Design for Obsolete Devices | Hacker News Reader

Design for Obsolete Devices

anaellebeignon.fr

90 pointspolm2332 comments

Back in the days I developed a webmail interface and backend [1] for myself because GMail got unusable on Windows CE devices while they were still on the market in Germany.

Designing a website with WAP-level of HTML is quite a challenge, but it's possible.

And it works so well with 2G slow connections that you start to appreciate it when your "flatrate" is throttled again. If you try to use any website in the new web with 2G slow, you'll realize how broken most concepts are. Even the ordering pages of ISPs to confirm an email address for a new internet connection is built with 20MB of Angular for no reason. It's so absurd that you cannot order an internet connection without an internet connection.

How did we collectively get to this point of not giving a damn about anything?

There's still such a huge population of the world that hasn't fast access to internet [2] that I don't understand why we keep making things bloated if they're unnecessary by concept - and can even be replaced via pure HTML/CSS most of the time.

[1] https://cookie.engineer - source under "webmail" project, built with old, old, PHP in 2005-2007 during the dark ages of web development.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...

OT: Didn't we chat a couple days ago on Reddit? The Internet is small... :D

> How did we collectively get to this point of not giving a damn about anything?

- works on my machine

- you need to build new features, not refactor / optimize what’s already there

- etc

I'd build stuff for old machines all day, were I paid for it just as good as I am to work on, as they sometimes say, webfeces.

> How did we collectively get to this point of not giving a damn about anything?

Sites don't target 2G, so your conclusions about what we give damn about are a bit premature.

You don't optimize a resource that seems abundant. It may be wrong, but it's economically the only common sense approach a system would take.

Unfortunately, optimizing for developer convenience seems to have a lot of overlap with optimizing for wasting my time.

It's less about convenience and more about having an entire generation of developers now who are literally unable of writing an app that doesn't use a heavy framework.

I would guess that a lot of it is profit driven. People without fast access to internet probably don't spend a lot of money, and the vast majority of things built on the internet are to make money.

Before 2008 I used to Tweet by sending an sms to a special phone number. When twitter removed the service, their bloated website cost a lot for a tweet. So I made a Wap service using their api and now tweeting cost me a fraction of what the sms cost me. I built it in a few hours, it was very fun to chop every last byte of html exploiting the flexibility of the browsers (who knew you did not need to close html tags?). That service was used by a few friends on feature phones till 2010. I discovered it when a friend complained that the service did not work anymore. I had completely forgot about it.

I switched to a dumbphone three years ago. It often creates restrictions that are surmountable. It prevents me from participating in the gig economy for example it is very difficult (or impossible?) to call an uber or use a take away app. There are however things I can't do, for example use the bike system in Lisbon, because it requires the use of an app. In this example the use of a card with RF ID would not only be more accessible but would have a better user experience.

Public bike systems should really not require an app. Unrelated but similar... Here in my town in the US, since covid the McDonald's is still closed for indoor dining/pickup. Therefore they have allowed people to walk through the drive thru line with the cars. (When I was 15, you were not allowed to do this). Some of the people have already placed orders on the app. But the general feeling is a line of cars with two or three people standing between the cars taking their turn to order at the drive thru window, at midnight when nothing else is open. Somehow this ragged line feels more dystopian to me than almost anything else since covid.

One of the problems we're facing today is building a ton of public infrastructure around the assumption that everyone own a car. This leads to sprawling suburbs and horrible public transportation.

I wonder if we're building a future where everyone owns a smartphone which is going to lead to many problems down the line.

> Public bike systems should really not require an app.

<advocate representee="Devil">The web makes for second-rate UIs, especially on mobile platforms. With that in mind, you're going to want to develop iOS and Android apps. Given that, why bother making a mobile web UI as well?</advocate>

Why does it have to be web-based? There are public rental systems that can be unlocked with a phone call (or maybe even SMS). Not every solution to a problem needs to involve a computer on both ends. Of course it's nice to have the web or app solution in addition to that, but it really shouldn't be the only way of interacting with such a system.

The public bike system in my town can be used either with an app or with an RFID card, the latter option not requiring a phone at all.

Bike Share Toronto nicely offers a handful options to take out a bike: Credit card, RFID/NFC key, mobile phone app.

Which generation of the radio standards does it use? In some countries 2G is gone and in some areas 3G is gone. Are there any 5G dumphones for when 4G is gone?

I'm aware of at least one CAT dumbphone that does 4G. Not sure about 5G.

What is the point of 4G on something that is designed to limit Internet access?

My dumbphone as 4G. Is the way I use to have internet at home. But there are not applications compatible with the operating system (WebOS)

Probably to be able to connect at all, even if only for messaging, email, and phone calls. Hey, it's a mobile network terminal, you've got to have some network access there!

They are retiring 3G like mad, and even 2G towers are getting fewer and farther between (although it's likely that 2G/GPRS/EDGE will never truly go down).

2G and 3G networks will eventually be shut down, so 4G support is part of future-proofing the product.

I have a nokia 800 tough with 4G. I bought after an experiment of living without internet at home. At the time I was using a 3310 with 3G. The experiment lasted 6 months and ended a month or two before Covid strike.

+1. I've intentionally never owned a smartphone.

Living in Estonia and using a dumb phone, I can still comfortably query my bank account balance via a voice service. I can also sign documents with my digital ID by confirming a secret and entering my PIN code. Buying intercity bus tickets also works, including season tickets for e.g. 30 days (by calling a number that includes your bus card identification string and another string for the type of ticket you want to buy). The newly created electric bike network in my hometown also sort-of works if you bind it to your bus card.

What I miss, though, is being able to work as a bike courier for Wolt or Bolt using just a dumb phone. Or maybe also use a Bolt electrical scooter. Not quite sure, but I think none this is possible.

All in all I'd say the quality of my life has massively gained from sticking to a dumb phone. No cravings to hug a smartphone in my sleep; enjoying the luxury to actually look out of the window during train commutes, etc. It seems obvious, though, that these simple, hassle-free, app-free, visual-glare-free solutions are on their way out.

Then again, seeing things like the Gemini protocol develop still gives me some hope. Maybe the next generation of nerds, facing climate and energy overconsumption issues, will start preferring really simple solutions again. Who knows.

You're not obliged to hug a smartphone if you can. I have a smartphone, but I don't use it often. I use it for important services, like navigation, bank apps. I can read a book if I don't have nothing better to do. I can check out my messages once or twice a day if I feel like that, or I can leave my phone somewhere for a weekdays and forget about it existence if there are better things to do.

IMO smartphone is a simple solution. Smartphone is an internet-connected computer. It's as simple as it gets. Phone calls, SMS are complex beasts with archaic protocols nobody heard about, without any reliability guarantees.

I guess you're right in many ways. These days smartphones are everywhere, they're common technology, something akin to a TV set. There's nothing special about them any more, maybe even for small children? Thus they're also easier and easier to use just like a tool; something that you simply forget about when you don't need it.

Got me thinking. Thanks for your reply.

It is quite ironic that the site is almost 4 MB, mainly because of oversized png-encoded photos. And wtf is that favicon?

The embedded video does not load on my not-obsolete Pixel 5 (Firefox)

Yes, I cannot see it on my 2013 macbook also. It seems like some security issue from embedded videos. Here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZaOAfookBE

Here too (on a brand new HP laptop, also Firefox). But it isn't related to the age of your device.

> Firefox Can’t Open This Page

> To protect your security, www.youtube.com will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window.

> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page?as...

Which says

> If you see this error, it is usually caused by a misconfigured website that is trying to display another website without the consent of its owner.

> Websites can use x-frame options or a content security policy to control if other websites may embed them on their own pages. This is an important security feature to prevent clickjacking, which is an attack that allows malicious sites to trick users into clicking links on a site.

Generally speaking this kind of situation represents the opposite problem to what the OP describes: the web browsers themselves are constantly changing and breaking previously working websites. This imposes a burden of continuously modify the websites to comply with the latest and greatest APIs; most of the web isn't going to upgrade and will slowly rot (like happened with sites that relied on Flash, a proprietary, non-standard plugin). Obsolete devices - the theme of this post - aren't a moving target like the web is.

Now, for this particular website, being a 2021 course, it's just a bug. It _should_ just be fixed and set the proper CSP.

The X-Frame-Options header is sent by YouTube, not by the website. The website appears to be trying to embed a normal YouTube.com link (/watch?) instead of using its normal embed path (/embed/).

This is probably intentional behaviour by YouTube to prevent clickjacking and the like. I don't think this has ever been how YouTube intended embeds to work, so you can't really blame browsers here. The author should fix their link to get the video to show up.

I was thinking along those lines: this api (content security policy) didn't work with older browsers, because they didn't exist. An older browser wouldn't have blocked this iframe. And by looking up, it would be indeed very old.

So yeah my rant didn't apply to this particular instance.

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