> users can choose not to use a service
By that logic you can just not use Google. But that's ridiculous, as ridiculous as the statement that users can choose not to use a service. I believe it's impossible to live in modern society without having an account in FAANG, even harder than a business not having a google maps listing.
I just visited family in California and I was surprised at how many things needs an app now, and there is no alternative.
For example, I went to visit the beach, which is on a national park. Parking required an app. There were park rangers there, the location was staffed, but they did not accept cash or credit card. Just an app. And there are two phone operating systems now, Apple and Android. So no. Can’t live without FAANG. I ended up downloading the app on the spot and purchasing a pass.
I’m sure the park service does this for their convenience. And it’s so populated near the coasts that if anyone doesn’t comply, they still have plenty of people who would gladly use the app. They can get away with demanding smartphone use. You can certainly get away with not having a smartphone further inland, and not needing to depend on FAANG explicitly. But I know this expectation is going to creep into the continent over time. In 5 years, if you say “I don’t have a smart phone” you’ll just be denied service. Period. No questions asked. And you will be considered the unreasonable party by most.
> They can get away with demanding smartphone use.
> In 5 years, if you say “I don’t have a smart phone” you’ll just be denied service. Period. No questions asked.
IANAL, but I feel like that should be illegal.
Sure, they can set up an app and those who want to use it may do so, but for things things like parking there ought to be an alternate. Beach, national park etc is a predominantly offline service for which it's absurd to insist on using an app.
Especially for something that's on a "national park" — I don't really know what the "national" part indicates (not from USA) but I'm assuming that the govt is involved.
Somebody should go to court.
If you can't pay the government using cash they printed, thar be problems in dem thar hills.
It should definitely be illegal. There are so many other options for charging these kinds of fees, all of which were used by public bodies in the US in the past, from dropping envelopes of money in a box to paying a person at a kiosk or using a vending machine to buy passes. Many of these payment methods are still in use at some parks/facilities.
The noose is tightening around the necks of those few of us who do not use smartphones. I hope a future wave of 'tech minimalism' gains enough traction to ensure that there are alternatives, but for now, as we ride the wave of tech-optimism and the mass adoption of intrusive technologies in the name of convenience or cost cutting, most people seem to see asking for alternatives as unreasonable.
There is an element of innate freedom in anonymous, analogue processes, even if they are not entirely 'anonymous' - such as writing a car license plate number on an envelope of cash for a drop box - it might as well be if the information is never entered into a searchable digital database where it will presumably be stored for eternity.
I few years ago I went camping at a state park in a system that had recently introduced usage fees (having always been free in the past). The state apparently partnered with some obscure parking app company to collect the fees. The use of the state park required submitting a considerable amount of information to a third party, with little or no information on how that data might be used, stored, or sold - in essence you had no choice but to submit to a third party's TOS in order to use public facilities at all. I did not like this at all, and having no smartphone, I paid cash at the manned office - only to have them collect my information and enter it into the parking app database.
A few months ago someone here made a comment in another discussion about having a pervasive sense that things are not quite as they should be. That stuck with me.
In my country the religious eschew smartphones, so every service has an alternative. I often have to pretend that I am of that group to avoid "just installing an app" for something as simple as taking a place in a line at a physical location.
Guessing by your name that you're Israeli, and you're speaking of the more Orthodox communities there...
In the US, there are still large groups of Mennonites whose choices to avoid most post-19th century technology are generally well-accepted by the rest of the population, the best known of which are the Amish. They do travel around to varying extents, because not every Mennonite community agrees to what degree to avoid technology and under what circumstances - some have a community cellphone, some even have family cars (with a preference for less showy models); many are fine with taking public transit or hiring an "English" (non-Amish) driver. Individual smartphone ownership and use would conflict very strongly with what I understand of even the most "liberal" Amish communities, though.
There's got to be some sort of alliance that privacy-conscious techies can form with technology-skeptical religious communities, despite radically different worldviews.
This is pretty much the only thing stopping me from throwing my smartphone in the sea and never looking back, it's actually quite hard to avoid needing one to interact with society.
Half of NZ's EV charging networks require an apps which are only available in NZ's app store...
No you can't just use a web app.
Hell, in five years you won't be able to transact without an iris scan and social credit linked to your digital money.
> I’m sure the park service does this for their convenience.
Nooooo...this is dark UX to artificially increase the number of violators and collect more revenue.
I expected better from the park service but around here they've started making people enter their license plate number on parking lot passes too to prevent the time-honored tradition of sharing day passes. They're in revenue-generating mode these days.
Case in point:
I had to drop off a cashier's check at a landlord's office. Same deal-- paid streetside parking, but didn't realize it was app-only. I struggled with downloading the app on a crappy connection and couldn't successfully pay for parking after 45 minutes of fucking with it.
What am I going to do, leave? I drove an hour to get there and had 3 minutes' worth of business there. In the end I just ended up parking illegally.
To be any scummier, they'd have to implement paid parking at rest stops and ticket anybody who dashes past the meter trying to get to the bathroom before they piss themselves.
> I believe it's impossible to live in modern society without having an account in FAANG
Oh, this is completely possible -- I do it.
But it won't stop them from getting your personal data.
What smartphone do you use?
People get along fine without accounts in FAANG. You don't even need an account to use many Google services.
Who lives fine without a smartphone today? See your sibling comment for an example.
I do in the UK (use a desktop for digital services), but I will need a phone next year after my current contract ends since employers like to have a chat via phone after applications.
I do.
What do you do when you need it? Banking or CC app for mandatory 2FA? gvmt Covid mandatory app to travel anywhere? QR code for restaurants? Places that require an app in general?
This is ofc locale-dependent, but if before the pandemic you could barely live without a smartphone, today is just impossible (at least in the 2 countries I visit often).
> Banking or CC app for mandatory 2FA?
Switched banks.
> gvmt Covid mandatory app to travel anywhere?
There wasn't one, thank $DEITY (Germany).
> QR code for restaurants?
Never encountered one without a menu yet, but I'd just go to another one.
> Places that require an app in general?
Never encountered those, either. There was one on my offline backpacking trip which required digital payment. It was sad, but I had to forfeit.
Thanks, and indeed.
Some places do require an app and while there are alternatives, there may not be another choice in the future. But not today, most of my elderly neighbours also don't own a smartphone and yet they survive in this city (Antwerp).
Life without a smartphone is possible, and imho calmer and more relaxed.
To be fair even the surveillance-obsessed UK offered a paper alternative to the vaccine passport scheme, although Partygate completely crippled the government's political capital for keeping restrictions around anyway not long after if I remember correctly.
Banks tend to have some back up, such as a TAN generator. I have used those for Euro bank accounts that require 2FA. US bank accounts are usually fine with a phone number, which can be a dumb phone. There were no real covid restrictions where I live, and no app, so that was not a problem (but that is definitely something people should push back against, as it's horrifying). I would never, ever eat in a restaurant that required you to use a QR code. They can simply go to hell. It's mostly trendy places that do that, anyway, and I prefer hole-in- the-wall restaurants anyway. I understand this stuff is a lot more advanced in some countries, but even in the US it's pretty easy to get by without any of it.
> Banking or CC app for mandatory 2FA?
The easiest way to avoid this is by going physically to your bank branch.
> gvmt Covid mandatory app to travel anywhere?
Don't live in a country that does this, so I don't know.
> QR code for restaurants?
I ask for a menu.
> Places that require an app in general?
Haven't seen that happen yet. There are some parking lots that require an app to park in them, but I just park elsewhere. The laundry room in my apartment complex requires an app to pay, so I just go to the laundromat down the street instead.
I do have a smartphone, although I'll switch to the dumbest phone I can find when this one dies. I do not use any apps for doing any commerce or the like, though. It's far too risky for my taste.
Aside, one of the best hacks for networking without a smartphone is a small notepad and a pen in your pocket. Write things down for yourself and others e.g. phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, reminders.
I do. I am beginning to feel the costs though. Even telling people that I don't have one is getting a bit awkward. Imagine the look of incomprehension.
A lot of people talk about 'needing' a smartphone for services/stuff I have never used, and probably would never use. I suppose I just kept living my life as I did before the 2010s, while everyone else changed. I was already in my 30s at that time, so not subject to the same social pressures a younger person would have felt, so perhaps it was easier.
When I tell people that, sorry, I don't have WhatsApp, they either look at me like I have a screw loose, or offer to help me install it (I am a middle-aged lady, so technical incompetence must be my excuse). I'd love to see the reaction to pulling out an old-school flip-phone, or providing an obvious land-line number!
That and my avoidance of Facebook didn't really matter until I had a kid and he started nursery school. I somehow got myself elected head of the Parents' Council, but it's been tough dealing with the mental block the slightly-younger generation has for email, and Signal is apparently a little too out there for non-techy 20/30-somethings of either gender.
I'm not as privacy-conscious as you, as I have a fairly recent iPhone; I'd probably be better described as social-media-skeptical, but your right to live a normal life without a smartphone is tied to my right to live a normal life without intrusive social media.
I've encountered the WhatsApp issue too. It's the communication tool in some parts of the world, but not others. In some circles people cannot imagine that you are a living breathing person who does not have it.
I use a bottom tier flip phone in the US, and a 13 year old Nokia with a pay-as-you go SIM in Europe.
I've noticed that there has been a generational shift towards smartphone-only communications, but I haven't really had to deal with it. I'd like to hear more about that. Oddly I use some of the same communication tools that young kids use, namely Discord, as it doesn't require a phone number. Linking online accounts and communications to a phone number has always put me off.
In Germany, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, possibly because when it hit the app stores, a lot of people were still paying per SMS, but had adequate data plans, and offered easy-enough group chats early on that at least felt private.
Also, even a lot of Facebook skeptics have no idea they’re owned and run by the same company…
I think the shift to smartphone-based communication is part of a vicious cycle of people giving up personal use of “real” computers, making a letter-replacement email something more comfortable to conduct as a bunch of short texts, which also have the “benefit” of quicker feedback before having to reveal the next thought.
Even I spent awhile when I first got a smartphone (ca. 2010) feeling like what I typed into or read on the device in an app was more confidential than what I did on a full computer, even though I intellectually understood what an API was and that apps that communicated outside the phone were essentially very niche web browsers. These little devices that fit in our pockets, have cute cases that we picked out, and are cradled in our hands just feel less scary than a desktop or even laptop that can get viruses and throw up cryptic errors and chime accusingly at us when they don’t like something we did.
So now we all have these little tethers that started out being a lot cheaper than a new laptop (but now easily cost $500+)
Early motherhood is particularly good at providing compelling use cases for a smartphone. Baby spending 45 minutes every 2-3 hours leisurely feeding, frantically reaching out to more experienced friends (or your various moms’ groups) for help with a small but urgent problem - much easier to pick up the little device with your free hand than to break out the laptop.
So once the kid is in nursery school at 12-18 months, even if you used to be a laptop user at home, your communications habits have been thoroughly changed.
And since mothers are the main social organizers, their preferred means of communication will dominate. Absolutely no one was interested when I offered to set up a website for the nursery school Parents’ Council, and from the perspective of people mostly ok with Facebook and WhatsApp, I understand the many reasons why.
Here, desktop for online services, flip phone when traveling, VOIP for most phone usage.
You can't download apps on your phone without logging into a FAANG account in the app store.
This is patently false.
I've been using GrapheneOS with F-droid and Aurora Store without logging into a Google account for years.
I've yet to run into a single thing I either couldn't use or couldn't work around.
Does that include banking and credit card apps? Most of my bank and card accounts require their own phone app to authorise transactions from time to time, and several accounts require their phone app to authenticate login to online banking, even if I'm opening it in a regular desktop browser on another computer. Three of those accounts don't have any other way of being managed than online, so their phone app (or tablet app) is mandatory to do anything with the account.
I had to buy a replacement phone in a hurry last year when my old phone's screen stopped working, just so I could login to make an urgent bank transfer. I would have preferred to take my time over what to buy, but so many financial things I use are blocked without a smartphone now.
Yes, it does. Even my podunk little credit union's app works absolutely fine.
Yes, every banking and financial app I have tried runs just fine on GrapheneOS.
The digital ID app in Sweden (BankID) recently started requiring google play services.
99.999% of businesses don't publish APKs or upload them to F-Droid. Expecting people to use third party distribution mechanisms like Aurora store is entirely unreasonable.
As for "working around" it, it's ridiculous to impose that expectation on the general population. Sure, you and I will always be able to find a way to hack around restrictions, but it's inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of the population.
What is unreasonable about showing people there's another interface to access all the apps in the Google Play Store, where you can download and use all of them without signing into a Google account?
Because Google could flip a switch and stop that at any moment. There is a systemic problem with how society is becoming more and more reliant upon a few large tech firms. Work arounds will work whilst they're small enough and fly under the radar, but if they get larger they'll be stopped by the holders of the binaries.
We're increasingly like animals that become dependent on a single source of food or a single watering hole. It's really risky. You could hardly design more fragile systems (or business models) that depend in these very narrow bottlenecks.
So we should...submit to the binary already, in case the binary closes the loophole? How is that a solution?
Such a HN comment lmao
Aurora store does not work anymore without a google account, at least for now. Google blocked their proxy accounts, I think. So curently there is no secure way to install apps from the play store without an account.
This isn't true either. I'm still actively using Aurora Store without signing into a Google account.
See https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore/-/issues/912#note_1... and https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore/-/issues/917. But right, this seems to have moved from "not working at all" to "being flaky", though it absolutely did not work for me.
Does Foobar national park publish their app to F-droid?
The exception does not disprove the rule.
Most people use phones they bought at their local electronics store, with default Android OS and default settings.
You can use android without logging into a google account with the default ROM and settings, just don't log in. I'm surprised more people don't do this, the app store is the only thing you "need" a google account for, and before they banned Aurora it was trivial to use it too.
The claim was "You can't."
The exception establishes that you can.
The exception very specifically and precisely does disprove the rule.
If you use aurora store you use google accounts. Someone else made them for you, but you're still using them.
Does it work for Lyft / Uber?
I can use Lyft with no issue. I prefer it to Uber, so haven't tries Uber.
Increasingly, even public agencies require/assume people to have a smartphone now, either an iPhone or an Android.
At that point, you literally cannot live as an adult in the society without FAANG dependence, even if it's a third party Android phone, at least not legally.