This has been a long burning issue for me. I’m not criticising the quality or aesthetics of mobile apps, I really just don’t want them on my phone. I also don’t want to manage all the strange, invasive permissions - my precise location for instance 🤷♂️
The last straw
My recent trip into Europe to watch a Euro 2024 match and visit Disneyland Paris has been the peak of my distaste.
- 2 different mobile apps for the Euros, 1 for travel discounts and 1 for match day tickets.
- Euro - for a FanPass and also has fixtures and standings, not useful enough to make me download it if I didn’t need the FanPass. Also the FanPass wasn’t available until too near the event to actually use to book the trains we needed.
- UEFA Tickets - provided ticketing details, single use app
- 2 different flight apps for flights in and out (different airlines)
- Ryanair (probably a web wrapper)
- Easyjet (clearly a wrapper around a website)
- 1 rail travel app - I actually use this one quite often
- Trainline - a good app that is useful multiple times. I usually move tickets into Google Wallet - would happily use a webpage for everything else.
- Disneyland map/booking/tickets app
- Useful to manage your trip
- The worst mishmash of micro-services you could imagine - not the topic of conversation.
- Resets your password every now and then 🤕
And now today, another app to be downloaded to access gig tickets 🤦♂️ - this app looks suspiciously like the UEFA Tickets app 🧐
Most of these apps are “single use” and like single use plastics, clutter your device and probably cause more harm than use to those maintaining them.