I have recently started university 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, for the dining plan, when it would literally work perfectly fine using your student ID and ordering to a real cashier, LIKE HOW IT HAS BEEN DONE FOR DECADES.

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

  • arc@lemm.eeEnglish
    29·
    1 year ago

    This won’t help in the above case so it’s a little off topic. But I got rid of Twitter on my phone and still use Twitter on my phone - Basically you just open twitter.com in Firefox, and go to the menu and click “Install”. Now you get a launcher icon to an “app” but it’s just the website hosted by the browser.

    Instantly saves 150Mb, stops it doing evil shit and because it’s hosted in Firefox I get to block all the ads.

    I would advise doing this with any app which has a desktop / mobile version and see what happens - Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. Some social media sites will nag you to install the app but some won’t or will be functional in spite of it.

    • infix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Hey that’s interesting. I haven’t used Firefox on iphone for a while because I didn’t think it was possible to add a blocker. Is that now possible? If so, which one do you use?

      • arc@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I only use Android so I don’t know. Check the menu and see if you have add-ons and you can install uBlock Origin. Edit - it looks like thanks to Apple being Apple, Firefox on iPhone is a wrapper around webkit and doesn’t support add-ons. Maybe you could still make a launcher though I don’t know.

      • DragonOracleIX@lemmy.mlEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        Assuming ios has the same extensions as android, I recommend ublock origin. Used it for years on both PC and android with hardly any issues.

      • SmoothIsFast@citizensgaming.comEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        In order to add ad blocker on my phone I just setup my ad block on desktop, setup Firefox sync and then signed in on my phone. At that point it pulled ublock origin and installed it. Not sure if it’s the same process for IOS but it’s worth giving it a shot.

    • miss_brainfart@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’d still go a step further and use a more privacy respecting frontend where possible. Not all of them will allow the use of an account though, so if interacting with the content is important to you, then those are obviously not an option.

    • Coldus12@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m using firefox on android as well, but i cannot find the “install” option anywhere, could you point me in the right direction?

      • TonyOstrich@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’m not positive but I think the option “Add to Home Screen” is the same thing as the above user mentioned. That’s what I have in my menu options, I don’t have an “Install” option there.

      • arc@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        in the Ellipsis. dropdown menu you should see an “Add to home screen” or “Install” button depending on what the website says in its metadata. The latter is for sites which have webapps.