do this is so they can artificially inflate their app usage and downloads. I don’t know anyone who actually uses the Steam app, except for its useless Steam Guard features. These Guard features are the authenticator and marketplace approval for selling items. Steam’s app is fucking pointless and is forced onto all of us because Valve would rather make money off of weirdos collecting hats in TF2 than making games.
Another shitty thing about app culture is how none of them properly back shit up. They will store your data to read and harvest everything, but when you switch new phones you will lose it all. WeChat is well known for this. You lose all of your pictures, texts, voice messages, etc but you know for damn sure they keep it on their servers because they have to. This is the same with a lot of messengers. They keep the data to mine it, be it for government purposes or advertising. However, when you sign into a new device they do not grant you the feature of getting your messages. Hell, WeChat doesn’t even grant you the privilege of seeing group chats you are in, until someone sends a message to them. I’m tired of constantly having to make offline backups of my data to restore my accounts. You clearly have them all in your cloud storage. Just let us access the fucking data.
There’s quite a few apps I have where this happens, especially with Chinese apps, but it’s not exclusive to them. Remember those 2FA apps I mentioned before? There’s like 2 that I know of that will let you login to a new device and have your codes loaded for you. Google Auth requires you to manually transfer everything. What happens if your phone gets stolen, or breaks? Get fucked, that’s what. When we had stuff like Yubikeys, and they were actually supported, it was pretty easy to transfer between devices if our keys broke. You can still buy a Yubikey, but few things support it now. You have to use either Google Authenticator or their own app acting as an authenticator. This is a major issue with the modern internet. Our authenticators can’t even connect to the cloud and get us our keys. Even if one does, it still works as ass backwards as possible. When I bought my last phone, I logged into my old authenticator and whenever I enabled cloud sync on my new device, which is required to perform a backup to get your keys, it decided to overwrite my backup with a blank one. Had I traded in my phone I would’ve lost all of my keys.
Then we have the issue of apps ruining the internet. Every website, or service, must be tailored for a smartphone now. This means touch input, the worst in the world, is the most important input system. This also means touch input is king of design. Giant ugly bubbles everywhere and minimalist design reigns supreme because of smartphones. If there is a feature but it can’t work on a smartphone, then it won’t make it into production these days. Apps aren’t just limiting their own design but the design of other systems. If you want to know why every modern website looks the same, and writing is split into micro paragraphs, blame smartphones. Even I have to edit and adjust paragraphs that would be okay if they were written on paper, or read on a monitor, and break them down to be mobile readable. It ruins the flow of everything because I will have to add weird things linking the micro paragraphs to keep the ideas flowing.
This one is just an annoyance, but making you download multiple apps for things that used to be one. Facebook split off messenger and forces you to download a messenger app. Steam split off its chat system, again, making their app even more worthless. I am noticing more and more companies are sectioning off their apps and having you download them as individual apps, which just makes the experience worse. What’s funny is if you use the mobile website for Facebook, and most of these apps, you can use the full service right there in your web browser without an issue. Let’s not forget when a company decides to geofence random parts of the app too. For 0 reason certain features, like the mandatory mobile auth, can be geofenced off because of where you live. I’ve had this happen. Apps that forced me to use their mobile auth locked me out of it because I moved to China. So, I stopped supporting those companies. Rest of the useless app works, just not the reason I had to download it and the only reason I used it. For other apps that geofence off certain features they never geofence these features off the mobile sites. Making the mobile sites a much better service for customers.
Now the big daddy of all issues: Tech support. App developers refused to admit they fucked up. They will blame you, your phone, your cell service, and whatever they can instead of just admitting they fucked up. Right now I am locked out of an app. They’re insisting it’s because my phone number is blocked from getting messages from 6-digit numbers. Nope. I’ve had 4 businesses text me today. Your service is fucking broken, and would you look at that! It’s one of those apps that is required because they insist on you using them for a mobile authenticator instead of using an established one. These companies never have good or reliable customer service, especially when it comes to issues like this. If you’re not able to properly support mobile services and their issues, then don’t fucking make an app. When I worked in loan financing our company was making an app for no fucking reason. It did nothing but bring in tons of customer complaints when the website just worked, even on mobile. We weren’t trained in how to handle these issues. We weren’t trained in how to handle our system not sending out text messages. So, we had to blame the customer. I’m aware how technically inept the average person is with tech but a lot of times it is usually the company’s fault.
At the end of the day, the internet will never get better as long as apps and smartphones reign supreme. At one point I had people beg me to make an app for my website. I could never figure out why. Then it finally hit me. Clicking an icon to open a page to read text is easier than typing in a URL because touch screens are fucking awful. No one wants to admit it, but the reason apps reign supreme is because the only interface for smartphones is one of the worst possible forms of user input. Our fingers are big. Too big for precise input. Something that is required for smartphones to properly work. A band aid fix for this is a giant button meant to attract your attention that’s easier to touch.