This is the equivalent of a "Do you guys not have phones??"[1] but on a way larger scale.
At least where i live i am able to use the bare minimum of phones, even working with tech. The friction is increasing though, which worries me a lot, and day after day there is a new attempt to shove it down your throat if you want to be considered a member of society. Seeing that a lot of countries (including mine) are pushing for age verification, and the whole thing about Android blocking 'sideload', by the end of 2026 you won't be considered a human being without a government certified smartphone.
My brother hates tech more than me, and only has an old flip phone. I'm always surprised by the random problems he runs into as a result. Unresponsive desktop sites that beg you to download apps are the worst.
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/travel/news/ryanair-s-new-check-in...
Also, I'm not too worried about the airport usecase as we're already being tracked and surveilled and inspected there as much as possible.
But it's another step to normalize and mandate phone and app use. The puzzle pieces are falling in place. Soon, AI could screen-capture your phone screen to detect suspicious activity, and track every tap you do, also taking pictures with the front-facing camera without you knowing, listening on the mic, etc. etc., connecting it all to your real identity. Because why not? If it's done step by step, nobody will care at all. Maybe that sounds pessimistic, but it looks like the end game and I see no principled political stance against it, nor any insurmountable technical hurdles.
Ex - we already have plenty of cases where the government outsources payment processing to 3rd parties. What happens when that private 3rd party declares it's not accepting payments through anything except a mobile app?
That's an insinuation with some vague truth to it, but not much. Budget airlines are not government departments, and competition between them isn't phony.
"The sky is blue" "I feel that it is increasingly yellow"
More to the point, the app isn't for my convenience. It doesn't do anything to make my experience better.
Or maybe not. I've never lost a boarding pass, but if you lose one, you can get it re-issued somewhere, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QwwPmHyuEA
Again, being argumentative like this never helps, but it will be you either go along with it, get escorted out or not fly in the first place.
> I've never lost a boarding pass, but if you lose one, you can get it re-issued somewhere, right?
Yes, typically there's a fee for getting it printed at the check-in counter.
There's a line item which basically said "mobile web" and they wanted it gone to save some number of dollars per year.
This isn't a serious argument.
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
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.
It definitely reduces costs to swap 3 platform support to 2, but it still came as a kind of surprise to me. They (customer) poured years and seven digit figures into the web-based version which is now effectively going to be trashed. The current prod metrics are not supporting the 90% mobile thesis... I guess they just have high confidence that it will become true soon.
I'm wondering if these are the first signs of an age-based bias I have and the next generation just can't really imagine a majority of users using desktop PCs.
The former happening would make so many things easier.
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.
Ryanair? I would expect them to offer you their boarding pass printing service for only $99.99 (you missed the $49.99 special that was only available until 4 hours before boarding, silly you).
to quote Gilles Deleuze's Postscript on Societies of Control(1992):
>The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's...electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position-licit or illicit...
https://faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Pos...
And even without adblockers a mobile app can gather much more data on you than a website can.
I know that his behavior was not a rational pursuit, since in practice humans are too skittish about standing up for themselves and too skittish against anyone whom they see as abnormal/not complying with social norms. But, this does not change the fact that he's completely in the right. I'd love to know a more effective strategy to deal with this shit from companies, if anyone knows one. What should he do instead in this situation where it is simply too unjust to him to be acceptable to give in?
Also, I'm offended at this cop for telling the guy to "be cordial". NO. The airline's behavior is not cordial! They do NOT deserve it back! Freedom of speech means freedom to get mad at someone, possibly REALLY mad, when they try to be unreasonable. Being angry is different from being violent, and the government shouldn't shield people and companies from this consequence (angry people) of their actions.
Fingers crossed the Russians figure this out and help remind these businesses why lacking paper alternatives is NOT a cost-saving measure. The group that can take down that API endpoint can pretty much name their price to Ryanair and the C-suite will effectively have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to pay it if there's truly zero alternative and that starts disrupting revenue indefinitely.
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!
I see this a lot on reddit and youtube. I tend to think that it's bots paid for by the company.
There's always just too much unanimous agreement in favor of the corporation.
Maybe I just don't want to believe that people are that homogenized.
Not going to use the app of course. If that restricts me I will seek to route around this censorship and share with others. This crap has to be resisted.
Stupid project, stupid design, stupid continent.
You can always spot them by the first word being “No” or “False” followed by a confidently asserted yet hilariously incorrect statement.
I suggest reading this [0] and approaching these discussions with more humility in the future. As you yourself stated, you’re an SRE, not a security expert, yet this forum is full of them.
0: https://peabee.substack.com/p/everyone-knows-what-apps-you-u...
Only marketed as such. Selling user data generates revenue. Win-win
No TLS certificate (which will expire soon), no boarding. /s
Your average phone user is already hostage to 7 hours of screentime daily. They don't mind installing more apps. The average person has hundreds of apps on their phone, many of which are never even used.
Internal job tracking metrics would have to answer why any time is going to running this thing, and god help us if there's a security breach via this endpoint we were supposed to have eliminated N time ago.
An unsupported internal API is one thing - and they're generally a huge timesink anyway. An unsupported external user interface is a cost center which I can't justify, and impacts numerous other parts of the business.
Nothing much has changed since the times when you had to "fix" your aunt's computer in 2003 because it's "slow" and found a zillion toolbars and cleanup/speedup utilities.
Fast forward a few decades and now the old users are on desktop and we’re worried about services only being available for smartphones.
Ryanair has always been an horrible corporation in the business of shipping drunk and old people for £5 with the help of public subsidies. They also largely abused their staff to enable that business model.
They are like many other corporations creating more and more fragile systems and I bet one of those days something is gonna go wrong and nobody will board their plane for a day or two.
Just stop feeding the beast...
Remotely related: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/manor-park-ottawa-sidewalk-re... there are dozens of us, dozens.
They still let me fly from UK to USA and back.
This was 1997. Wild times.
