Being forced to upgrade phones... Ugh.
I don't have a solution if you're not me and you're not paying me, though.
A smartphone is like a little computer you can use on the go, in case you weren’t aware.
I can think of various solutions (from companies not requiring an app in the first place to inserting an SD card) but suggesting that people simply not store user data on their phone is a new one
It got so bad I had to do things like delete my Internet history if I even wanted to copy and paste something! And I would do everything I could to not have to pick which photos and conversations I needed to delete forever just to download some fucking app I would only use one time to order food or park somewhere or do first-time router setup.
Finally I had to give in and get a new phone, because managing phone storage was making my life much more difficult than it needed to be. But I'm still so mad that I had to, because daily living seems to demand more and more storage space. And people accept it!! Ugh. The dang thing didn't even have a scratch on it either. Would've used it for 20 years if I could.
Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your media.
1. I like to have access to my photos and videos while I'm on the go. You never know when the subject of some trip or experience from 2 years ago will come up in conversation, and I'll want to show a photo of it to someone I'm talking to. Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them.
2. I don't like to give cloud services all my photos and videos. Despite the extremely dark pattern in Google Photos where it tries multiple times a month to trick me into enabling cloud backup, I've kept it off. Some of my photos may be sensitive things like personal documents, I'd rather not have to think about what's in the cloud and what isn't, and what is deleted where. These services also often aren't free and I'd prefer not to pay for them.
3. I back up my phone regularly to my personal computer, so losing my phone doesn't mean I lose all the media on my phone.
4. And since I know someone will ask, I lock my phone. Not with a fingerprint; with a passcode. It's not perfect but I'm comfortable with the level of security.
But in your example they -do- weigh something, measured in megabytes. So there is an obvious tradeoff in terms of what you can fit on your phone with some spare empty margin, similar to physical goods that you need to fit into a backpack when you know you might pick something else up along the way.
Digital storage is so far removed from this concept. Let us not excuse poor business practices by trying to offload a piece of their business systems on to their customers' devices.
I shouldn't have to provide space on my property to conduct business with another organization.
But if you have a problem with the train ticket textbook, people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're not managing or carrying your belongings properly. I should get a bigger bag, or I should carry fewer of the books I actually want to read. Why am I carrying around so many things anyway? It's irresponsible! Sure I've got room for a piece of paper, but that's not enough these days. Don't I know that I'll need space for the train ticket textbook?
Have fun with that.
I really don't like this analogy. These are entirely different concepts. A backpack has weight, dimension in real space that impacts the real world. A phone full of videos has no extra weight or volume in the real world.
What are you talking about? Only the most expensive flagship phones have a terabyte of storage space. There are no phones that have "many TBs". Mine certainly doesn't.
Regardless, none of the following functionality needs an app. It all works great on a website, and doesn't take up any space permanently on my device:
- Buying a ticket - Checking transit times - Receiving notifications (not only does email exist, but websites can send notofications) - Joining a loyalty program
I don't have any problem with people who want to carry these apps around, but as an infrequent user of many businesses, it's death by a thousand cuts. I resent how what were once perfectly workable mobile websites are slowly being degraded in order to force me to download hundreds of megabytes of copy-paste support libraries for what half the time are just wrapped webviews anyway.