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
And furthermore: Most of these shitty apps are nothing more than overblown API clients. Which means they didn’t want to build a website and operate a webserver, so instead you provide the processing power for the UI yourself. These apps usually can’t do anything on their own, if you are offline, becaue all the value is generated remotely by the actual server.
The modern software experience sucks much!
When you have a website, you also provide the processing power for executing JavaScript and rendering HTML+CSS.
Why they would prefer an app (that’s by definition less compatible) is unknown for me, but I can attempt to guess it’s simpler for some reason.
It’s about control. Websites cannot control the browser or browser addons. The browser makes it harder to track and control the user. An app by definition allows more hardware access, even if modern mobile OS can control it pretty good. But then again, most users allow everything anyways.
It’s not control as in “track and control the user”. It’s control as in “normalising the environment”… if the user can install your app then they can use your service - it’s not a weird issue with a browser add on or cookie or whatever.
If it’s proprietary then you can’t confirm what it’s actually doing or change it. Even if the uni has no intentions of being controlling they have unjust control of your computing.
Browsers work just fine. The add-ons they don’t like are the privacy ones.
They want your data.