I do not like them, Sam I Am.
I do not like them, apps and ham
A friend emailed me yesterday. He had sent me a message over the weekend on Facebook Messenger, and I hadn’t yet replied to him. He wanted to make sure I’d seen it.
I had seen it, but…
I don’t have the Messenger app on my phone. I don’t have the Instagram app on my phone. I do have the Facebook app — it came preinstalled and I can’t remove it — but I’ve never launched it, and it’s disabled in my Android settings; it doesn’t even get updated when I install app upgrades.
Mobile browsers today are perfectly capable, and almost all websites now are designed with mobile displays in mind. Facebook, for instance, is fully capable of working, even the messenger functions, on a mobile sized screen, as can be shown using Chrome tools. Were there a way to spoof the user agent in the mobile browser — tell Facebook that you’re using Windows and not Android — Facebook’s messenger tab would work perfectly well.
Unfortunately, Vivaldi, the mobile browser I use because it syncs with my desktop profile across multiple computers, does not do user agent spoofing natively. It does have a feature that will enable “Desktop Site,” but then Facebook renders in a tiny fashion, with what seems to be a normal desktop width (1600-plus pixels) but on a mobile screen. Facebook isn’t usable when you can’t read it!
And attempted to access your Facebook messages in a mobile browser brings up a page that directs you to the App Store, where I am not going to go.
So, yes, old chum, I saw your message when I was logged into Facebook on my desktop. I didn’t reply at the time because I wanted time and energy to consider my response. Then I felt unwell for several days and it slipped the mind.
LinkedIn is actually worse, and it’s why I’m writing this jeremiad at all.
LinkedIn does not like that I do not use the app.
First of all, it knows. I routinely receive emails from LinkedIn telling me to download their app. Like, for instance, this very morning.
“LinkedIn is better on the app,” it says. I don’t bloody care! Facebook, at least, doesn’t spam my inbox telling me to download their constellation of apps. It just cripples the site on the mobile browser.
LinkedIn then posts a nag message when accessing the site in a mobile browser.
You can close this (my preferred behavior, and it will go away), or you can close this, but if you close this, sometimes the LinkedIn site will close in the browser.
“You fool!” it taunts you. “If you won’t use our app, you don’t get to LinkedIn! Considering how little I enjoy LinkedIn, I don’t feel this is a threat.
Let’s say you get past this. Are you out of the clear?
No, you are not!
You can’t scroll past this. LinkedIn won’t let you. Your choices here are to hit Continue and go to the app store, or you can hit that close X at the top left.
And LinkedIn does not play fair here.
Hit close, and you might go to the app store anyway.
Hit close, and the LinkedIn tab in the mobile browser might close.
Or hit close and be taken all the way back to the top of the page, and you have to scroll back again, but this time there won’t be any active blocks to continuing.
LinkedIn, I will not download your goddamn app now, purely out of spite.
I don’t want it. I’d prefer not to use LinkedIn in general.
Indeed plays some games like this, too, but the only real crippling it adds to the mobile website that I’ve found is that it removes the ability to save a job for later. Switching to the “Desktop Site” in Vivaldi will sometimes get around this.
I want to look at websites on my phone. I do not want to clog up my phone with needless apps and useless trackers. Maybe I’m at my “old man yells at cloud” stage of life, maybe I’m an old fuddy duddy who remembers DOS 2.11, but I don’t think this is too much to ask for a website not to cripple itself and force a user to download an app.
I do not like them, Sam I Am.
I do not like them, apps and ham