Why apps?...

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Jeroen Belleman

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For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
 
Jeroen Belleman <jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

Desktop browsers don\'t count anymore. There are billions of phones to attract
marketing messages, and very few desktops.

I view this arrangment in our favor. We are not bothered much by ad campaigns
and can go about our business of collecting information relatively
unhampered. There may be a few useful aps on cellphones, but we can usually
find similar or the equivalent for desktops.

So rejoice that marketers are passing us by.

(Opinions lightly held by a private citizen)
 
On 1/8/2022 15:18, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

I have been wondering that myself, and I also see it as a step back.

Not sure if working outside the browser gives them more control over
the device, perhaps some - I remember facebook constantly suggesting
I use their app, \"better than the browser\" (I don\'t use it, never
tried it really, I am not much of a facebooker although I have a profile
etc.).
May be there are many people capable of writing apps - this must have
been made really easy - and they need to be kept busy, who knows.
 
On Saturday, January 8, 2022 at 5:49:17 AM UTC-8, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 1/8/2022 15:18, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
I have been wondering that myself, and I also see it as a step back.

Not sure if working outside the browser gives them more control over
the device, perhaps some - I remember facebook constantly suggesting
I use their app, \"better than the browser\" (I don\'t use it, never
tried it really, I am not much of a facebooker although I have a profile
etc.).
May be there are many people capable of writing apps - this must have
been made really easy - and they need to be kept busy, who knows.

Apps are supposed to be more secure and more convenient. Many apps can store accounts and passwords directly, since you are supposed to have the phone under control all the time. That is until you lose the phone.
 
On Sat, 08 Jan 2022 14:18:24 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

Have been trying to get an Android OS running on a PC,
just in order to communicate with hardware using a
bluetooth link - which is what mfr app provides.

Android cannot recognize, access or use most of
PC hardware, to do this. Complete flop.

Android not ready for anything other than use as toy.

RL
 
In article <lfbjtg9upd99ifgfqkeetttdbe5gtqjulb@4ax.com>,
legg@nospam.magma.ca says...
Have been trying to get an Android OS running on a PC,
just in order to communicate with hardware using a
bluetooth link - which is what mfr app provides.

Android cannot recognize, access or use most of
PC hardware, to do this. Complete flop.

Android not ready for anything other than use as toy.

RL

Have you tried this ?

https://www.bluestacks.com/android-emulator.html
 
lørdag den 8. januar 2022 kl. 16.33.18 UTC+1 skrev legg:
On Sat, 08 Jan 2022 14:18:24 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
jer...@nospam.please> wrote:

For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
Have been trying to get an Android OS running on a PC,
just in order to communicate with hardware using a
bluetooth link - which is what mfr app provides.

Android cannot recognize, access or use most of
PC hardware, to do this. Complete flop.

Android not ready for anything other than use as toy.

there are 3 billion active Android devices ...
 
Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

The way they ask for ridiculously broad permissions should be a clue.

\"Why does Walmart need access to my camera, phone, and messages?\"

One guess.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
 
On 2022/01/08 5:49 a.m., Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
On 1/8/2022 15:18, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

I have been wondering that myself, and I also see it as a step back.

Not sure if working outside the browser gives them more control over
the device, perhaps some - I remember facebook constantly suggesting
I use their app, \"better than the browser\" (I don\'t use it, never
tried it really, I am not much of a facebooker although I have a profile
etc.).
May be there are many people capable of writing apps - this must have
been made really easy - and they need to be kept busy, who knows.

I use FaceBook for business and hate it. It is very clumsy and difficult
to search for past conversations. Flagging stuff like you can do with
most email readers appears to be lost. Unfortunately most of the
customer base I need is on FB so I struggle with their lousy interface
and miss the days when a post I made offering technical advice was
viewed (possibly) by more than a dozen or two people who subscribe to
that FB Group.

FaceBook is a fool\'s wasteland and shows no sign of improving as it
appears to only care about the present, not the past, nor can you plan
for the future. It is only following the money of advertisers...I trust
that people will get bored with it at some point - I consider it a fad.

John :-#(#
 
lørdag den 8. januar 2022 kl. 18.37.19 UTC+1 skrev Phil Hobbs:
Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
The way they ask for ridiculously broad permissions should be a clue.

I think sometimes it is just lazy developers that doesn\'t bother picking what they actually need

\"Why does Walmart need access to my camera, phone, and messages?\"

One guess.

if it scans barcodes it need access to the camera, it might need access to messages
to read a message with something like a discount coupon
 
On 1/8/2022 12:54 PM, John Robertson wrote:
On 2022/01/08 5:49 a.m., Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
On 1/8/2022 15:18, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

I have been wondering that myself, and I also see it as a step back.

Not sure if working outside the browser gives them more control over
the device, perhaps some - I remember facebook constantly suggesting
I use their app, \"better than the browser\" (I don\'t use it, never
tried it really, I am not much of a facebooker although I have a profile
etc.).
May be there are many people capable of writing apps - this must have
been made really easy - and they need to be kept busy, who knows.


I use FaceBook for business and hate it. It is very clumsy and difficult
to search for past conversations. Flagging stuff like you can do with
most email readers appears to be lost. Unfortunately most of the
customer base I need is on FB so I struggle with their lousy interface
and miss the days when a post I made offering technical advice was
viewed (possibly) by more than a dozen or two people who subscribe to
that FB Group.

FaceBook is a fool\'s wasteland and shows no sign of improving as it
appears to only care about the present, not the past, nor can you plan
for the future. It is only following the money of advertisers...I trust
that people will get bored with it at some point - I consider it a fad.

John :-#(#

Thankfully in 2022 you can still use Usenet:

<https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos?t=178>
 
On Saturday, January 8, 2022 at 10:14:43 AM UTC-5, Ed Lee wrote:
On Saturday, January 8, 2022 at 5:49:17 AM UTC-8, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 1/8/2022 15:18, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
I have been wondering that myself, and I also see it as a step back.

Not sure if working outside the browser gives them more control over
the device, perhaps some - I remember facebook constantly suggesting
I use their app, \"better than the browser\" (I don\'t use it, never
tried it really, I am not much of a facebooker although I have a profile
etc.).
May be there are many people capable of writing apps - this must have
been made really easy - and they need to be kept busy, who knows.
Apps are supposed to be more secure and more convenient. Many apps can store accounts and passwords directly, since you are supposed to have the phone under control all the time. That is until you lose the phone.

Lol! The app for my go to airline can\'t pull up my flight info unless I tell it the confirmation number! What idiots came up with that idea? The ones who decided to make it work *just like the web page*! What is the point of being logged in if it\'s going to ask me questions it should be answering! \'

--

Rick C.

- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
lørdag den 8. januar 2022 kl. 18.37.19 UTC+1 skrev Phil Hobbs:
Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
The way they ask for ridiculously broad permissions should be a clue.

I think sometimes it is just lazy developers that doesn\'t bother picking what they actually need

\"Why does Walmart need access to my camera, phone, and messages?\"

One guess.

if it scans barcodes it need access to the camera, it might need access to messages
to read a message with something like a discount coupon

Let\'s just say there aren\'t a lot of closed-source apps on my phone.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
 
On 1/8/2022 8:18 AM, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

Because people don\'t use the browser nearly as much as they used to in
general, the average browser-user only goes to like 10 sites 95% of the
time anyway.

The Web of the 1990s with lots of independent content is gone, the web
of 2022 consists largely of three things in 2022: Content produced
and/or controlled by giga-buck corporations, advertisements, and shit
basically nobody looks at.
 
On 1/8/2022 1:25 PM, bitrex wrote:
On 1/8/2022 8:18 AM, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

Because people don\'t use the browser nearly as much as they used to in
general, the average browser-user only goes to like 10 sites 95% of the
time anyway.

The Web of the 1990s with lots of independent content is gone, the web
of 2022 consists largely of three things in 2022

Apologies for the redundancy. but the Web is becoming as redundant as
some of my typing when I\'m running late on my first cup of coffee
 
On 1/8/2022 8:48 AM, Arnie Dwyer (ex Jan Frank) wrote:
Jeroen Belleman <jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman

Desktop browsers don\'t count anymore. There are billions of phones to attract
marketing messages, and very few desktops.

I view this arrangment in our favor. We are not bothered much by ad campaigns
and can go about our business of collecting information relatively
unhampered. There may be a few useful aps on cellphones, but we can usually
find similar or the equivalent for desktops.

So rejoice that marketers are passing us by.

(Opinions lightly held by a private citizen)

Right, the WWW is destined to become a mostly-dead technology, like FTP
and Usenet. The average 20 year old of 2040 will have no idea what HTTP
is or how to access a \"web site\" any more than the average 20 y/o of
2022 knows what a \"newsgroup\" is.
 
On 1/8/2022 10:14 AM, Ed Lee wrote:
On Saturday, January 8, 2022 at 5:49:17 AM UTC-8, Dimiter Popoff wrote:
On 1/8/2022 15:18, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
I have been wondering that myself, and I also see it as a step back.

Not sure if working outside the browser gives them more control over
the device, perhaps some - I remember facebook constantly suggesting
I use their app, \"better than the browser\" (I don\'t use it, never
tried it really, I am not much of a facebooker although I have a profile
etc.).
May be there are many people capable of writing apps - this must have
been made really easy - and they need to be kept busy, who knows.

Apps are supposed to be more secure and more convenient. Many apps can store accounts and passwords directly, since you are supposed to have the phone under control all the time. That is until you lose the phone.

All that would have to happen for the WWW to mostly die as a mainstream
technology is for Google to decide it\'s not worth the trouble to scrape
it anymore and get out of the search-engine business entirely, which is
a plausible thing to happen in the next decade or two.
 
On 2022-01-08 19:00, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
lørdag den 8. januar 2022 kl. 18.37.19 UTC+1 skrev Phil Hobbs:
Jeroen Belleman wrote:
For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
The way they ask for ridiculously broad permissions should be a clue.

I think sometimes it is just lazy developers that doesn\'t bother picking what they actually need

\"Why does Walmart need access to my camera, phone, and messages?\"

One guess.

if it scans barcodes it need access to the camera, it might need access to messages
to read a message with something like a discount coupon

You can trust them to purposely invent ways to make the broad
permissions seem legitimate, so that they can better spy on you as
a result.

Jeroen Belleman
 
On Sat, 8 Jan 2022 11:52:34 -0500, Ralph Mowery
<rmowery42@charter.net> wrote:

In article <lfbjtg9upd99ifgfqkeetttdbe5gtqjulb@4ax.com>,
legg@nospam.magma.ca says...

Have been trying to get an Android OS running on a PC,
just in order to communicate with hardware using a
bluetooth link - which is what mfr app provides.

Android cannot recognize, access or use most of
PC hardware, to do this. Complete flop.

Android not ready for anything other than use as toy.

RL



Have you tried this ?

https://www.bluestacks.com/android-emulator.html

Emulators inherently have no access to hardware.

I\'ve tried booting Android from USB - supposed to
allow access but needs the OS to do so - hardware
model and driver dependent.

RL
 
On Sat, 8 Jan 2022 08:56:33 -0800 (PST), Lasse Langwadt Christensen
<langwadt@fonz.dk> wrote:

lørdag den 8. januar 2022 kl. 16.33.18 UTC+1 skrev legg:
On Sat, 08 Jan 2022 14:18:24 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
jer...@nospam.please> wrote:

For years, interaction with the internet worked through a
universal browser. Lately, every service, gadget or whatnot
wants you to download their special-purpose app. Why??
What\'s the deal? It seems like a huge step backwards to me.

Jeroen Belleman
Have been trying to get an Android OS running on a PC,
just in order to communicate with hardware using a
bluetooth link - which is what mfr app provides.

Android cannot recognize, access or use most of
PC hardware, to do this. Complete flop.

Android not ready for anything other than use as toy.

there are 3 billion active Android devices ...

The option of buying an android tablet and setting it
up to run the app seems the only current alternative.

Why? because Google doesn\'t want to do the work of
creating a real OS. Revenue from toys id apparently
enough.

RL
 

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