Users are the last ones to blame.
If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists.
If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….
If anything it’s policy makers, investors and industrialists.
If you want to participate in society, you need a smartphone, and guess what? The whole world is okay with only 2 companies doing this….
While the government is aware that there is a group of people who can't or won't use a smartphone or their app, there is no technological solution on the horizon, despite viable alternatives for 2FA existing (like WebAuthn). This is what I mean by “all but demanding”.
Because you do have a right to view your medical records, there is a fallback option which essentially means going to the healthcare provider and asking for paper records. This is behavioural nudging taken to the extreme.
1: Broader than just DigiD actually, supporting European eIDAS standards, but for 99% of citizens this means DigiD.
I think this just illustrates how much easier smart phones make things. If we didn’t have smart phones for example, all your interactions with the government would be as cumbersome and inconvenient as this fall back option.
So there is a requirement to scan a QR code and there is no option to enter the building for people who don’t have a smart phone?
“or need to display Vaccine status.”
You can’t display your vaccine status without a smart phone?
“My bank now requires I run their mobile App to be able to log in, even if I'm on a PC.”
Is your bank run by the government?
“Most OTP authorisation requires you to receive an SMS code.”
SMS is available on any mobile phone, not just smart phones. Also many SMS OTP implementations include the option to receive a phone call.
“Government departments are now only contactable via the Net, so a smart phone is the minimum unless you have a PC.”
Okay so the government requires you have a computer and internet access, but not a smart phone.
In the EU this fortunately can be done trivially with a paper QR code as well.
This is why desktop Linux never gets anywhere. Even if one distro was dominant in users, that’s completely decoupled from it getting the lions share of developer support and it wouldn’t give it any advantage in resources. There’s no feedback loop to elevate a dominant distro. Maybe that’s a good thing, perhaps the value in desktop Linux is it’s diversity and ability to address niche specialisation, at the price of market power.
There is a feedback loop in commercial server distros because that is a commercial market, hence RedHat’s dominance.
Only to a point then it crosses over into exploitation. If users could switch OS's more easily then there would probably be more of them in widespread use, like browsers. As it is most people have to buy a new device to change OS.
Websites themselves become sticky because of network effects and familiarity.
There's a chap from RedHat here, telling me that Linux is commercially viable.
Actually ChromeOS is arguably mass market. That's all beside the point though really. It doesn't change the fact that the dynamics that drive consolidation are actually in a very large part motivated by user self interest.
Users are conditioned to lower their standards, not unlike workers in a dangerous environment or citizens of an inept or dishonest (or worse) government.
Such users/workers/citizens rarely take a stand.
Usability (UX) is a hard commitment to maintain for a supplier with little compassion, and software security is just an interesting hypothesis given the prevailing tools.
Speaking from my experiences in Europe and South Asia.
So effectively companies and the government are telling us that we need one of these to get avail conveniences and in some cases to be able to use their service at all…
With policies that mandate the use of digital vaccine certificates, apps and QR codes being ubiquitous, we’re effectively being forced to become a customer of Apple or Google one way or another
I cannot enter or place an order at most coffee shops today without a smartphone
Really? I wonder where you are.
I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it with me; I've never been to any kind of shop that doesn't accept my debit card, other than for small-value purchases like a bag of onions from a greengrocer, for which cash is sometimes required.
Often choices are made for short term benefits that come with a long term negative trade off. ie choosing features like a phone camera even though the device also disregards the user’s privacy.
In other cases, choices aren’t even made by consumers directly. Like when a company acquires potential competition before they’re able to grow into a threat. Or even a company uses their growing economic power and position for regulatory capture.
Sometimes a company just breaks away from their competition and end up the only competitive choice in the market and are able To cement their position through the means above.
Especially following the previous cases, users sometimes don’t choose at all because there remain no meaningful choices in the ecosystem they purchase in.
How would users vote now with their wallet when everything is tailored for users having either an iPhone or an Android phone?
(Yes, I know alternatives exists, even alternatives not built on top of Android, but it's extremely limited and targets very tech savvy users, possibly requiring coding skills to use to their fullest).
I own a pine phone. It's all but un-useable in any meaningful sense of the word. I own a brick and motor and have just been mandated by the government to run their version of the vaccine passport app.
It's android OR ios.
What choices do I have here?
What about people that don't have a phone? Or a 'dumb'-phone?
Where I live any valid QR code works, be it paper or even just a picture of the paper. No need to use an app.
This small business is not allowed to let customers enter the shop if they can't validate their vaccination status. To do this one needs a QR code reader on a phone. Practically speaking there are no alternatives.
Also, they're not saying that your business needs to run this app, they are saying that your business needs to verify Covid certificates and offering these apps as one way to do it. But it's not the only way - for example, it may be less convenient, but you can do that QR code scanning + Covid certificate validation on any computer with a connected camera using a web service (https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/ is one random example, there is also open source code to roll your own checks for EU Covid certificates in some custom system if you need to), and there you can use Windows or Linux or whatever, there's no need for a smartphone as such. In fact, if the parent poster's Pinephone can run a browser and expose a camera to it, then perhaps it might work out of the box on the Pinephone without needing a special app.
It's so ubiquitous now that even if you want to get out of this duopoly, you can't really.
Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else.
Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences.
Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010!
The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.
Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).
We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago.
But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
Society has always been fast to embrace new technologies, particularly if profits were to be made or economies of scale made prior luxuries affordable for everyone. Industrialization, the advent of the rail age or air travel as mass transit, and now the Internet.
We're using CPUs with more processing power than multiple million dollar 70s-era mainframes in disposable pregnancy or covid tests, and a modern single (!) GPU can blast a 90s-era supercomputer to pieces with GFLOP/s performance.
I presume your beavers also come with healthcare, and the stores where you'd buy anything will still take cash.