Walled Gardens Can Kill
aneesiqbal.ai
aneesiqbal.ai
You can say that people should know better but sometimes dead tree maps are not available, and anyway there’s no doubt that they are on the way out. The “safe/reliable” way might even seem to be up for debate, since phones can be more waterproof than paper, less likely to blow away when you’re on top of a mountain, serve as a backup flashlight/emergency comms, etc. But all it takes is a company that decides to force auto update and a PM that decides feature churn increases engagement and creates job security, and who knows what will break?
It is kind of like packaging that’s a choking or asphyxiation hazard.. if you’re doing anything that affects millions of people, it’s almost ALWAYS a safety issue even if you don’t usually think of it that way. No big audience or big user base without big responsibilities. Sure you’ll probably not be held liable in law suits, but on the other hand you should probably feel bad if you’re killing people due to indifference /negligence when thinking through edge cases.
Funny thing. I was in search and rescue as a teen, and I went though the courses with a friend. A decade or so later, we were hiking on a bright sunny day* and weren't properly prepared. We went off trail, and found ourselves in an unknown position. Our predominant emotion was shame, with the understanding that if we got S&R called on us we would be completely honest about our training (not that our spouses wouldn't be honest for us). We had a paper map but no compass, and were able to navigate to a marked trail with some educated guesswork. In the end, it was a fun adventure, but the shame stuck with us the whole way home.
* note: "bright and sunny day" is the condition that search and rescue teaches one to be the most mindful of. It's where you and everybody else get the most confident, and prepare the least.
And if you like belts & suspenders and have a laser printer, splurge a little[1]. But still keep your map, compass and pencil in the ziploc.
[1] https://www.riteintherain.com/printer-paper-20-pound#8511-50
My recommendation is to take an old phone, make sure it's charged, and throw it in a Ziploc in a back pocket. Then stay on-trail, which you should almost always be doing anyway.
This is the second response in a row where you've read something I wrote and responded to a very specific thing I did not say.
Sure, use your phone with offline maps as your primary, but a printed backup map doesn't require anything special or expensive.
[1] With an overlap strip that is printed on both sides, thanks to plakativ[2].
Last year I went hiking in Switzerland, so I mailed a couple of different maps of where I was going and picked them up from the print shop in town, which took me...... 30 minutes?
The times I've used my phone for hiking I've always regretted it for one reason or another. Maps are so much better, and it's not extensive setup getting your hands on one, one way or another. Come on.
You can also purchase printed copies.
A gallon ziplock bag makes for cheap lamination. So does clear packing tape.
Not everyone is an engineer, and they may simply not be aware that things like reliability / stability / user-control / user-consent for phones/apps/SaaS is a complete joke compared to any other kind of technology. Someone out there probably has a "life alert" app that used to work but has been recently broken because the API to pre-load the "one trick all seniors should know" advertisements recently changed. Someone can't see to dial emergency services because their huge-font-app was removed from the app store/marked as malware, or maybe their flashlight-app doesn't work because a server or cell connectivity went down and it can't phone home telemetry.
All the following things are true at the same time. Backup plans, knowledge, and tactics are good. Victim-blaming is often very tempting/easy. Apps have no doubt saved lives as well. We can still acknowledge issues and try to do better. "Death by GPS" as a recognizable figure of speech should not be a thing. It's no longer a solid bet that "works today" means "unless I change something, it's working tomorrow".. this is bad and is mostly unnecessary. As time goes on advice to avoid technology to avoid associated problems always becomes impractical (good luck throwing away your phone/email to avoid spam) so at some point we have to actually admit and address the problems.
My ass has been saved more times by an iPhone compass and offline OrganicMaps than the other way round. Quote the situation a couple of years back where the state issued paper maps were completely wrong and my Suunto compass turned out to likely be a fake one and froze and cracked open overnight. 30km from humans on a mountain range in central asia.
I have never had an iPhone crap out on me I will add. Has completely replaced my dedicated GPS.
The worst thing I've ever seen though is a compass app on Android that won't work if it can't contact the ad server.
GaiaGPS, which advertises is offline capability, after an update (but not immediately after the update) recently required users to login to continue using the app. Which was impossible if you happened to be out of cell phone range 10 miles from a trailhead when this login popup happened. Incredibly bone-headed move, and dangerous for hikers that aren't smart enough to carry backup map sources. But Gaia has been trending this way for several years.
The structure provides a way for leadership to refuse to act in ways that counter the company’s charter.
More here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Their end-user privacy policy says "We will not use your Inputs or Outputs to train our models" (followed by carve-outs, which seem reasonable).
But really the idea of in-network hospitals for emergency services is nuts. Like, checkups, chronic issues—fine, your instance provider might have some preferences. But if it is an emergency (a situation in which you might die) and you have to figure out which hospital to go to first: Apple can not fix your malfunctioning society.
This sounds like a verbose way of saying "this is really the fault of Apple".
Apple should not be the arbiter of whether a business model you want to engage in is legal or not. That's what courts of law are for. I would strongly oppose Apple unilaterally deciding which apps can-, and which cannot-, use the geofencing feature.
Go to the government, and have the government compel Apple to restrict certain apps if that is your desire, but for them to do that on their own is completely out of line.
This is exactly the argument against what Apple is doing. They're compelling the user's device to enforce geo-restrictions against the user's wishes. They're acting as a government when there is no law requiring the user to respect arbitrary -- and inaccurate -- geofencing restrictions.
The DEVELOPERS are compelling the user. Which is what should happen. The user should be given options by the developers, not Apple.
Our computers are meant to empower us, not to enforce idiotic developer policies that nobody cares about.
As opposed to all the other Apple decisions?
By the way, which law requires Apple to provide geofencing to a health insurance app such it can't even be installed outside a particular country, and ties its hands completely on the matter?
Nu-uh. (?)
Comments: Its not the corporation, its the government. Its not the corporation, its just the way things are. Its ok the corporation restricts freedom, everything is a tradeoff and everyone does this. Gollygee I hope this gets better.
real elevating curious conversation here /s that never self reflects, is our culture of software making the world worse? will one day our intentional naivety around power fail to protect us from that truth?
Please elaborate on the times when a large institution restricted peoples freedom for their "own good." The history of this is extremely clear. Software being involved is just an obscuring detail.
It's not. I'm not a history buff so I won't speak for the past. But right now there is a huge accountability problem.
Government literally can't exist without ignoring accountability.
Corporations are incentivised to ignore accountability.
Individuals want to ignore accountability.
You only have control over yourself. If you want your life to go better then you have to take the accountability.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket, have backups, understand how the things you participate in work. Ask questions like "why would this be free".
It's a long road for everyone but if you want to be safe and happy you gotta take the solutions into your own hands.
People should be able to buy the phone that fits their needs.
The fact that google does it also doesn't make it ok.
For paid apps, maybe. For the free app that is the companion to a meat-space service you are already paying for (insurance, banking, etc), region locking is a liability all-round.
I've spent countless hours working around this while travelling, and in some cases just haven't been able to use services I've paid for.
It might be nice for you if Apple refused to let devs build region locked apps, but that might cause other bigger problems for other people, right? For banking, hacking attempts from other countries in general is a big and serious issue. My banking app offers a region locking option for my own security, and I’m sure many banks can safely assume that login attempts from other countries are illegitimate.
This is a different thing, though - a region lock on logins might be useful.
What these companies are doing is only region locking installation. If you already have the app installed, you can use it from overseas just fine
(and you can generally setup an arbitrary-region Google/Apple account over a VPN, so the scammers just work around it that way).
The trouble with that is you might need to buy a region-compatible sim card to call the bank, and you might need to call the bank in order to buy the sim card. (I was lucky I could find wifi and had a VPN set up so I could make myself appear in the US).
Yes, and it's very wrong that the device seller gets to take part on that deal too.
> Apple’s not working against you so much as serving multiple customers
Apple is explicitly working against you here. Yes, it was hired by somebody else to do it, but no, this doesn't make it ok.
They do, but they shouldn't. This is one of the worst things about modern technology. My device, my rules, end of story. I should be able to change the inputs to the application such that it thinks it's in whatever region I decide, because I physically control and operate the device.
It probably is, I didn't check. I was able to grab the APK and install it directly
Unless something has change in the past few years since I needed to do this, you can get around it on iPhone by creating a new Apple ID for the new region and logging your phone into that account.
[added] probably not the first thing one thinks about if they are in a heighten anxiety/panic state though
Shitty, anti-consumer dark pattern from Apple.
No, Android does not support region locking. Neither does iOS. (Technically, you can make your app look at the SIM country and exit if it's not what you want, but nobody does this.) App stores on those platforms support region locking. The problem the author is highlighting is that you can't just get the ipk and install it directly to get around the app store's restrictions like you can on most Android phones.
(I had the same thought as you at first :)
Your response is kinda shitty toward the very part where I was trying to validate their misread as reasonable. Decent strangers sometimes do that for one another
While the submission does make an important point, it seems a bit obfuscated by accusing Apple exclusively.
Seems like main benefit of the side-loading was bypassing the geofence.
And while native apps provide heavier geo-attribution (thus, probably harder to fake), I'm not sure if this is solely an Android vs Apple thing.
Still it's a good reminder of what you're getting into with walled gardens.
More broadly, it is a real shame how corporations have turned mobile internet into the complete opposite of what it could achieve.
Ideally, the only thing tied to a specific hardware or software provider should be your identity.
And imho, said provider should be controlled by state government, and be accessible from any device, given the proof of identity.
If that is the case I am surprised that is the first time you ran into a geo locked app and didn't already have another Apple account for that region that you could log into. This was one of the first things I quickly learned to do if I wanted my iPhone to be useful at all when I spent many months living in a (non-Western) country. (using apps for their services)
Also works for pinning versions of apps that ship some malware (like safetynet detection) with a new update. Apps installed from there are not linked to play store by default and so updates are not checked.
There is an Android app, and that installs smoothly enough, but trying to start a subscription initially errored out on both my & my wife's phones.
I then tried to create a new user through the Apple website, and got stuck on this screen, which was throwing 500s every time I clicked on the continue button: https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/17zawel/continue....
After a couple of days that screen cleared, but then I found that their website won't take payment from me (I'm based outside of the US, but have a US billing address, so that's likely the cause of that.) I did find that their app at this point allowed me to subscribe through Google Play subscriptions (once I had gotten this account fully setup), so that almost got me to the finish line (except for some reason I got blocked and decided to start again with a new account, so back to square 1).
I'll also note that (of course) they don't support chromecast (as I think all or most other streaming apps available on Android do); the workaround is apparently to open the Apple TV site in chrome and cast from there.
Kind of a shitshow, overall.
Would require transparent file and copy buffers I guess. In addition to remote desktop functions.
I'm sure this exists (and clearly so does the insurance company practice), but I've never run into it — bank websites always have the same or more functionality than the phone app. Except maybe something like mobile deposit.
Maybe one can hope.
I got locked out of Google because my second number was not a cell phone. Back then, they had the option to call and read the code. Suddenly they took that option away and only allowed texting.
If I need to send money direct, I use ACH. Yes, it takes a few days. And yes, that's fine.
It feels like how a minor problem (in the sense that the app is poorly planned) is escalated into a device/os and then a country + international problem
If your goal were to fix this issue for other people on your situation, you would push for your insurance to disable geolocation instead of complaining about the existence of geolocation which is opening a can of worms you have no bearing in and don't understand.
Fix your garden before you fix the world.
But this is far from the biggest problem in this story.
e.g, if it’s important to be able to access the information available through the app, why is it locked?
Why isn’t that important information available on a regular web site?
Why do you need to install an app before getting emergency medical attention, anyway?
While sideloading might let you work around a broken bureaucracy from time-to-time, that’s not a very effective way to improve the system.
Sympathy will be limited when that country is also a repressive dictatorship, if you have gone there of your own accord.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/united-arab-emirates-uae-free-spe...
But if you chose to move to a horrible, evil country, then you cannot blame its awfulness on your phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Ara...
This apparent need to push the discussion away from the issue being presented and instead engage in some moral grandstanding on an irrelevant point comes across as suspect.
If you were presented with an example of a walled garden causing distress to someone in a nice, white Western country, you'd presumably rush forward with your sympathy, would you?
You seem unable to parse my statement "Sympathy will be limited when that country is also a repressive dictatorship, if you have gone there of your own accord."
You seem unable to comprehend that the OP complained about some policy choices of his phone's provider, when what actually "can kill" here is the health service of the evil, oppressive country he lives in.
This apparent need to push the discussion away from the issue being presented and instead try and make it a race issue comes across as you being a demented defender of a disgusting regime.
Suspect indeed.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/unite...
I didn't "make it a race issue".
I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that you employ such a puerile tactic, as it's exactly what you're doing with the original article - picking out an irrelevant detail and focusing on that and then acting like you've "won" some sort of argument, which in fact is only taking place in your head.
My very simple point - which you've done nothing to address - is that the article was about the difficulties and stresses which can arise when digital services are arbitrarily blocked off from one region to the next, and that you're simply sidestepping that to make an irrelevant point.
Neither the article, nor I in my comments, make any point about the human rights situation in the UAE. It simply is not germane.
From my browsing of the comments here, it seems like no other reader of the article has gone off on a tangent in any way similar to yours - do you think there's any chance that your reading comprehension skills are at fault here, or is it just that no one is on your level?
Your point here and below have the whiff of committed insincerity off them, but nonetheless, if we take you at face value, a quick search reveals this astonishing quote from https://u.ae/en/information-and-services/justice-safety-and-...
> "UAE's hospitals can handle any medical emergency. During medical emergencies, a hospital will accept you for initial treatment and may transfer you to a hospital better equipped to deal with your problem.
The UAE provides standard medical care and visitors can easily obtain medical treatment from either private or government hospitals. In case of emergency, treatment to stabilise the case is free. Other treatment must be paid for by cash, credit card or insurance."
The UAE is a dictatorship that badly mistreats migrant workers. Don't go there.
https://hrf.org/latest/infiltrating-america-new-hrf-report-o...
No one is "going there" except you, so take your own advice, and don't.
On the other hand, I think my personal values make me ideologically opposed to locked-down hardware/software that you don't get full control over (with associated freedom/repairability implications) and Apple products are some of the most restricted in that regard.
The current compromise? I'll buy all Apple devices for convenience... once I have enough money to not care.
• The insurance company decided their information can only be accessed via an app, not Apple.
• The insurance company decided their app should be region locked to UAE, not Apple.
It seems like HN bait to turn this into an opportunity for an anti-Apple rant. Anyone who from the US travels abroad frequently will discover quickly that their banking apps are region locked, via the network, and you often have to use a VPN that looks like you are back home in the US to be able to access their apps or services. Apple has nothing to do with any of this. It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Android, it's network level.
It's fine to be against this practice, but turning it into something directed to a single company as if it is their responsibility entirely is just... well, at worst, it doesn't seem honest, at best, it seems naive or ignorant.
I hate that it's functionally become the only way to sell things online.
The web solves nearly all of the problems Apple and Google have created with their ecosystems.
* Just buy an Android if you don't like it
* This is not the Apple way
* My grandma has much better experience this way, because I don't have to some made up reason why this is impossible on Android
* Green bubble
* Much more secure this way
* I don't like when someone has different use case than I do
* It would be even worse on Android
* Think of the kids
Did I forget something?
It's a whole ecosystem of enshittification.
Unmitigated bs.
Use your web browser and find an in-network hospital via the website. Like a person.
This article stretches the limits of credibility.
Garbage premise and clickbait title.
I could continue on to talk about the "walled garden" issue, but I don't think that step is even warranted given the facts.
Edit: Made it a bit darker, hopefully its easier to read now.
The real takeaway here should be that life-or-death outcomes should never depend on some buggy app installed on your phone and maintained by a for-profit company that's more interested in protecting shareholder profits and executive salaries than in providing the critical service in question.
There isn’t a bank that I’m aware of that is app only in the US. The one thing you can’t do from some bank websites is deposit a check. Which makes no sense either since you have been able to capture photos from web pages in iOS forever.
I couldn't find their Lumi / web based login. Maybe you can help me find it!
Or maybe I'm missing something, did you actually find a Login form there?
I know about someone having a heart attack, and people around him panicking and not knowing the emergency phone number 112