Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

Not sure which is worse:
Businesses not posting opening hours/holiday opening hours on their website.
OR
Businesses not posting opening hours/holiday opening hours on their website BUT posting them on Instagram/their Facebook page/ as a Tweet instead (or menus, closures, or any relevant and timely information).

Well done, you recognised that was helpful information yet assumed everyone would scroll through your social media feed to find it instead of putting it in one central place for all to see.

(^^ probably more for a 'Did Social Media Ruin Everything' thread than this)

the sad truth about that is probably that social media solved something in this case...a lot of businesses hire someone to make their website and it's not easy for them to change/update, whereas any employee can post to social media. Squarespace/Wix and the like should create small business websites with and easy and quick interface for updating key information.

ugh yeah, so many times with menus/hours and shit it's "okay hrmm... maybe it's under 'about us'... no? no go back. i mean go back to the top page, i thought i saw a link to... oh. hrm. maybe try their facebook?...." and then the facebook hasn't had any posts since 2018... etc......

There’s a restaurant in queens, arguably the best Chinese restaurant in New York, and they only take pick up orders via Facebook message. If you call them you usually get the owner who doesn’t speak English but send a Facebook message and the daughter who does gets tight back to you. This started with the pandemic.

I take it back looks like you can order through google now.

there are businesses (mostly like crafts/clothing type places that are etsy stuff) that do their sales via Instagram ...

* Touch/swipe controls on headphones are, in all but a few cases, unreliable enough to be consistently annoying and disorienting. I suspect they're being rolled out less because of user demand or cool factor, and more because they let manufacturers avoid headaches related to moving parts and button contacts.

(not one we all just accept, just yet, but certainly becoming more and more common, such that otherwise Really Nice headphones have them, and it's increasingly difficult to find similarly-nice models that DON'T have them)

yeah I'm constantly turning off my earbuds by mistake

I'm about to return a pair that, among its other "features," pauses/unpauses your music whenever you take them on/off. Which, if you've already paused by pressing the pause button means the music comes back on. So every time I took them off, I had to then lean my head down and hold it near the headphones to make sure they hadn't started back up again. Insane.

Noooo that's so dumb!
I haven't bought headphones/earbuds in ages, why are they doing this

When I park at the supermarket I switch from listening on the car stereo via bluetooth to listening on headphones, and every time my phone helpfully pauses whatever it is I'm listening to, so I have to find the app to unpause, doesn't seem to be any way to turn off this "feature"

never switching from a phone with an audio jack and wired headphones if i can help it.

I like the pause-on-removal feature on my new earphones. On top of being convenient: When one of them falls out of my ear in the middle of running across a busy street; I don't miss any of my podcast!

I will say that I was a firm anti-wireless crank when Apple first got rid of the jack, but after finally taking the plunge and coughing up for some good Bluetooth cans, I don't think I could ever go back to having a wire connecting my phone to my head or ear phones. Especially for exercise.

Shouldn't be wearing earphones when crossing a busy street.

I hate catching the wire on things but the inability to plug my phone into a speaker, the many annoyances of Bluetooth, the lack of direct control over audio and tge fact that I would immediately lose any small items without a wire all weigh against switching.

My recent problem stems from having to tether an iPhone to my desktop at work so I can be on camera during virtual meetings. I can hear everyone just fine with my headphones plugged into the desktop, but I can't hear myself whenever I speak out loud. (I mean, I can, but it's just the sound of my voice IRL. I can't hear myself through the headphones.)

THE SOLUTION on ANY OTHER PHONE would be to plug the headphones into the phone itself, instead of the desktop, but NO CAN DO since I'm on a newer iPhone.

i have an older samsung galaxy with android; it has 16 GB of internal memory

for like $12 i've added a 32 GB SD card (which has 31 GB free)

but the phone -- which i have very little stuff on -- is constantly running out of space because most apps refuse to be moved to the SD card and I CANNOT FUCKING DELETE ALL THE PRE-LOADED SHIT LIKE AMAZON/YOUTUBE/FACEBOOK/GOOGLE without rooting the phone, which i haven't been able to do after multiple and ever-sketchier attempts. (if i try to delete them, i'm asked 'revert to factory version?')

i mean 25 years ago microsoft was sued because it bundled internet explorer with windows, but i don't think users were literally prevented from deleting it?

Yep i spent a year or two stubbornly whittling at all extraneous disk hoggers but android essentially made it impossible to shift a raft of protected apps AND THE ASSOCIATED CONTENT over to SD a few years back and tbh 32gb isnt even a practical internal disk size anymore unless you want to be spending maintenance time each month

Absolutely sucks.

xp Wonder if you can put LineageOS or something on that phone. The big difference between your PC and your phone, as computers, is you don't have adminiatrator rights on the phone, without a bit of underhandedness. It is wild.

i've been vaguely watching the pinephone experiment

kind of seems like someone could make money offering a bare-bones OS but i obviously dk

Feeling mookie's pain, though in a way, I do enjoy deleting cache out of dozen or so apps whenever I'm waiting around somewhere.

Hate that Facebook is on there and can't be removed. I've disabled it, restricted it, tied it up, thrown it in the back of the phone and yet, it still registers like 28kb of activity a month. I know it's following me around. I've never linked the app to my Facebook account. The instagram account isn't connected to my facebook account. My gmail login for Facebook is on the phone, so it's probably figured out what I had for dinner tonight.

oh i clear the fuck out of cache

but also why should i have to do that

and tbh 32gb isnt even a practical internal disk size anymore unless you want to be spending maintenance time each month

what do you even keep on your phones that take up so much space? good lord I have 16GB and I only have to do maintenance like once every 4-6 months? If I have to take a bunch of pictures for work I transfer them and then delete them ... and I'm the person that keeps every text message except for like spam.

I have a little app on my phone called AppMgr which easily transfers apps from internal storage to SD card. Might be worth a look in your case, although it will of course only transfer those apps which are able to be transferred.

mookie I was in the exact same position with the memory card etc and it is really annoying. I ended up dropping and destroying my phone and having to get a new one (not the latest model obv) and I hate how I'm almost glad I had a reason to as everything works much better on the new phone. It was the apps clogging up my old phone and it's not like I even use that many.

what do you even keep on your phones that take up so much space?

most of my basic apps fill up the cache with hundreds of megabytes of data, some of the worst offenders (twitter, chrome, instagram) also somehow store hundreds of megabytes of personal data and if you clear it you get logged out and lose all your saved settings.

Spotify regularly takes up 1GB of space on my son's phone, it's insane

Yep if you download eg spotify playlists to phone that will add up

he does no downloading! it makes no sense!

My phone storage

20gb system

20gb apps- mainly podcasts and music in case of offline

I could farm a lot of that latter out to sd card but tbh i like not having to bother anymore

xp spotify is for my purposes a wonderful thing but i swear as an app it behaves terrifically badly ito commandeering storage and eg just not responding when you open it for the first time in a while because its decided it has shit it would rather do

Luckily i mainly just have it installed on speakers and never actually open it on the phone these days

instagram: application 110mb, data 158mb, cache 109mb. guardian app 66mb, data 72mb, cache 69mb. youtube app 179mb, data 82mb, cache 77mb. chrome app 124mb, data 268mb (!!), cache 184mb.

app sizes seem excessive, wish you could restrict the caching somehow, but the 'data' is ridiculous.

Android successive versions have taken a lot of control away from the user across all of this but as noted there are apps that do an ok job of cleaning selectively

Just cleared 8gb of podcasts to sd card so ty thread

my phone provider recently upgraded me to an L4 that has 64gb. I will have barely got a quarter into that by the time they start offering me a new one.

one of the worst features of recent android: no button to clear all app caches. like, why the fuck not?

spotify's storage offenses are infamous. amazing that after all this time it STILL doesn't really remove downloads when you tell it to "remove downloads." eventually, you gotta uninstall, reboot, and reinstall. madness.

I think every Android phone I've had has come preloaded with a Samsung 'virtual assistant' bollocks (current one: "Bixby") that seems to exist solely for me to accidentally activate it, swear at it, vow to remove it any way I can, then forget until next time. Maybe I should start training myself up to do something useful when I do it, like drink some water or do a yoga move, until I become conditioned.

checked my apps, the one taking up the most space is wechat at 3.2gb.

Recently got my first Samsung and I think Bixby is disabled. I had to check options in like 10 different menus and would not know how to tell anyone to turn it off. This is the kind of crap I spend an hour or three doing on a new phone. And despite that I still found after a few days that I was using some kind of Samsung backup feature. Turned it off and hit the button to delete whatever was backed up to their servers but uh.... yeesh

lol it's this type of stuff re android that made me switch to an iPhone -- it still has that "storage Other" problem with cached crap that you have to do "special Apple magic" to get rid of.

also, damn y'all, Spotify sucks and rips off artists. No sympathy there.

I have to use the Smart Switch app on my iMac to move data over from the Samsung.

And every time, this little window pops up: "Ready to transfer your iTunes files over to your Android?"

That question constantly ranks first as the (1.) Most tone-deaf, (2.) Answer unlikely to change, and quite possibly (3.) Overly-repeated that I get regularly asked.

hahahah I have an iPhone & windows 10 -- I am sure there are a bunch of redundant cloud things that are in multiple places that I will eventually have to get annoyed by.

just saw a QR code on a tv advert

(etoro? some trading site)

Last time we drove to Michigan, I saw three billboards that were basically just giant QR codes with only the name of the company beneath. One was for a brewery, but I forgot the other two. Presumably, even at highway speeds, those still work?

Glad to see those companies are big supporters of highway safety.

xp the ongoing lack of progress of the investigation into the death of her daughter iirc

security reorganisation on online bank account taht means paying regular bills has become a convoluted chore. Have to eneter and reenter codes to get payment transacted. Maybe it means taht there is less likelihood of having the account hacked but it just seems totally time consuming. NOt sure if having a much newer phone so I had teh app itself would make things easier.
I always thought of my desktop as my main computer interface and phone as secondary. Is taht like totally outdated?

logging into my bank needs a security code generated by the banking app on my phone. i wonder if they thought this through?

I'd guess they did; isn't this in addition to a password that should ideally only exist inside your head?

IANAE on this, but I think I've seen it described thus: Login (or whatever) should depend on data points from two out of the three following types: something you are, something you know, something you own/can access. In the first group are e.g. fingerprints or iris patterns, in the second groups are passwords, in the final group are e.g. phone authenticators. The idea (if I have understood this) is that compromising one of these is not enough to immediately compromise the entire thing.