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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

No, sending a pdf by email is no extra cost. They already have an email output interface for tickets and recipts and confirmations.

It's all about better tracking. I'm not quite sure what additional info they get exactly, but tons and tons of mobile websites (that work and don't get deleted) are close to unusable due to a barrage of popups telling you to use the app (e.g. Reddit and other socials).

Also there is no indication they will stop the mobile web version. Already today the mobile web version is there but it explicitly refuses to show the boarding pass QR code: https://i.redd.it/lj3wdnfp9mq91.jpg

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Not just tracking - also a chance to spam you with notifications until you figure out how to block them, and free ad space on your home screen in the form of the app icon.

As an SRE I can assure you that "sending a PDF by email" is far from free to support, and anything email is pretty much top of the list to eliminate.

It doesn't need to be by email. They can simply show it in the mobile website.

But they refuse to do so in order to get all that data which they can sell. In a mobile app it's way harder to run ad blockers and much easier to sneakily collect information on the user. Especially on android which is by far the biggest OS in the countries where Ryanair operates.

I really doubt it's that, as opposed to the maintenance cost of an extra flow to a boarding pass. Or perhaps just a perceived complexity/annoyance cost when something breaks in the desktop flow here and there.

I'd think it's only maybe 5-10% of customers at most who both use desktop over mobile to get their boarding pass and use an ad-blocker on desktop. And honestly I don't remember ever seeing an ad (even on Ryanair) when getting my boarding pass on mobile. OTOH I distinctly remember seeing many giant ads on printed boarding passes, most often on printed boarding passes brandished by other customers (usually printed in full color!). I'd think that's hugely more valuable as advertising real estate than the iota of additional data they get to collect on a few adblock users who have been forced to use mobile.

It's not the ads on their site/app but the data they can sell to ad brokers like Google. Remember an adblocker also blocks trackers.

And even without adblockers a mobile app can gather much more data on you than a website can.

>I'm not quite sure what additional info they get exactly

probably more guaranteed location tracking - hey this guy is buying tickets from the expensive part of town on the newest model iPhone! Chance we can jack up the price, 99% good!

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