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Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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I have an app for my sprinkler system and it's a fucking nightmare. Not only is it basically just a web API, it's so transparently just a glorified browser with access to exactly one site that frequently my phone thinks that app will work for whatever else I'm trying to open.
Document? Sprinkler app. Web Page? Sprinkler app. Installing from a source other than Google? Oh you better believe the sprinkler app can do that.
Doing anything takes longer to load than it would take me to walk from anywhere on my property to the fucking box and hit whatever button I need to hit.
It frequently forgets what I entered for preferences. I can tell it a week ahead what days I want it to skip but if I do that more than 24 hours on advance I might as well not have done it at all.
Oh you want to make a payment online? Let your sprinklers do that for you. YouTube video? Sprinkler app. YouTube video about fixing your fucking sprinkler system? Sprinkler app.
Apparently the one thing it can't do is effectively manage my water usage. It's ONE job
shit that's amazing
Android apps tell the system which URLs they can open. If you click a Google Maps link, it can prompt you to open it in the Google Maps app. It sounds like whoever created the sprinkler app misconfigured the app and it's saying that it can open all URLs, not just the URLs it cares about. They probably read a tutorial about how to make a webview in Android and didn't know what they were doing :)
Almost certainly. If the guy who was making yandere simulator was tasked with a sprinkler app, it wouldn't be much worse than it currently is.
I don't know shit about fuck when it comes to programming, but I know bad programming when I see it.
Thanks for this! I often wonder if non-programmers can see this. Such horrible programmers. And embarrassingly low bar for company outsourced it.
Some find it scary that AI might take programmers’ jobs. I like to think that it’s these type programmers being replaced, and I’m kinda keen on having that.
Just request a copy of the source code! Oh wait
Yeah this is begging for !homeassistant@lemmy.world to replace that app.
Can !homeassistant@lemmy.world help with that?
If I could rip that thing off the wall and replace it with a spigot I would.
My wife wants it, and she cares more about the grass than I do.
Is it actually opening up the Sprinkler app for all those other purposes, or giving you a choice dialog? If it's actually opening up the app, maybe installing Intent Intercept would at least make it a choice dialog, as it also tries to open everything (just to show information about the request; it's a dev tool).
I have never actually tried, it's just suggesting it as an app that can do those things.
So, giving you what I called the choice dialog. That makes sense. Intent intercept wouldn't help then, it would just give you one more basically irrelevant choice to do all the things (although it's useful for developers).
I'm sure it can't actually do any of those things, but it would be nice if it would stop suggesting that it could when I try to open up certain things