Re:I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
by jimmies on Friday February 16, 2018 @01:01PM
(#16394275)
Everything you said about it being dead before the car arrived is true. However, it was not the point. What if the phone died before it could update? What if the driver couldn't see me so they had to call me, or I forgot the license plate? What if I was roaming on expensive data? What if that was a more critical app?
All of those things shouldn't be a problem in the first place.
Re:I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
by dmix on Friday February 16, 2018 @02:50PM
(#16395452)
As I said I believe apps should be supported for at least 1-3yrs at a minimum via versioned APIs and careful product planning. Especially for 'critical' apps and massively popular apps like Uber.
But otherwise it's not a massive problem, yet. But one we in the software community should promote as best practice and provide social pressure/ridicule when not done.
I've had my phone die well before the Uber arrived and it wasn't a problem, it showed up at the place I requested.
Once the ride is initiated the drivers phone becomes the primary client. It seems quite flexible with devices going offline (as it should, mobile networks are unreliable).
> use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them for a month.
This is a worrying trend but I don't think it's really that bad yet. My primary phone died recently (famous Nexus 6p bootloop) and I used my old Samsung S3 with stock Android circa 2014 and I was surprised how many of the apps still functioned properly without updates (including the ancient built-in pre-Chrome webview Browser app).
... basically my expectation these days was that they wouldn't work. But in practice 99% of my phone use is SMS/Messengers + Maps + Browsers, and they all worked perfectly fine, web standards don't advance that quickly at all, and the messengers are all using simple protocols where they had no problem.
So it's typically the edge case 1-5% 3rd-party apps like Uber that are of concern.
It's really not hard to develop APIs that are versioned. This is becoming a standard best practice among mobile/web app developers (via SemVer standard). And there's no excuse for a big company like Uber to not support ~1-2yr old apps.