Well, shit. I've definitely been misled by this exact thing. Fuck Google.
https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3093979
> Fix problems with home and work in Maps
> To use home and work when you search or use directions, you must turn on Web & App Activity. If can't find home and work in Maps, learn how to turn on Web & App Activity.
I hate that companies that work this way are some of the biggest and most powerful on the planet, but it’s also darkly funny if your humor runs to Kafka or Dante...
/low brow comment
- When I type “Ho” in GMaps it will first suggest all businesses — “Ho... Home Depot? House Garden? Horror House (375km)?” then cities (“Ho... Chi Minh City, Vietnam?”) and, after many tries, “Home”, the real.
- I had Web Activity and Location History registered, in France but English with a address for “Home”,
- I was using it for every return trip; They could have suggested by default without typing anything; Clearly they optimize to promote businesses or other usecases first, not convenience.
- I ended up putting a Label “XKDJF” on my home, which is more convenient (until a city starts with “XK” – hoping Elon Musk will not name a city on Mars this year).
I would say the root problem is that supplying any information to a Google app is by default assumed to mean "This should be uploaded to a persistent profile of user data."
They could just let me set a Home and Work location on my phone and leave that data on my phone (regardless of tracking preferences), or they could store it in a more private mechanism with a key that lives on your device (see Chrome bookmark sync), but they choose to not do any of that.
The release of the iPhone imo was the Eternal September of the mobile experience in so far as it was the tipping point wherein a demographic of users who didn't even need to be convinced that yielding full and openly adversarial control over the hardware to the network operators and advertisers became an uncontested majority.
They came with a text editor, a calculator, and a file browser out of the box -- can this generation even imagine not having to run the app store gauntlet of monetization and fraud to Open Files, I wonder?
It would probably be better to have a system of secure file buckets, where you could create them arbitrarily and choose to allow access to any bucket to any app, rather than permit open access to the file system as Android traditionally has done.
If it was the norm to download a signed binary from a random website, random websites looking genuine and offering genuine fake signed binaries would be the norm. "Are you sure you want to install Adobee PhotoShop? (Signature verified!)"
"No mom, Adobe PhotoShop!"
"I have Abobe PhotoShop, Adode PhotoShop, Ádobe PhotoShop, PhotoStop by Adobe"
"Mommmmm"
Not sure the market would react the same.
Many people are fighting phone addiction. Rich people want their kids off the grid. Lacking apps could be a feature in a more mature market.
Rich people could display wealth (better the children not be seen with a crappy phone) with a great UX, while at the same time being exempt from the dopamine addiction. Now that we know what we pretty much do on a phone, we could create a phone with all main apps hard-coded and it would fulfill the necessary needs.
The same Microsoft that hides the option to set up a computer with a local user account (instead of an online Microsoft account) unless you turn off networking during setup?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-users-fume-microsof...