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I hate how everything requires you to download a shitty proprietary data harvesting app nowadays when everything can be done just fine without an app. (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have recently started a new position and am required to use an app that has three Facebook trackers, one of them being a Facebook location tracker according to Exodus App Privacy in order to get your food when it would literally work perfectly fine ordering to a real cashier or shit even a website rather than having to download an app.

I have also read many stories of people that live in apartments that require them to use a mobile app for god damn LAUNDRY. All you need, is a card reader, and it will work perfectly fine like it has been for the longest time.

Privacy concerns aside, it is just annoying that you need this app and that app and this app and that app and it just clutters space on your phone. Security concerns too as now they have all of this additional info on you online, such as your phone number your email your real name, instead of just your credit card info like a card reader would have. And I am willing to guarantee that their security model is absolute horseshit because they have such a small team of engineers working on the app and the servers.

Literal enshitification

Magne

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Performance of a web app in this day and age is negligible.

Hard disagree.

The vertical real estate is a non-starter argument.

Hard disagree. You lose much of the top and bottom of the screen to useless information, and different browsers do different things with them when you start scrolling which easily causes jank in some relatively common use cases.

This is why web standards exist.

Too bad it makes no difference and there are still differences in how browsers function. Just yesterday I discovered an issue in Firefox where overflow: hidden is required to get certain things sized properly in position: absolute properly even though it shouldn't change how things are sized. iOS also often deviates from the norm.

As far as browsers are concerned, standards exist to be broken.

If you can't deal with this gracefully then your app flow needs to be redesigned.

It currently CAN deal with it gracefully because we've specifically built it to be able to handle it properly. It doesn't change that we've wasted many man-hours and tracked down numerous bugs for something that should not even be a problem in the first place. It also ended up significantly less readable and puts a higher barrier to understanding the codebase itself. We spend more hours putting up annoying safeguards for things that shouldn't be a problem than we do making new features.

You need a new job. It sounds like you're both under paid and over worked.

I'm not underpaid in any sense of the term and I'm not over worked. I just absolutely despise everything about the web dev and specifically JavaScript ecosystem, and the absolute distain towards writing anything performant at even the slightest expense of developer experience. I'm tired of the memory hog and leak prevalent garbage web apps that exist literally everywhere.

You need to invest in automation testing.

Too bad that's not my decision. The architect is actively against automated browser testing because it runs too slowly. Even then it wouldn't resolve the actual issue.

so why am I seeing ads

I fully agree with you on that front. If you've bought and paid for a product and the app is required to use kt, then the dev-required support for the app should be baked into the product rather than relying on subscriptions or ads.

They have their place but for most things a web app will do just fine.

Yes I absolutely love that I can have a total of four web apps open before my browser slows to a crawl due to excessive garbage collection for these shitty react apps that are forced to clone the universe every 2.7 nanoseconds. I adore my computer's lack of ability to have any amount of ram available that's not dedicated to Firefox or whatever shitty chrome reskin you decide to use. They start slow as shit due to 50MB bundles, have shitty caching, error every other day, and don't feel at all like an actual mobile experience because desktop and mobile navigation are fundamentally different experiences which often requires supporting two separate versions of the layout anyways in order to have an "okay" experience. And even if you can miraculously ignore all of that or do some dirty JavaScript war crimes to make it less of an issue, then half the gestures you normally do either end up hard refreshing the page or forcibly send you to the last page in the browser instead of just opening the fucking navigation drawer. Don't even get me started on electron.

Web dev is shit, chrome is trash, Firefox is barely better, and all we've successfully managed to do in two decades of browser and frontend framework development is centralize the web further, prevent any other browser from ever being created due to the absolutely ridiculous feature-set barrier to entry, turn browsers themselves into the kitchen sink with the entire house around it as well, and create a new shitty framework every other year that does the exact same thing with the exact same pitfalls because they still don't fix the fundamental stain on the world that is JavaScript.

I'll take a normal app over a web app any day of the week. I've never used a web app on my phone that was in any way better than the mobile counterpart. Even if they effectively look exactly the same. Not a single time had the web app been any better.