It is also another example of having a phone or SIM card with you is a requirement to function. I hate mobile phones. They are really useful but I really enjoy hours or days when I can leave them behind. But what you can do without a SIM card device in your pocket keeps getting more restrictive.
iOS has App Clips which theoretically are supposed to do this - just tap on NFC, app clip opens up and lets you pay, and sticks around to allow you to re-up while your meter is going.
Agree tho, parking is not a world where we get really good UX developers.
Toast used it pretty effectively for QR code-initiated restaurant bill payments. Though in the US I've only seen a few restaurants trust customers to pay by QR code and not physically want to handle a card.
Though the other notable thing about it was that the App Clip version does a decent upsell to get you to install the full Toast Local app. Then once you have the Toast Local app you never see the App Clip version again. So there's probably other things that have App Clips but you would not notice because you already have the full app.
I have used them once to pay in a restaurant in Prague.
There was an App Clip code on the table that you could scan to pay.
The UI/UX was pretty nice, but I bet you could make a website also look that nice and work as well.
I have also seen them around Japan, but of course, Japan being Japan, if you scan them you’ll normally get an error saying that it’s not supported on your non-Japanese-region set phone.
I used easypark to pay for parking in different cities and countries very happily.
It is vastly preferable to "find a parking meter, sort out rules, find a way to pay" which was the previous experience, I'm a bit concerned they look like a sort of monopoly but I'll take that over every city having their own system.
Can you explain why? As someone who parks in different cities and areas a lot EasyPark is...well, easy. Finding meters, going back to the car to drop in the slip, extending parking if you need to is much easier. And having a single app that works in most places is helpful.
“Finding meters, going back to the car to drop in the slip, extending parking” takes up very little of my life. I don’t like apps and generally hate the idea that I should be forced to 1) have a cell phone to park a car, 2) install closed source software on the cellphone, 3) be gaslighted by the vc and company behind that app that it’s for my benefit. In fact, it depresses me a little bit that the world is getting worse at an ever increasing pace.
2 days ago I was in the waiting room for a medical checkup. I had parked ~8 or 10 mins walk away, though day in the city. The doctor took more than I estimated, and renewing the parking was a total of 30 seconds from taking my device out of the pocket, hitting "Extend time", and "Confirm". Done, without risking that my turn might come during the ~15 or so mins I'd have been outside running through the street.
Some things are better in modern times. I'd rather have more time-efficient public transport to not need going by car, but that's a different topic.
The app was only necessary as a one click bypass for the original bad UX. Im not the author but would likely develop an automation of sorts for such a pointless daily friction. And it doesn’t really matter what’s bundled as (app, script, etc) as long as it gets compressed/reduced to one click.
The person we're talking about didn't make an app to "pay for parking". They made an app to automate a tedious process their employer makes them do every day.
There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.
The design choices added more friction than walking past a "pay and display" machine.
The design choices added more friction than displaying a monthly/anual pass that you purchase for regular parking at places like universities.
The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
I agree with you with parking garages or tolls. The license plate system is definitely preferable.
But, street parking was not a quick or simple process for 50 years. I used to have to keep a stack of quarters with me in order to street park, which was a huge PITA. Then the meters moved to working with CCs, but they were broken much of the time. Then they put in random kiosks every couple blocks that you had to find and figure out, often having to go back and drop a slip in your car.
Now I pull up, park, get out, and walk off while clicking 'park' in the app. It literally can't be any simpler.
My municipal parking consists of normal parking meters. They accept CCs or cash and are placed on every block. They are rugged and I have yet to see a broken one - if the majority of your parking meters are broken, that's the fault of your city, not an inherent flaw of the tech, as proven by the aforementioned 50 years of people using parking meters just fine. Worst case scenario, if one is broken, you walk a little more to the next meter. If we assume 1% of parking meters are broken, it's still far less of a waste of time than fiddling around with an app 100% of the time.
> Now I pull up, park, get out, and walk off while clicking 'park' in the app.
Oh, you went to a different city or entered a private parking lot? Gotta install their preferred parking app. Just scan the QR code to go to a broken website, or better yet, be forced to waste your data, time and your phone's storage space to download their special app if they don't allow online payments. Now all you have to do is make an account, set up 2FA, enable geolocation so they can tell where you are, type in your plate number, potentially retype your payment information and deal with any errors that may pop up along the way. It's easy!
> There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.
Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.
> The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
The one instance of this I have seen used an app to connect your licence plate to your payment method.
> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
With a proper app, it’s a quick, simple process if you have a phone that is just “not completely discharged”, no need for it to be fully charged.
> Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.
There are no incentives for them to make a proper app. When faced with a choice of being nice to you or extracting maximum value out of you, those companies will pick the second option every time. Having an internet-connected app is an open invitation for companies to force you to register an account, make you grant their app all sorts of permissions, have you view ads and waste your money. Another incentive is for them to save as much money on developing that app as they can. Combining these two, we get a situation where any company that's not squeezing you for those few extra cents is making an economically inferior choice, and anything digital and connected to the internet has no bounds for how many types of abusive practices can be facilitated through it.
On the other hand, paying at a parking meter is physical and grounded in reality, you can't inject too much bullshit into the process. It's very constrained and you know it will always remain so. They don't have wiggle room to try any of the above. It's boring 20th century 'exchanging money for services' instead of new 21st century 'abusing the user for money and potentially providing a service on the side'.
The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.
If flushing the toilet without an app would suddenly require you to walk across campus to obtain a one-time-use Toilet Flushing Override Token (and no, you can't ask for multiple ones - no "hoarding" allowed!), there would be riots on introduction - and rightfully so! The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.
Same with parking. ANPR cameras are ancient technology, and many commercial lots already have tap-to-pay at the exit barrier. Or even the entry barrier, for fixed-price parking. Even the complicated cases have you enter your vehicle registration on the payment terminal these days, rather than messing around with paper passes. In this world it should not be complicated to handle employee parking with a one-off license plate registration on some intranet web page, or just allow tapping your employee badge at the parking barrier. Worst-case scenario they'd hand you an EZPass-like RFID tag during onboarding to put behind your car's windscreen.
The toilet-flushing app should not have to exist. It is the ultimate embodiment of institutional "we have tried nothing, and are all out of ideas". Accepting deeply-flawed workarounds for non-problems should not be a normal part of your day-to-day life.
> The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.
Well, yes, that’s exactly my point. It’s not the case with parking, so the analogy breaks down.
> The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.
How exactly? You’re kind of begging the question by taking it as self-evident that an app is an inherently bad solution. What is so bad and “deeply flawed” about a properly designed app? Do you posit that there are many employees who have a car but no smartphone?
why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing. everything that happens once inside the app or website is just normal UX design - no reason to do it 'worse' on a website.
> why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing.
Except saving that to the Home Screen isn’t the same user experience as downloading an app via an qr code, and you’ll be expecting some pretty technically incompetent people to be using the parking space.
But I do agree with your general point about the UX inside the (web|mobile) app.
the complaint wasn't about the 'discovery and install experience', it was about the UX of paying for parking every day. There are definitely things that the app store experience brings to the table for distribution of apps - trust being the main thing I think. I really don't like the barriers that iOS specifically puts in place for web apps - they're intentionally making it harder than it needs to be, in order to protect their walled garden and the $$ that brings them.
Widespread misconception. There are plenty of product managers / executives who also want quality and plenty of engineers who want to ship. I'd wager most engineers would rather ship and get their creation in front of users than spend eternity perfecting it.
of course we can never speak of an entire population in absolutes, only tendencies, but if you're going to argue against the tendency i'd like to see a bit more depth to the argument than "I'd wager". I also don't think my overall point suffers at all if you substitute "engineers" with "some people" and "corporate side" with "other people", so i'm going to politely request that we do that going forward so we can address the substance of the discussion rather than the makeup of the two sides of it.
Different expectations maybe. In my experience, DSF 4.1 high/max is basically what Terra should be for coding, and is very acceptable (Terra is hot garbage, yes even the latest 6.1). Luna at xhigh+ stands out as a cheap implementor/reviewer of very very well defined tasks, but goes off the rails if you're not very specific, Sol 6.1 and Sonnet 5.5 at medium are basically powerhouses for implementation with a half decent plan (slightly prefer sonnet), and Opus 5.5 high is an excellent planner (and implementor). And Astra is amazing at burning money.
I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.
I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...
Have you run into any situations where you couldn't reach back to your server? I still have an m3 macbook pro w 64gb ram that I use for local qwen when my internet isn't great ie getting stuff done on a plane. Not sure if I'd feel a loss going to MBA and having a 24gb ram max or if it would be good for me to disconnect and just read a book instead
Not really. The connection speed doesn't have to be great. It's nice if it is, but you can function on slower connections no problem. That means if my land internet goes out, my phone hotspot is good enough as a fallback. I can go to a coffee shop or w/e. My dev box is not at home, it's on a rack, backed up.
I'm using it w/ a Rust server and I can get up to 80k writes per second, 200k reads per second. You won't get that with other databases without paying a lot and doing a lot of special architecture.
The problem is "remote" SQLite. Just run a "single" beefier box with in-process SQLite and Litestream backups to object storage and never have to think about RDBMS again. I'd wager there are 90%+ applications that would be better served, more performant, and cheaper with this design.
It's class warfare. A few billionaires and a bunch of millionaires fighting against the other 99.5% of the world, just so they can be even more wealthy.
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