I tried looking at the reviews for a monitor, and when I clicked “see more reviews” I got redirected to a page asking me to login and to provide my mobile phone number (which I didn’t do for privacy reasons).
On Instagram I was confused at everyone else mentioning Instagram stories because I only have the option of uploading pictures and videos. Then I found out that it’s something you can only do if you use Instagram on a phone… I swear I’ve came across a few sites that wouldn’t even let you sign up if you were using a PC
I only ever browse social media on a PC and that’s the way it will always be. Sometimes I can’t help but feel like desktop/computer users are becoming an afterthought. Anyone else have similar feelings? 🫠
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Same.
There’s almost never only a single option to offer me what I’m after, so I’ll just go back to my search results or whatever and pick the next link and move on.
There’s no way in hell I’m giving some jackasses my phone number, though. I don’t even like giving people who really actually need to be able to call me my number, so why would I give some sketchy-ass website it?
Yes, I hate it. In fact, I hate most of the impact of smartphones on the internet:
- I’m not giving you my phone number. Shu’up. Stop asking.
- I’m not installing your broken browser made for a single site. Aka, your “app”. And if you don’t let me check your site without that “app”, I am not doing it.
- Smart web devs can deal with different screen ratios, but those are a minority. So guess what - I get blank space on both sides of my screen!
- I’ve noticed (based on myself + acquaintances) that people have worse basic reading comprehension when using a phone than a computer. And I’m tempted to blame the sorry state of social media partially on that.
It’s because the apps work as black boxes stopping the end user from blocking their telemetry, advertising and tracking.
What I hate more is how companies deliberately add blocks to their websites if you’re on mobile so as to force the user to download the app.
Two of the most egregious samples I’ve seen so far is Microsoft teams that shows a banner saying “this browser is not supported”, but switching your user agent or enabling desktop mode from within your phone’s browser makes it work perfectly fine.
Another is Facebook (yuck) which displays a fake loading bar that never finishes unless you trick it the same way as with teams. Their mobile site prevents you from posting anything, commenting, viewing random posts, uploading files, or seeing notifications. If you don’t have the app installed, you’re essentially locked out of messenger because it is reluctant at opening any shared files or posts as that has to be opened through the facebook app (obviously). What’s worse is I’m prompted to log in to Facebook every time I open any link Facebook or not from within messenger.
I’d love to fully uninstall meta’s apps but I have family members that only use their apps (fuck the networking effect)
no. its one of my pet peeves that we spent decades creating sites with dynamic viewports (mobile friendly/any screen size) only for kids to wonder where the ‘app’ is for your site.
and conversely, server products created with such minimal features as to require an external app to fulfill basic functionality.
god i hate apps.
I get frustrated with that with the fediverse. To see an image in a post at a proper size ends up taking 3 clicks
I think they get more data from your usage on mobile.
yep. tons of telemetry.
Even moreso for apps, you can still retain some control through Firefox and others on mobile, but it’s still limited.
They want to push people to apps because you have no control over how you view the site, unlike on a traditional web browser where you can tweak such things and block advertiser connections.
I think it’s also that just significantly more people own a phone than a laptop.
It’s like those demographics maps that are really just population maps.
If companies really designed sites and apps thinking on the majority of people they would make their software as lightweight as possible, so that they could run fine on cheaper hardware
Fucking seeeeeerrrioussslyyy dude I remember when GoogleTalk took 8 megabytes of RAM. Discord at minimum takes about 200mb.
