You can do almost anything with a website that you could do with an app. The only reason they are pushing the apps so hard is because they can collect a lot more data than a website can.
The cloud is many things, but most of all, it’s a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don’t control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover that the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:
The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to alter the functioning and cost of those products unilaterally. Like mobile apps – which can’t be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability – cloud apps are built for enshittification. They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for.
I legitimately want to scream sometimes as I feel the continual death of local computing and actual software, and it depresses me to no end how few businesses or users see it for what it is.
And it’s exactly this: a trap. A trap users people are racing into, and they have no idea, at all, how bad it’s going to get when the doors close behind them.
The rest of us are left with little recourse. Looking at the difference between Outlook and New Outlook is genuinely depressing because that’s the future we’re all being shepherded into against our will. I swear, in like 10 years, Windows will mostly just be a kiosk for Edge.
Around here, Target (department store chain) will let you order stuff through their app and pick it up in the store parking lot. If you order through the web you have to wait around inside the store to get it. I still won’t install the app but this issue annoys me.
And then there’s guys like me. I don’t announce when I’m coming. I grab the items myself, and then I pay in cash. Nonsequential bills. I’m like a ninja! I can’t be traced! Shashasha!!! Pocket sand!
Then on the way home, if I see someone following me home, I make 3 left turns. If they’re STILL following me? I turn around, and I shoot them…a dirty look!
What? I’m not a psychopath. I just don’t like being followed.
You can do almost anything with a website that you could do with an app. The only reason they are pushing the apps so hard is because they can collect a lot more data than a website can.
As Cory Doctorow put it, “An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.”
I legitimately want to scream sometimes as I feel the continual death of local computing and actual software, and it depresses me to no end how few businesses or users see it for what it is.
And it’s exactly this: a trap. A trap users people are racing into, and they have no idea, at all, how bad it’s going to get when the doors close behind them.
The rest of us are left with little recourse. Looking at the difference between Outlook and New Outlook is genuinely depressing because that’s the future we’re all being shepherded into against our will. I swear, in like 10 years, Windows will mostly just be a kiosk for Edge.
Around here, Target (department store chain) will let you order stuff through their app and pick it up in the store parking lot. If you order through the web you have to wait around inside the store to get it. I still won’t install the app but this issue annoys me.
And then there’s guys like me. I don’t announce when I’m coming. I grab the items myself, and then I pay in cash. Nonsequential bills. I’m like a ninja! I can’t be traced! Shashasha!!! Pocket sand!
Then on the way home, if I see someone following me home, I make 3 left turns. If they’re STILL following me? I turn around, and I shoot them…a dirty look!
What? I’m not a psychopath. I just don’t like being followed.