Hacker News Reader

Comment by fifticon | Hacker News Reader

My doctor/'s office was just forced to switch to app-instead-of-website for patient interation. Ironically, the old and this new software came from same megacorp I work for (different department, same story). The old web interface was rather good and rather sensible-practical-sane. It was almost as if someone had asked a doctor what he actually needed for his patients, and then understood his answer and also managed to actually implement and deliver it.

  The new smartphone app.. Not so much. It looks more like some MBA types managed to solve "what is the cheapest thing we can get away with, lawfully?"

Internally, I know it is because the original dev team has been gutted, development outsourced to india, and just a skeleton crew from the original team manages the chinese-whispers process with the huge indian team.

As a result, the use case flow (IE the only way you can operate it..) of the app, goes as follows:

1 close the app 2 launch the app and sign in 3 do ONE action 4 enjoy the result of the action 5 repeat from 1..

You might wonder why that is.. Well, that is because your software is not allowed to display any errors - because that might indicate there were bugs.. So instead, whenever an error happens, you just display the '... still loading..' animation... forever. So, technically, there are no errors, no bugs.. "IT IS JUST TAKING TOO LONG TO RESPOND". (spoiler: it will NEVER respond, because hidden behind the screen, is a series of unhandled web api errors..)

But again, as an "internal" employee, I have seen our management claim all this is a huge success (client paid/pays).

Back to using it: When I have to interact with my doctor, I write the texts on my PC, and mail them to myself. Then I cut/paste them from gmail into this wonderful app.

View on HN

The perpetual spinner thing happened at my last job too, and I developed the opinion that putting a spinner into your site at all is a sign of incompetence. For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds to do whatever task. Even with network delays, 150 milliseconds is a reasonable upper bound for end-to-end processing. If you have an animation at all, then your thing is either ridiculously slow or broken. Either way the animation is a crappy attempt to paper over a bad job.

> For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds to do whatever task. Even with network delays, 150 milliseconds is a reasonable upper bound for end-to-end processing

This is only really true with stable, high speed internet connections. We still cannot take for granted that everyone has that, especially not in rural areas and double especially not on mobile devices

Also, inside buildings in very urban areas

Also in my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos.

Hello fellow german

> my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos

Hello fellow Canadian

Where I used to live, in NY (not NYC, but close to _a_ major city), I had to go out onto my front porch to use my cell phone. It wasn't a great signal out there, but it was better than the _no_ signal inside my apartment.

At least on my mobile, I get ~100 ms ping to most things. Admittedly I don't use it very often so it's hard to have a real world feel for how frequent things like dropouts are, but that's mostly because data costs a lot. That kind of also ties into developers doing a bad job though (e.g. sending me 10 MB of who knows what when the task (like paying for parking) fundamentally should be doable with a few kB, most of which are the TLS handshake). If they didn't do that, their thing would be instant with 3g speeds. Most CRUD generally just doesn't need a lot of data to actually accomplish the desired task.

Satellite Internet will be slow, but should still be well under a second? I'd still expect that even extreme cases, you wouldn't expect a spinner to complete a single revolution. So it still seems unnecessary.

Anyway, I'm generally on a reliable 300 Mbit/s connection where my pings are more like 20-70 ms, so I suppose you could alter my statement to "if I see a spinner, I interpret it as incompetence".

So many places in apps just wait for no reason. Let's take a hypothetical situation:

Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can.

I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip to the server before the app moves to the next step. There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive teensy data updates.

But all "the best" software development employees (that they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies can't seem to work that out.

That’s bizarre. The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right?

> The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right?

One would think this is the case. I agree it should be.

> That’s bizarre.

Unfortunately, it's not. It's normal operation.

Why is it so?

The whole point of app is to gather your info from the phone and to send you tons of notifications.

And don't forget mandatory updates, when you open an app and cannot use it without updating to the latest crappy version.

The whole point of having an app is to collect data, show ads, and “engage the customer with the brand.” Any additional capabilities beyond that are incidental.

Don't forget bait and switching with updates so you can do all that later, possibly after you sell your quality app to someone else and cash out.

The delivery driver is not the customer, but I wouldn't be surprised if some MBA bonehead thought showing ads to workers was a win. "They have to use the app to schedule and do the work, so it's a captive audience!"

Hell, I got shown an ad after I paid for a ride on Lyft the other day. Even if you’re the customer, you’re still the product. If there’s not already ads in the drivers’ views, I’m shocked it’s taken them this long.

Why do you think only MBAs have the idea to insert ads? It's not exactly specialized thinking. Plenty of startup founders with technical chops decide to insert ads because they desperately need the revenue.

Because "MBA" has become a generic derogatory term for greedy and short termist management, because its easy to blame a group of people than face the fact that the problem is a wider one of incentives and ethics that pervades the whole of western society.

And send push notifications

History has shown over and over again that you cannot trust the client.

No, the whole point of apps is data collection, background tasks (when the device is closed) and push notifications.

Many apps are shortcuts. They live rent free on people's home screens/launchers.

Plenty could exist as a web app.

> Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can.

The obvious answer is because asynchronous workflows are brittle, and require intervention from the end user to correct if they break

Then most end users aren't going to care to fix it when it breaks, or be able to fix it when it breaks for a variety of reasons

Relevantly, in this specified case, the picture of their delivered food is shown to the customer immediately. This is more than a nice to have (imagine a large apartment building, where your food could be dropped in any number of locations).

it's shown when the driver gets a network connection again, was the way I read that.

Because "[driver] doesn't know where to go till it confirms the upload"

And what should one do if the network is down? Stand there indefinitely hoping it comes back up?

Recall the driver can’t continue without an address.

Better they can't continue than they do the last order wrong, amirite?

There's some strong "Seeing Like a State" vibes here. I'm pretty sure these apps are intentionally designed as tools to force the users (here, drivers) into a specific flow, a flow that minimizes complexity for the vendor, reality be damned.

Another way to look at it: the job of the driver side of a delivery (or taxi) app isn't to be useful to the driver; the job is to be a remote control with which the business can control the driver like they were an automaton.

So the automaton can’t deliver to the next customer because the app can’t phone home.

I don’t see how this benefits anyone.

For the control system, no delivery is better than a delivery that they can't track.

Lots of delivery jobs are effectively paid by the piece or paid by the route. The driver is not paid hourly.

This is one reason that package delivery drivers often will say that they've attempted delivery when they at best drove past the delivery point. Marking the delivery as attempted gets them off the hook for that delivery, and they can finish their shift that much faster.

Having a broken app that forces the driver to 100% complete every delivery before moving to the next one thus costs the company relatively little, but saves some complexity, missing proof of delivery, etc.

You can still queue the upload client side and let the worker move on. Don't consider the delivery complete until the upload happens, but allow the next leg of the job to start. The client workflow can require taking the picture and clicking submit, but it can accept queueing the actual upload.

In any case, if the network is down, a spinner is a lie. It's pretending to be working on something when it's not. It should show an error at least.

It's dispute resolution in a low-trust environment.

When a customer shows up saying something went wrong with the delivery, the CSRs will need evidence and if the driver did their job then they can be exonerated.

The logistics are a bit more complex than a restaurant where customers are eating at tables in the same building.

If the network is down it really doesn't matter if your app does synchronous or asynchronous operations because both will fail?

I'm not entirely sure what your point is at all

Asynchronous operations can be retried until the network returns without blocking the UI.

Not when they require user validation like making sure a photo updated correctly

If you drive away from the delivery before that photo is uploaded, then you risk not having the proof that you delivered the package successfully

That is actually worse for the driver than having to wait for the upload so they can retry immediately

The proof is still on the phone. The photo doesn’t magically vanish because the driver moved on while the network was disconnected.

I'm proficient in optimizing these UX flaws, and have been unable to land a full time job in two years, even after hundreds of applications.

Nobody cares about quality anymore.

Don’t I know it …

While doing Instacart deliveries here in Maine, I dropped off a leave-at-the-door order which requires uploading a picture of the shopping bags at the entrance. However, there wasn’t any service in the rural area I was delivering to, and the app required a connection to even open the camera interface. So I had to drive away down the road until I had service, open the camera, drive back to the delivery point, take the picture, then drive away again to upload the picture and complete the order.

Same thing with paypal.

They require a mobile phone number now. If I give them one, they'll enforce SMS as a login path.

I live in an area with excellent cell service, except for a few miles around my house. I'm not going to try to log in, while buying something, then drive down the road and wait for the SMS.

Sheer stupid.

Then it should give explicit status information like

  uploading to server (xx%)...OK
  waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes.

Not as cool, but at least somewhat informative. Engineers have a responsibility to push back on this kind of thing, because marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes.

> marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes

It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks.

But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.

It should be, but it isn't in my experience. Marketing people care about onboarding and engagement numbers, and are a major driver of dark patterns - everything from popups to moving the 'close dialog' icon to unintuitive places like the bottom left of unasked-for video embeds.

Massive over-generalization.

I’m sorry you only worked with terrible, unethical, incompetent marketing people. There are good ones, just like there are bad programmers who do all sorts of terrible and dumb things without creating universal truths about programmers.

I don't think so; I said marketing people frequently do bad stuff, which is not the same as saying they're all bad. I stand by 'frequently', because just look at how much terrible adware, clickbait, spam etc there is on the web. It's a Gresham's law-type situation.

Of course marketing people do a valuable job in terms of figuring out how to sell things and minimize the gap between producers and customers. But - just like engineers - there are lots of cynical and amoral people who work in that industry who make things worse for everyone else. By contrast, I can't think of any society that is suffering because they don't have enough advertising.

Effective marketing (not just comms, but real positioning and messaging) is why people can find the right products and services, why small businesses can compete, and why entire industries grow. It's unequivocally a good.

If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.

> If anything, societies suffer when good marketing is absent—because that’s when bad actors fill the void with misinformation, hype, and scammy tactics.

Except, marketing too is a market for lemons. Scammy marketing outcompetes good marketing. Simple as that.

Scammy marketing can sometimes be effective in the short term, but the problem with it it’s inherently self-limiting.

Deceptive brands burn their audiences, lose customer trust, and either get regulated out of existence or collapse under their own churn rates. Meanwhile, companies that invest in clear, honest positioning, strong customer relationships, and long-term brand value consistently outperform in the long run. Apple, Patagonia, and Tesla aren’t winning because they spam pop-ups.

If marketing were purely a race to the bottom, all successful brands would look like clickbait farms. They don’t.

Did you seriously just mention Tesla as an example of "honest positioning" and "strong customer relationships"??

Effective marketing (not just comms, but real positioning and messaging) is why people can find the right products and services

If that's your metric, I can confirm the GP's statement, at least when it comes to online marketing people. Increasingly, I can not find the right products and services online.

It sucks to live with a dial in nowadays.

And when your users are in the same continent as your backend.

Some things in the real world simply take longer than milliseconds; this is not a failing. I'm working with a system that takes over 10 seconds to get a list of wifi access points, and you bet we throw up a spinner while that's happening.

Now of course if the spinner is merely cosmetic and doesn't represent any actual work going on, that can be a problem especially if the process you're waiting for dies.

Monitor the process if it fails hide spinner, show the user an error and provide a Retry button to restart the process :)

>150ms

Server in Australia?

> For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds

For most CRUD apps

Sometimes wheels within wheels can slow down even modern computers.

Nah. We have a spinner, but I also have a timeout handler.

The reason is that the app's backend (and many of the servers on which it depends) can be hosted on the lowest-tier-dogshit-shared-hosting plan. I would love to have a better backend server, but we are a nonprofit, and can't afford better. This app would be a lot faster, with a more robust backend.

But error handling/reporting is a true art, and should never be an afterthought. In my experience, I need to start thinking about error management, as soon as I start planning.

In my experience, the best error handling is to not have errors, and, quite often, good UX is the answer to that. If the user doesn't do something that might cause agita, then they don't get an error.

> I developed the opinion that putting a spinner into your site at all is a sign of incompetence

This so much. If your site is so slow that it can load what is usually a video file (non-SVG animated graphics) before it can load the text on the page, then you have failed at making a website

Looking at Discourse® here, and iirc Google AMP did something similar except it was a blank page for 8 seconds (until it hit a timeout) if you blocked their tracking

I think it's an art, not a science. The alternative to a spinner is to show some sort of error to the user; a connection error or something specific that went wrong that they can report. Sometimes this is useful.

I frequently put spinners just in the individual components that need loading. I tend to use them more for large data loads that will hang around awhile, so I have to do fewer round trip transactions. Loading a list of a customer's last 1000 transactions? I'm going to bring on all that data at once, not keep calling the server as you try to scroll through it.

I want user actions to have an INSTANT consequence, not 150ms latency. So even if not a spinner, that button needs to gray out and something should affirm that they tapped it.

Also, spinners are very useful for me in tracking down bugs. When a few customers report stuck spinners in the same day, I can almost immediately determine if some particular action is failing or whether it's a server issue. Even better, they can send screenshots helping me isolate the problem. If no stuck spinner and the app just freezes, they reload it and forget what exactly they did to trigger an error. And endpoints do go down, nothing has 100% uptime. I want to FEEL how long a call is taking on a heavy operation on a busy day.

Not sure if it counts as CRUD but, when downloading files, it can take a while to prepare the files. If that while is long enough the user may thing something isn't happening, and a "I'm working on it" signal is not unreasonable.

As an Australian whose parents have 300kbps internet, please continue to add spinners to your apps. The round trip time to US west is 270ms for a good connection here. That 270ms doesn't include any processing (maybe 60ms or so) and the wifi tax (another 20ms). Then your round trip time gets doubled by HTTPS, which goes up to tripled if you're sending more than 14 KB of data.

This means it takes a full second to load most websites or apps, and this is further compounded by slow server code, daisy-chained sequential calls, living further away from the undersea cables, and bad infrastructure.

Imagine the entire UI of an email client becoming inoperable, diplaying "loading..." and a spinner every time you send mail. We don't do it now nor did we do that when 300kbps connections were more common. Spinners are a crutch for undercooked, bad software.

Keep in mind that spinners can also be used (as well as other indicators) that something is being processed client side, e.g. rendering a video and if the total time can't be estimated a spinner is reasonable.

Spinners don't have to replace the entire UI or make it inoperable. Classic email clients did indeed have a losding indicator when doing things like a "send and receive" operation.

From what I remember of Thunderbird and Outlook, they both showed a visual loading indicator somewhere in the UI.

Am I missing a detail of terminology here? By "loading spinner" I meant it in opposition to "do absolutely nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the page with the network tab open." I didn't mean to suggest any particular indicator of a pending network request, only that there should be an indicator.

Yes see what you mean now. Sorry - I was imprecise with my wording. As a fellow Australian I feel the pain too by the way :)

> do absolutely nothing for three full seconds and make me refresh the page with the network tab open

This is what I was talking about. A pattern I see is papering over this deficiency with a massive “spinner”. Barely noticeable for the devs accessing the app on 127.0.0.1 on fancy machines - so frustrating for everyone else.

Absolutely agree indication of activity is important. Especially so considering how buggy many of these web apps are.

And ndriscoll is also unfairly generalizing. Which usually happens when you generalize because it's impossible to take all eventualities into account.

For example, I've worked on add-ons to other software. But it's cloud and you gotta make certain calls back to your "host" app. Said host app responds to most calls in more than the 150ms they claim is the max. Because of what guarantees our plugin makes to the user and despite us caching whatever we can we need to make multiple such calls to make our guarantees... well guarantees.

So what can we do? Of course we show spinners while we make those necessary calls and make absolutely everything we can get away with async.

But we can't get away from things potentially taking more than a second when something isn't in cache, the host app is slower than usual and under 150ms is impossible for anything that doesn't just hit our own database.

Until like a year ago, thunderbird froze the whole UI when fetching mail

You didn't use email software with a blocking send and receive button? Usually with a somewhat informative progress bar, but still.

Spinners are a lie. Nowadays, you hardly encounter a spinner that actually shows the progress of the action you started.

For this reason, they are mostly useless. Even worse than useless if errors aren't even propagated to the user.

It's pretty useful to indicate "network requests are in progress". I agree they lose their value if you don't handle errors.

Processing should be more like 6 ms though (assuming basic CRUD), not 60. The TLS/TCP latency can be solved with a TLS terminating proxy in the region. After that, unless you want spinners on every data fetch (a miserable experience), you probably want a read replica if you're actually trying to serve the region. If you're a big company, you probably want a full read/write setup in the area (which is something for big companies to figure out anyway with newer data protection laws).

Slow server calls and daisy chained sequential operations are both people doing a bad job. My last job had backend calls that took over 1s to do basic CRUD on a low traffic service (bouncing around a dozen micro services on the backend). That should never happen.

150 ms is really bad... in mid 90s, 50 was considered the upper limit before some "busy" indicator was to be shown... these days, I'd consider 20ms to the limit of "good".

I used to work with a web developer in state govt who purposely coded a couple seconds delay before data was displayed so that the spinner would always show. He was actually one of the best developers on the team ironically.

Our state implemented a regulatory report website. It took 10 minutes to file a quarterly report thats basically 5 screens and 3 check boxes.

I emailed IT About it and they replied "try restarting your machine"

I then produced a video of the process for them.

I am 99.9% certain its just a poorly written SQL query, but no one responsible knows where that code is.

At what point does this constitute a hostile action against the user and what degree of retaliation is appropriate? Open question for everyone.

what retaliation are you imagining and against whom? who is even "the user" here?

Do a little reverse engineering/analysis on the app, to parallel-construct the claims of 'fifticon (as to not require them to leak internal info or become a whistleblower). If it's as bad as it sounds, go to press. Or just dump an expose on Twitter/X to maximize public awareness.

> who is even "the user" here?

The doctors and their patients. If it's as bad as it sounds, it actively degrades the ability of doctors to provide care, so it quite literally hurts actual people.

People should instead just vote with you feet and dollars. That'll be inconvenient, but if it bothers you enough, you'll make the effort.

A crucial part of this approach is to let your doctor know exactly why you're leaving. If they're losing business over it, they'll look for alternatives. And if the EHR company loses money, they'll look to make changes, too.

Yea, I wouldn't put up with a doctor that required me to interact with him through an app. I'd switch doctors, and hopefully find a way to let the old doctor know why I'm switching. That's often the hardest part--actually finding an owner who is harmed when a customer leaves.

Usually when people say vote with your wallet, it means those with more money make the rules.

What recourse does an individual have if they live in a rural area with 1 or 3 doctors that all use the same hostile software?

Should they suffer because they don't have money or the ability to go else where?

Most people don't have 3 doctors let alone 3 which all use the same niche/bad customer facing software.

Those that do should organize to make their displeasure known. Senior decision makers are probably incompetent boobs rather than compete assholes.

If they live somewhere with 1 doc they should vote with their feet by leaving before the town finishes dying around them.

So we should condemn large swaths of the rural population to not only abject poverty, but remove health care access too?

Is this what you're seriously arguing? That people should be forced to have a worse quality life, die earlier; all because they committed the crime of not living in a metropolis?

Do you not see how people read this as completely heartless and devoid of empathy towards their fellow man?

Yeah I should move out of the subtropical rain forest and move back to urban asthma and traffic and crime, and noise.

The idea that my neighbors and I are gunna go picket the only person within 20 miles that can write a prescription is ludicrous.

>Be forced to have a worse quality life, die earlier; all because they committed the crime of not living in a metropolis?

Literally already the case and more so care isn't cheaper unlike land so your lesser dollars buys lesser care and no realistic access to specialists

Reminds me of how the CCP pays doctors extra money to work in rural areas. And I read an article on how gynecologists are fleeing the American South. And even in my own country there is lack of GPs in some provinces.

Most such bad software is provided by a small number of very large companies, so none of it is "niche".

> Senior decision makers are probably incompetent boobs rather than compete assholes.

It's not some coincidence that just about every company in every sector is screwing over more and more people. This is all extremely calculated. We've decided that making the most money is all that matters and we're seeing the inevitable results of that choice everywhere around us. If shareholders got richer by providing people with quality healthcare and well designed websites and the freedom to use or not use mobile technology we'd already have those things. No one cares how shitty they make our lives or even how many of us they kill as long as they keep the ability to stuff more money into their pockets this quarter than they did last quarter. The people doing this shit to us aren't incompetent. What we want from them isn't what they're optimizing for. Maybe you haven't noticed the massive amount of consolidation in every industry going on, but consider that voting with your wallet gets harder over time. Consider how many companies you're personally giving your money to right now while wishing you had an alternative that better met your needs. Voting with your wallet is not a real option. The fattest wallet will always win.

Surely it's not a well-functioning market, when the client (the medical organization) had accepted and paid for a clearly dysfunctional software that harms their operations. Yet, they somehow survive and continue to function despite it.

And thus it's questionable whenever voting with wallet would work. It works in healthy, free and competitive markets with rational actors, and we probably aren't looking at one.

My PCP once apologized for a system upgrade (he had joined a larger medical practice) which "forces me to look at this laptop screen instead of you, My Friend"

And he was well aware that I'm a guy whose mental illness can mostly be traced to escaping into screens since the first Family Cathode Ray of 1974 and Clarke Monolith of 1968

I imagine legal retaliation as the perpetual loading could be framed as blocking access to medical care.

I’m gonna punt on the question of where the line is for hostile actions and use some past legal justification of “I know it when I see it” and I see it clearly here.

The second part is the more interesting question to me:

Appropriate reactions would seem to include:

  - finding a new doctor/practice/provider. Super hard in practice as they seem to be geographical monopolies a la the cable networks
  - providing appropriately hostile feedback to your current doctors — but this is likely only to garner empathy as the docs have little say over this
  - stop using smartphones and claim hardship — not sure how this would pan out. Probably not well?
  - channeling Luigi and murdering the people responsible for our ongoing dystopia

Seriously what other options are there? You can either complain to the ether and it goes nowhere. Or you can take up violence and it still likely goes nowhere and you fuck up your life.

This is why so many people are content to let the world burn. It ain’t for us anymore anyway.

Is stupidity instead of hardship a legally valid claim? Are cognitively disabled people, unable to operate a smartphone, a protected class?

If the entire world requires smartphones to take part and you are unable to use a smartphone you deserve some protection, yes.

If you see other options I’d be happy to hear them?

My question is can I sue based on that?

If you’re a protected class I would assume yes. IANAL this is not legal advice and this is not a real situation anyway

That's my question, am I a protected class for not being able to operate a smartphone? I think many of a typical doctor's constituency fall into that category.

I don’t think “person who is unable to operate a cellphone” is a protected class. There might be some overlap between those people and people in other protected classes. But it is hard to say just based on a hypothetical, right?

> a typical doctor's constituency fall into that category.

My 95 year-old mother can't use apps on her iphone because she can't figure out the navigation and various modes. Because of this her phone usage is limited to answering incoming calls, making calls to the six icons we've preset on her home screen, receiving texts and replying to the last text she received (because it's still on the screen). Anything else is iffy. And she's not cognitively impaired. She's actually quite sharp for her age and lives on her own within an assisted care community.

No. You're not.

Blind people are. At least, insofar as we still have the ADA.

One thing these companies are doing is charging blind people extra. Phrase it that way and you can maybe move some policy levers.

They are protected if we collectively-enough (laws, or culture, religion, ethics, or...?) agree to provide equitable access to people with disabilities. Human rights are made up (the local deer that spent the night in the woods near where I spend the night have no rights, they just exist in a mix of cooperation, reciprocity, and some competition. Actually, I don't know if they afford each other rights in the way we do that. Likewise, I don't know if deer focus on "productivity" as much as so many of us do...), and for good reasons (?). I wonder if rights were codified back when we were far less numerous and living so much closer to the land, amidst so much more abundant life.

wcag has provisions regarding cognitive issues, I have been thinking about writing an article arguing that dark patterns being liable under accessibility laws - but have not really shopped it around.

Of course one thing is nobody wants to sue someone because they don't understand something, because they think it means arguing they are stupid.

On a similar note, I think the inability to pause all animations on a website seems like a kind of WCAG violation as well.

If anyone needs a test case, I consider myself a reasonably intelligent human who is absolutely too stupid to use modern technology and would be glad to proclaim that to a court. (executive function, working memory issues. latency is a killer for me.)

You have forgotten sabotage or whistle blowing. If i would work for such a crappy manager, i would let upper management know.

Feeling helpless is the moment you loose.

This is all downstream of consolidation of ownership in private equity of clinics, community health centers, emergency rooms, veterinarians offices, end-of-life care facilities, etc.

This is what happens when you let the bean counters and MBAs a quarter turn around the world with no on-the-ground experience or institutional knowledge make decisions from their spreadsheets to "optimize out inefficiencies".

Let's call it what it is: strip mining.

> downstream of consolidation of ownership

No, if anything, people buying and running multiple offices are exactly in the business of optimizing the last few percentage points of efficiency and that include amortizing better software across all these offices to make them run with fewer humans in the loop. Causing more people to talk to more humans is NOT what they do.

The issue is lack of care, incompetence, stupidity - exactly the things that will get you fired from these operations. Eventually.

The problem is "eventually". Unfortunately it will take too long for that to happen, compared to the rest of our lives.

VOTE MOTHERFUCKER

Local government politics work. State politics even kinda work.

The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind boggling.

I vote. I am 50. I have voted in every election I was able to. In my life my preferred candidate has won exactly twice: Obama’s second term and Biden’s first. This includes local, state elections, and national.

To quote George Carlin: “If voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it”.

Trump lost in 2024 but took the win because his cronies disqualified enough voters in enough states to win.

So, please, spare me. We’re up to violence already. You’re just well behind the times unfortunately.

Don’t mean to be antagonistic here, but do you have a source for the claim that trump took the win?

Would be really curious to see how this could be proven or at the very least convincingly induced.

Go look for how many ballots were disqualified in the swing states?

I googled around, but I couldn't find an authoritative source showing either the numbers disqualified, the reasons, and that those ballots were majority not-trump ballots.

Can you provide a source for that data for a specific swing state of your choice?

Contra Carlin, if voting didn’t matter they wouldn’t be putting so much effort into making it harder.

Your argument is, violence is an option, because your preferred candidates don't win as much as you like?

I would see a point in saying voting is pointless, because no matter who you vote for, all end up on the payroll of the people doing enshitification. But not because your side always loose. Because this then won't likely change when you turn to violence - your side will be still the smaller one and we tried the whole voting thing, to not have all arguments solved with bloodshed.

“My preferred candidate only one twice” is the hallmark of a “only the federal govt elections matter” midwit. The federal government is the least effective way to lead on regulatory change. California has demonstrated leadership this way repeatedly.

>So, please, spare me. We’re up to violence already. You’re just well behind the times unfortunately.

There have been nut-jobs saying this and inflicting violence since the beginning of the country. Then there are people who actually affect change. Pick a side.

Ok, maybe something less desperate than voting but appropriate in this case: create a competitor to disrupt the suckers? Maybe using the same API?

The users of the sub-par app are captive, the hospital or insurance company is mandating it, and neither the doctor nor patients are free to choose a competing app.

If you create a technically better app for the users, people still won't be able to use it unless you also are chosen by those higher up, and since there's likely already a strong existing relationship between the executives at the existing company and at the medical compan(ies), that means creating a competitor also will require building a lot of social capital with the decision makers, taking them to dinner and on golf trips, and so on.

It will take years of your life, millions of dollars (since a 1-man company will never be seen as legitimate enough to provide a medical app, you'll need a large company with many employees), and the chance of success is minimal.

I don't see how this is an "appropriate" response to a bad app.

I was just thinking of a better front end for the same API that trifticon mentionned. Still a lot of work of course, but may not require as many approvals.

I wish we lived in a world where all these APIs were open, regulated, and everybody could compete on the implementation on both sides... One day, if capitalism survive technofeudalism...

Even avoiding the problems with getting a foothold into this space any start up that tried to do the right thing would get bought up by someone else and enshitified until it was just as bad if not worse. There's more money to be made by screwing over the public than by not screwing them and our entire system is centered around making the most money at any cost and placing money over every other concern.

Where can I vote for "Medical establishments should have an accessible-friendly browser-accessible no-javascript webpage for all functionality"?

I see the "democrat" and "republic" checkboxes, but I don't see the magical third "Good apps, and also health insurance companies have to cover medical claims without questioning whether my doctor is competent, denying each claim once, and requiring 3 months of arguing on a phone"

I've been voting, and as far as I can tell every option I have ever been able to vote for has been fully in support of crappy apps and crappy healthcare.

Democrat is the only sane choice if you want a functioning government. Republicans have departed reality.

There are no sane choices. We're only stuck with republicans now because democrats were happy to maintain a status quo that was keeping them rich but wasn't addressing the needs of the people. The dems might throw us a bone now and then, but they weren't willing to make the kind of meaningful changes that might threaten their power or the interests of the corporations and industries bribing them. Now we're left with folks who just want to pillage everything they can and burn the rest to the ground.

>Where can I vote for "Medical establishments should have an accessible-friendly browser-accessible no-javascript webpage for all functionality"?

Get off your ass and start a ballot measure. If you want to literally vote for a direct regulation that’s the way to do it.

Alternatively, start talking to state legislators and get them to support a bill doing it.

> The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind boggling.

It's not. Unlike voting, it has a nonzero chance of improving the app situation.

In this situation, instead of anything on the list above, I recommend going to press/Twitter and stressing the angle that this bullshit actually ruins people's lives permanently (or kills them prematurely).

> The fact that murder is on your list but not voting is mind boggling.

for hundreds of years our government and the corporations who bribe them have worked to limit the influence of the average person on the laws and regulations that we live under. After seeing our broken two party system, the gerrymandering and voter suppression, the open bribery, the lack of integrity or accountability, the inability/unwillingness of congress to do their job, and the growing list of laws and policies most Americans support and problems we want solutions for that get ignored time and time again while laws are being passed to appease corporations and industries, I really don't blame people for thinking that their ballot box is not the solution to their problems.

When people feel they don't have a way within the system to get the things they need they'll look for ways to get them outside of the system. Our government used at least put in the effort to give the appearance that working within the system could be successful, but these days they barely bother to do that.

Personally I still like to hold onto hope that voting can make a difference, especially at the local level, but it's a hard sell these days and getting harder all the time.

You’re talking about national elections. California has demonstrated time and time again that it’s able to regulate businesses and impose environmental regulations beyond the federal government

> stop using smartphones and claim hardship — not sure how this would pan out.

This is basically what I do now. When someone tells me to install their app or give them my cell phone number I tell them that I don't have a cell phone. Sometimes I do it while holding a cell phone in my hand.

I've told employers that if they make using an app a requirement they'll need to buy me a cell phone.

If people really push on why I won't use an app I'll tell them all about how my buying a phone doesn't make me the owner of one since multiple people at multiple companies have privileged access to the device I paid for far beyond my own level of access which enables them to access/add/remove/modify files and settings at any time and for any reason without my permission or even without making me aware that they've done it. Why would I use a system controlled by an unknown number of others who are only interested in enriching themselves to keep highly personal information like my medical history or banking information? Cell phones are inherently insecure and adversarial devices designed to collect and leak our private information while stealing our attention.

- Call the office and ask them to read the message that they couldn't be bothered to put in regular email.

- Switch to paper mail notices

(Here, health insurance "improving" their web site - again - to a useless two-factor auth that loops indefinitely.)

I tend to push back against this nonsense pretty firmly, and would go so far as to request paper documents be sent, as "I don't have a device up to the task" (which sometimes is true, as I use old hardware until I luck into a handmedown or the thing breaks). I get that paper and postage and time are costs. So is user time and stress level.

It will be an uphill struggle for you to claim obsolescence.

The general public are currently being trained with administrative assistant/clerical skills in order to do this labor for companies unable to support a workforce.

Your card transactions are now your responsibility, not a cashier's. Your menu ordering is in your hands from the cloud, not a waitress you can harass. Your vehicle's vital functions, safety mechanisms, and accessories are all on you, in motion or at rest. All your paperwork is cloud-assisted but you're the secretary and they're going paperless so you'd better have a nice printer, too.

Your mobile apps are living rent-free in your home/pocket and you've got limited authority over their resource usage, especially if a coin miner or botnet is part of your package deal.

Currently I'm struggling with my ISP because apparently the providers in USA are segregating/unbundling Mobile Wireless service and moving toward stricter metering/throttling of data and bandwidth, so it would seem that this Mandatory Smartphone also demands an Unlimited 5G plan to match.

when the functioning of the app means that people with disabilities, including cognitive disabilities, will be denied medical access, and the retaliation is probably a lawsuit appropriate to your jurisdiction, if your jurisdiction does not support accessibility legislation then you're probably out of luck.

The annoying part is that website can just be used as an app. For a booking app we don't need native performance; just a webpage-inside-an-app is fine. In most cases, it should be fairly straight-forward and cheap to make this work.

What happens is they hire some contracting firm and they go "whole thing will have to be redone" so they get more work, and that's how you end up with a "solution" like this. Basically the software equivalent of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq6WME576ZE

What’s even more asinine is the website can be updated without publishing to an app store. You always have the latest version and all these apps are just a thin veneer on some CRUD endpoints anyway.

This is the entire philosophy behind all of the apps run by DHH/Basecamp. The web should be the default and native apps should only be used for software that just isn’t possible through the web (yet).

The problem is that users much prefer native apps. The idiomatic UI, the use of OS specific capabilities (even if the same result could be done without), the appearance of better performance because the app launches before a network connection is made.

We can opine all we want about how things should work, but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want other than development cost/non-customer concerns.

It’s very hard to tell users they should feel differently than they do, no matter the technical or philosophical high ground.

people here is web biased, people forgot that mobile world exist and I can tell you navigating web in mobile vs native mobile app is like heavenly different

if people commenting from web dekstop perspective I can see that point, but from mobile?? where hardware processing power and network is sometimes unreliable???

huft

> The problem is that users much prefer native apps.

I imagine there is some data on this, but it goes against my observations of me and my circle.

I have maybe 4 apps that I use heavily and another 10 that I use when I have to. I actively avoid installing another app when the web version is sufficient. I don't need the weekly updates to clog up my storage. I don't need notifications going off at all hours. And I don't need creepy unfathomable permissions requests.

Is there some 500ms delay if I click a button on the web version? Maybe. Honestly, I'm not so busy to have noticed.

> it goes against my observations of me and my circle

Your friends are probably tech savvy. That means your browser is well configured (or configured at all), running an ad blocker and on a modern machine. You probably value the privacy attributes of using a browser, versus most of the population than will trade privacy for convenience.

I’ve worked on a few native apps for large companies where there was already a decent web app but we were losing to competitors’ native apps.

User feedback was loud and clear: many users see web apps as cost savings efforts that are inferior products and only exist so a lazy / cheap company doesn’t have to invest in native.

Remember that permissions and notifications can also be a problem in web apps; that’s one thing the “make web apps as good as native” crowd has gotten us.

For a GP booking app that most people only use once in a blue moon it really doesn't matter much. And most users will absolutely prefer a well-designed webapp vs. a crummy semi-working native app, as the previous person described. In short, this is just boring thoughtless repetition of a cliché with no consideration for context.

> We can opine all we want about how things should work, but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want other than development cost/non-customer concerns.

No way / at most, HIGHLY context dependant. Facebook/Insta/social media slug of the year? Yes, probably app is desired.

My bank? Maybe, at a strech, if it's good.

My local doctor? The real estate agent im trying to rent a house from? Amazon/AliExpress/Shopee? A movie theatre? My council street parking system? My university? Fuck no i dont want your shitty apps on my device.

My bank has been fine as an app. My main nitpick is that it makes it very hard to fully detach from the app store since none of the banks publish elsewhere (I can easily ditch social media on the go or use a website, in comparison).

I went to college early enough in the smartphone era that they didn't have an app as a freshman but did by senior year... I don't miss it.

Yeah banks want the closed ecosystem. Last thing they want is a plethora of app stores where fraudster clones of their apps appear, or jailbroken phones where grandma does everything right but a bootkit steals her money.

part of that is old perceptions that have long went away. And the other part is the huge push against PWAs, especially from Apple. Web-based app development has come so far but Apple is showing off its control freak tendencies as usual to make it not seem so.

Hearing the story above about infinite loading to hide crashes really boils my blood and shows that it's simply a matter of care these days (and not hardware/bad middleware) that determines how smooth something feels.

I’m not sure what Apple’s huge push “against” PWAs is, other than just declining to support them. Are they doing anything active to lobby against PWAs?

I'm not sure if they hit the US side as hard, but they were (to be frank) trolling a lot with PWA support as a protest to the DMA over in Europe.

https://x.com/mysk_co/status/1754978973417672794

I didn't keep up with how this ended, but they clearly do not care for the feature.

For that matter, what does "declining to support" even mean? I use PWAs a fair bit on macOS, and as I recall they are available on iOS as well.

Speaking as a user, I do prefer native apps that actually do the things that you have mentioned (i.e. use idiomatic UI for the platform, integrate with its features etc).

The problem is that the vast majority of the apps that we're talking about here - the ones that replace websites - are little more than a web app repackaged in the app store. So it still has all the downsides of a web app UX-wise, while also working around any privacy settings that would have applied in the browser.

Ideally, Web is either for thin clients or text/visual focused content with minimal interaction (i.e. anything more than basic forms). Apps are for when a user needs more control (i.e. important or sensitive data that persists on their hard drive or account) or access to your hardware for proper function (aka, games or other resource-specific/intensive tasks).

In reality, you want to push everything to an app that you can or one day want to monetize. Web is to be avoided except to advertise the app. I hate it with a passion. Easily my least favorite shift over the 2010's. We advanced past flash to make proper use of HTML5, and can now start blur the lines with aspects like Webassembly and PWAs, but corporate is angry that the WWW never properly optimized itself to monetize easily.

Feels like this well written piece by Atol Gawande is relevant if you haven't seen it. I showed it a couple of years ago to my very competent and conscientious doc and she got PISSED. She talked about how she spent literally half of her doctoring time working through poorly designed menus in {epic, cerner} to carefully document everything she could about the patient, only to discover that most doctors don't pay attention to any of that info.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

Oh I think the only reason they did that is because that was the "hip" and "schnazzy" UX flow that everyone signed off and loved because "oh this will be amazing for users".

So apps, and even websites, have just become ways to market and push to users. It's not about functionality or enabling the user.

Another, maybe smallish, manifestation of this that I've seen is that devs, UX, and everyone involved is so downright hostile to direct "links". Devs because it forces them to think about what stupid react/angular router they want to use, devops has to do URL-rewrites, PMs are worried about the "additional scope", and UX folks' brains absolutely explode that there is no "flow" to the entity (it just pops up, omg). Instead you, as the user, are forced to click through the search UI or to type the right thing, to trigger the flow or whatever, before you get to that entity you want. You can't just create it as a link, and thereby enabling users to have "emergent" behavior of sharing links or emailing them, etc.

My hospital system has a surprisingly decent web app. I can log in and see my appointments, pre-register for office visits, view lab results, medications, request appointments, do virtual visits...

The amazing stupid part is when I have to sign in at the actual doctor's office.

They have an iPad which does some sort of remote/citrix setup, resulting in a frustrating experience that is full of lag where you interface with what might be their actual EMR system.

I had kaiser permanente and had google/doubleclick tracking through the entire website, including investigating conditions, doctor communication, and test results.

I complained, they played dumb, but eventually they came up with "the website is a convenience". I stopped using it.

The app was much worse.

A couple years later, other people must have complained

https://www.classaction.org/news/kaiser-permanente-shares-we...

https://www.classaction.org/news/data-breach-lawsuit-says-ka...

I believe the same thing happens with apps and websites provided by other health care providers, but nobody investigates and nobody cares.

It's kind of annoying the article burns up all the space talking about various discounts and benefits you get from Apps. Aka far less of a problem as they're optional quid pro quo and doesn't talk about the creeping enshittification of those functionalities. Im fine with a council making an option to do important things through an app. But I'm not fine with it being compulsory and I'm even less fine with it being some non functioning trash made in a software sweatshop that doesn't provide a contact number when it goes wrong and noones ever on the hook if it's dysfunctional. It rarely if ever actually improves functionality or makes important things self service. It more often reduces what I can actually do but with a flashier interface for "computer says no".

Companies need to be held accountable for their negligent behaviour

How? What do you propose?

Holding C-level executives criminally liable for the actions of the company would be a start.

eye-for-an-eye, any time a company's app is showing a customer a spinner, the c-suite's phones should also be showing spinners

Substantial dilution of shares rather than monetary penalties.

At the doctor's office I'll just ask for paper if there is no real website. Apps freaking suck. I probably won't be able to do this forever though. Example of enshitification #456249

I often can no longer ask for a menu at restaurants that expect me to scan a QR code. Well…I can ask, but they don’t have any to provide.

I just leave restaurants that have gone to the online-only menu. It's usually an indicator that there are other terrible cuts in service and quality going on as well.

I leave because I go to a restaurant to enjoy a meal with my family and friends and to connect. Forcing everyone to stare at their phones for the first five minutes is a bad start.

It makes it easier for them to regularly increase pricing without printing new menus. I wonder if any restaurants are doing A/B testing with pricing

I'm not generally evil, so I never would have thought of doing this. Therefore it must be the correct answer.

I’ve thought of this - if there’s no paper menu available, to avoid tracking, I always just search for the restaurant and navigate to the menu from their webpage rather than using a QR code.

> I just leave restaurants that have gone to the online-only menu

I would if I'm by myself but if I'm out with friends I'm not comfortable making everyone leave.

> It's usually an indicator that there are other terrible cuts in service and quality going on as well.

I've seen no such correlation.

Most I see restaurants switching to card only, pay in app. I can seem some benefits from them.

* they don't need cash to make change * they have no money to be robbed * employees can't pocket any money

Most of my friends like going cashless so they see it as a benefit too.

I ask the waiter what’s good, and usually end up going back forth a few times. It’s not as efficient, but it keeps me from reaching for my phone, which is covered in germs.

And in case of paper menu? It is also covered in germs. Do you read it or refuse and ask a waiter?

I’m banking on the assumption that a paper menu has fewer germs than my cell phone. Life has risks.

I've seen this trend regressing where I live, most restaurants I go to have done away with the QR codes (unless it's a brewery/distillery kind of establishment).

"Online menus" are fine; they allow quick updates without requiring the restaurant to re-print menus, and allow for just one copy/version of the menu to be used everywhere.

But then they should also display them publicly outside/inside, and/or have a bunch of tablets ready for visitors to use.

Tell them you can't use your phone for whatever reason, and then ask them to just tell you what they have. I think enough people must have done this already because I've seen paper menus return in many places.

(This fall under the general pattern of "make it their pain")

There's a restaurant my parents take me to when I come to visit that requires you to scan a QR code to get to a website and then order and pay for your food on your phone. You are prompted to provide a tip up front before anybody has even done anything. Then when the food's ready your phone alerts you, and you have to get up and grab the food from a shelf outside the kitchen. So if you do tip, you end up tipping... the management, I suppose.

It's just about the most cynical dining experience I've ever had the misfortune of enduring.

> So instead, whenever an error happens, you just display the '... still loading..' animation... forever.

Gotta love how everyone copies the nasty things Apple does (hi beach ball of death), but not the good things Apple does.

I've stopped submitting all electronic forms for medical purposes. I simply don't want to chatbot my health concerns to anyone. So I don't.

I also stopped signing anything in the waiting room.

What are you going to do when they refuse to provide care because you won’t fill out or sign forms?

they took an oath not to refuse.

Doctors take an oath to do no harm. With few exceptions, they are not required to treat patients.

If you were correct, you could get cosmetic surgery for free and with no prerequisites, assuming it wouldn’t harm you.

Why shouldn't they?

That would be called “slavery.”

You equate doing things for other people without money transactions, with slavery?

If it’s mandated by law, yes.

What would you call it if you were required to work—paid or otherwise—under threat of criminal punishment?

Make it so I can pay without using an app and a new login to keep track of and you'll get paid.

That’s not a condition you are entitled to create or enforce. If you want that to be enshrined in law, speak with your local representatives.

Then I can't pay you for the services you rendered.

> this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.

I've heard the arguments, so if you're thinking you're going to win an argument with me about whether this means anything or not, you're not; but supplemental information about why what's printed on our money doesn't mean it's legally money to pay a debt to a doctor, go for it.

I don’t think you understand how the system works. Or perhaps you do, but fantasize that reality were different.

First, in a non-urgent situation, you’re going to be asked about payment prior to service, and they may refuse to treat you if you can’t pay.

Second, in an emergency situation where you’re unable to provide affirmative assent, you’ll be liable for costs under the doctrine of quantum meruit (quasi-contract). If you don’t pay, the provider can sue you, in which case, the court may force you to pay on their terms.

I do understand the situation, thank you for the light insult, but I do go to the doctor in the US and in the both your first and second examples I've had my own different experience than you.

Well, what happened? It may well be that you visited someone who was generous, and they didn't exercise their rights to the fullest extent. Generosity is always an option a provider can extend, but it's not something a patient can demand.

Is the threat of criminal punishment the only incentive that works on you? You never do things because it would make someone happy or you a better person?

This isn’t about me; let’s not make this personal.

The question was, “why shouldn’t doctors be required to treat patients?” It wasn’t, “should doctors treat some patients regardless of ability to pay?” There’s a big difference between these. The first is about compelled behavior; the second is about voluntary behavior.

There’s an analogy in the legal world in the U.S.: while lawyers aren’t required to take cases for free, there’s a time-honored tradition of reserving some time to take some cases for free (aka pro bono).

I was really expecting your personal usage of the app to involve invoking developer privileges, and inserting your text through the much more user friendly UX of DBeaver..

I can't decide if I'm disappointed or relieved

Reply on news.ycombinator.com