1116
‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
1116 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
69391 readers
2516 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I use a dumbphone. I'm not buying a smartphone just so I can play these stupid games, and I'm not installing an app for every fucking business I interact with. I realize there will one day be a point where I won't be able to do things I need to do without one, but until then I have no desire for one. Fortunately they haven't made the parking meters here require a smartphone yet.
My grocery store still uses loyalty cards for most discounts (which is irritating enough), but also has "digital coupons" that require an app so I can't get that. Theoretically I could go to their website and print them off but that's not worth the effort. I have to pay close attention to the price signs they put up because some of them say "with digital coupon" in small print, meaning "not for you, bitch". You know who doesn't pull this kind of shit? Walmart. So I wind up getting a lot of my groceries there so as not to be discriminated against.
Walmart doesn't let you use contactless pay unless you use their app. several times now I've gone there to grab a few things, not realizing i didn't have my card with me, and had to leave a full cart behind because i will not install their adware.
Back in the day, Walmart and Apple fought over contactless pay standards for the US.
Apple's standard was eventually mass adopted, and since then Walmart has refused to license the tech. So you have to use their app, which uses their own tech stack.