rhazn

We've found it to be quite flexible to set up. Are you doing anything in that space or would consider using it?

I am the author and I love the UK, am sad about you leaving, and I am as angry about similar practices in EU countries. My gripe is with the pushing of foreign controlled apps, not the immigration rules.

I even got flak in this discussion for referring to the UK government multiple times as "EU government" because I can not let go :(.

I wrote about my thinking here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168225). I do not have a story and I am not a writer that has editors so I have no excuse but my personal taste ;). You will disagree with that, but just wanted to mention it so it does not seem like I am ignoring it.

Not sure I can change the submission anymore. I am happy with the title as it is for my own blog, it just created some irritation here.

I am not a native speaker, so my interpretation might be wrong, but I tried to evoke the semi-serious but good-natured "You went to the bakery? You better brought me a snack as well!" meaning with "better have", not the "must have" meaning.

Yeah, sorry. I am old and like the UK, so I still consider them Europeans at heart.

I can understand the feedback and I agree if you are building a product, you want to make it easy to use and intuitive for the majority. In my opinion, as a government you have an obligation to create processes differently though. You should provide and focus on a flow that is 100% in your/the citizens control with the messaging to match.

So in your email example, I think the governments messaging must be neutrally on email (and arguably the government should provide free Email accounts to citizens), but they could add convenience buttons to open GMail or similar.

But I recognize my opinion is probably an outlier, especially on hackernews. I can see your point as well and taken with an open mind :).

(author here): Is this in agreement with the article? It reads like you want it to be a gotcha?

A government requiring emails and then giving complete control of the email infrastructure to two US companies (Google for Gmail and Microsoft for Outlook) would be exactly what I was trying to write about.

(article author here): The big green "Start Now" button on https://www.gov.uk/eta/apply takes me to the same double push-for-the-app flow in the article (on desktop firefox). But otherwise true, should probably have searched for "UK ETA", but coming from the announcement, that is very clear you need the app, searching for "UK ETA App" felt natural.

(article author here): It's over the top from my annoyed reaction when I encountered the clickthrough. I am mostly annoyed at how much EU governments keep pushing native apps for government services, thus making them dependent on Google/Apple. The fallback exists here, but it is very much not what you are encouraged to use.

I agree though that the title is too much and less funny in retrospect, I wish I chose a more tame one. Humorous annoyance on personal blog posts translates badly to submissions here.

(article author here): Fair comment, but at least for me the https://www.gov.uk/eta flow still just leads into the double upsell of the mobile app. My problem is more with governments (all of them, this is just one instance) increasingly pushing people to use native Apps and with that to the mercy of Google/Apple.

The article is definitely a bit over the top, it is just my personal blog and me trying to write a bit more funny to counter the bland LLMs. Your opinion can vary on if I have succeeded or overshot on that.