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This is exactly the problem with technology. Asshole companies have to productify everything. It's not about being paranoid, it's about operational simplicity.

by tomc1985 10y ago

This is exactly the problem with technology. Asshole companies have to productify everything. It's not about being paranoid, it's about operational simplicity. Dialing a phone is dialing a phone; not everyone wants Google to think for them The act of punching in a number should not require any outside services or assistance or requirements. If there are value-added components to add then they can manifest as modular extras or in another part of the device. This is a violation of user expectations and runs contrary to 75+ years of muscle memory. (And to add... dialing a phone should be a core, fundamental, and inviable aspect of smartPHONE and its OS, not something OEMs can swap out) Watching technology companies supplant (erm, "disrupt") established and proven tech with their crap is extremely depressing. We had nice things, and then we threw them away because we are stupid and lazy. Why do "technologists" ruin everything? "Smart" my ass.

chickenbane 10y ago
> This is exactly the problem with technology. This is YOUR problem with the technology. Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. They like that the dialer provides fancy stuff like visual voicemail, automatic transcription, phone-number-to-business-name mapping, etc. Most people don't care about trying to avoid Google Services, in fact most people don't use smart phones as phones. In a way, luddites that hate techologists have it nice. You can use an old flip phone that is just a phone and that thing will last forever! It's use assholes who need to keep charging them every day.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  > Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere? A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these services came along and many likely want it to stay the same. > They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. Ha! You're funny. Look at one process I'm sure most of us are familiar with: getting a cute girl's (or guy's) phone number. With flip phones this was simple- pull up the dialer, punch in the number, hit save instead of dial, done (or just dial and save later). No waiting, no fuss. Now with my smartphone that same process is: * key in my passcode / fingerprint / whatever * wait for UI to animate, notifications to process, and for the OS to catch up (cause powersave is now off). 3-10 seconds on average of awkwardly staring at the screen and apologizing for the phone's slowness * hit phone icon, wait another second for my touch to register than another 5-20 seconds for phone app to start * enter number, hit Add To Contacts, meanwhile all inputs are lagging about a half second behind my actions. Wait for contact screen to appear (another 3-10 seconds) * enter her name, maybe snap a photo (about the only real value-add in this process), hit Save, again waiting half a second or so for UI lag after each touch If going out with a flip phone didn't make one such a large target socially you can be sure more would be rockin' it.
  - derefr 10y ago
    A lot of these people were fine before smartphones themselves came along. A lot of people were fine before phones. A lot of people were fine before agriculture or stone tools. Does that mean much?
    - tomc1985 10y ago
      It does when the replacements make life appreciably worse or more complicated, and it matters even more when the old ways are deprecated, made unfashionable, or just flat-out unavailable. Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have another case of the OEM inserting themselves way too far into something that they do not belong in. Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?
      - derefr 10y ago
        > the replacements make life ... more complicated It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity away.) > Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit? I'm not totally sure; don't know that much about this story. (Do you have a link? Maybe submit it as an article!) My entirely-uninformed intuition is that agro-tech generally is such a different thing now than it was in the past, that legal precedents from the past won't serve us very well. We don't just have fancier tractors now; we effectively have "a crop-growing+harvesting system in a box—just add ops staff." The modern large-scale farmer is now doing a job that bears less resemblance to the act of classical subsistence farming, than it does to the act of being a feudal lord with serfs. The serfs are robots made by John Deere. Does that give John Deere some different rights than they had when they just made tools for humans to operate? I'm not sure. I can be certain that it's not an "easy, obvious" question, though.
- Risord 10y ago
  I am not so sure do _normals_ care or dont't know. Do all alcholics think they have a problem? Can mass of people beat any single person on chess? I think that trusting for feelings of masses as facts is quite dangerous thinking.
derefr 10y ago
We're not just talking about dialing a phone; we're talking about a Phone app. Which is—besides being a dialer—also a call history list, and a notification UI that appears when you receive a call to let you decide whether to accept it or not. Both of those use-cases benefit far more from looking up numbers than dialing does. As it is, if I'm sitting at my desk with my iPhone and get a call from a number I don't recognize, I literally take a second to Google the numbers on my laptop before accepting the call on my phone. I wish iOS (or any VoIP app for iOS; I use Bria) had this integration, optional or not.
- sirn 10y ago
  iOS do have this integration in the form of Caller Identification. An app can provide a caller information to the Phone app (I believe in a form of a database, rather than sending each call to remote server) and it will show up in the caller screen. Any VoIP app that integrate with CallKit will automatically get this functionality as well. Whoscall is one example and is pretty popular in Asia.
  - derefr 10y ago
    Huh, neat. I guess I never really thought about how large phone storage has gotten. (A thought—if they're doing this all-locally, then they don't technically even need a separate API: phone number databases could just act as Contacts sources, with each virtual contact containing a field denoting "not actually someone I know, just someone who is calling me" so they won't show up in the Contacts app.)
PeterisP 10y ago
"Dialing" a phone is niche functionality that most people don't use anymore - generally, people don't know phone numbers anymore, they don't really see them, and they definitely don't use them, they just tap on a name or face in their contact list. A phone number is an identifier that you use once when obtaining a contact (or it gets shared by someone, so you don't enter it even that one time). If a phone actually required you to dial a number, for many people it wouldn't be usable as a phone to call their friends. This means that integration with wherever users have stored their contracts (and right not it's generally one of the cloud services) is a key component of the dialer app, possibly the main one - a contact app without phone features can be used to communicate with everyone (using the multitude of VOIP services available, skype calls or whatever) but a dialer without contacts isn't sufficient for communication.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  Not so sure about this... just yesterday I got stuck behind a freight forwarding truck that was labelled with only the company name, a list of destination ports, and a phone number. Lawyers, doctors, and bail-bondsmen still advertise via their phone number. Entire generations still go to phone numbers as their primary means of reaching someone remotely.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    Yes, this is the (rare) use case for the first call you make to a stranger. If you have a pre-existing relationship with a particular lawyer or doctor, you tap on their name or face in the contacts app. Like, thinking about this I understood that don't know the phone number of my wife. I (probably?) have it written down somewhere outside my phone, I had known it by heart many years ago, but life was different back then, and as far as I recall it may be that I have not used it in any meaningful way for more than full ten years. I recall that I have given her phone number to others on some occasions, but it involved sending a contact - possibly the number was displayed at the screen during that process, but neither I nor the receiver really read it, and it that way even before smartphones were a thing and sharing a contact happened over SMS.

chickenbane 10y ago

> This is exactly the problem with technology. This is YOUR problem with the technology. Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. They like that the dialer provides fancy stuff like visual voicemail, automatic transcription, phone-number-to-business-name mapping, etc. Most people don't care about trying to avoid Google Services, in fact most people don't use smart phones as phones. In a way, luddites that hate techologists have it nice. You can use an old flip phone that is just a phone and that thing will last forever! It's use assholes who need to keep charging them every day.

tomc1985 10y ago
> Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere? A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these services came along and many likely want it to stay the same. > They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. Ha! You're funny. Look at one process I'm sure most of us are familiar with: getting a cute girl's (or guy's) phone number. With flip phones this was simple- pull up the dialer, punch in the number, hit save instead of dial, done (or just dial and save later). No waiting, no fuss. Now with my smartphone that same process is: * key in my passcode / fingerprint / whatever * wait for UI to animate, notifications to process, and for the OS to catch up (cause powersave is now off). 3-10 seconds on average of awkwardly staring at the screen and apologizing for the phone's slowness * hit phone icon, wait another second for my touch to register than another 5-20 seconds for phone app to start * enter number, hit Add To Contacts, meanwhile all inputs are lagging about a half second behind my actions. Wait for contact screen to appear (another 3-10 seconds) * enter her name, maybe snap a photo (about the only real value-add in this process), hit Save, again waiting half a second or so for UI lag after each touch If going out with a flip phone didn't make one such a large target socially you can be sure more would be rockin' it.
- derefr 10y ago
  A lot of these people were fine before smartphones themselves came along. A lot of people were fine before phones. A lot of people were fine before agriculture or stone tools. Does that mean much?
  - tomc1985 10y ago
    It does when the replacements make life appreciably worse or more complicated, and it matters even more when the old ways are deprecated, made unfashionable, or just flat-out unavailable. Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have another case of the OEM inserting themselves way too far into something that they do not belong in. Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?
    - derefr 10y ago
      > the replacements make life ... more complicated It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity away.) > Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit? I'm not totally sure; don't know that much about this story. (Do you have a link? Maybe submit it as an article!) My entirely-uninformed intuition is that agro-tech generally is such a different thing now than it was in the past, that legal precedents from the past won't serve us very well. We don't just have fancier tractors now; we effectively have "a crop-growing+harvesting system in a box—just add ops staff." The modern large-scale farmer is now doing a job that bears less resemblance to the act of classical subsistence farming, than it does to the act of being a feudal lord with serfs. The serfs are robots made by John Deere. Does that give John Deere some different rights than they had when they just made tools for humans to operate? I'm not sure. I can be certain that it's not an "easy, obvious" question, though.
Risord 10y ago
I am not so sure do _normals_ care or dont't know. Do all alcholics think they have a problem? Can mass of people beat any single person on chess? I think that trusting for feelings of masses as facts is quite dangerous thinking.

derefr 10y ago

We're not just talking about dialing a phone; we're talking about a Phone app. Which is—besides being a dialer—also a call history list, and a notification UI that appears when you receive a call to let you decide whether to accept it or not. Both of those use-cases benefit far more from looking up numbers than dialing does. As it is, if I'm sitting at my desk with my iPhone and get a call from a number I don't recognize, I literally take a second to Google the numbers on my laptop before accepting the call on my phone. I wish iOS (or any VoIP app for iOS; I use Bria) had this integration, optional or not.

sirn 10y ago
iOS do have this integration in the form of Caller Identification. An app can provide a caller information to the Phone app (I believe in a form of a database, rather than sending each call to remote server) and it will show up in the caller screen. Any VoIP app that integrate with CallKit will automatically get this functionality as well. Whoscall is one example and is pretty popular in Asia.
- derefr 10y ago
  Huh, neat. I guess I never really thought about how large phone storage has gotten. (A thought—if they're doing this all-locally, then they don't technically even need a separate API: phone number databases could just act as Contacts sources, with each virtual contact containing a field denoting "not actually someone I know, just someone who is calling me" so they won't show up in the Contacts app.)

PeterisP 10y ago

"Dialing" a phone is niche functionality that most people don't use anymore - generally, people don't know phone numbers anymore, they don't really see them, and they definitely don't use them, they just tap on a name or face in their contact list. A phone number is an identifier that you use once when obtaining a contact (or it gets shared by someone, so you don't enter it even that one time). If a phone actually required you to dial a number, for many people it wouldn't be usable as a phone to call their friends. This means that integration with wherever users have stored their contracts (and right not it's generally one of the cloud services) is a key component of the dialer app, possibly the main one - a contact app without phone features can be used to communicate with everyone (using the multitude of VOIP services available, skype calls or whatever) but a dialer without contacts isn't sufficient for communication.

tomc1985 10y ago
Not so sure about this... just yesterday I got stuck behind a freight forwarding truck that was labelled with only the company name, a list of destination ports, and a phone number. Lawyers, doctors, and bail-bondsmen still advertise via their phone number. Entire generations still go to phone numbers as their primary means of reaching someone remotely.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  Yes, this is the (rare) use case for the first call you make to a stranger. If you have a pre-existing relationship with a particular lawyer or doctor, you tap on their name or face in the contacts app. Like, thinking about this I understood that don't know the phone number of my wife. I (probably?) have it written down somewhere outside my phone, I had known it by heart many years ago, but life was different back then, and as far as I recall it may be that I have not used it in any meaningful way for more than full ten years. I recall that I have given her phone number to others on some occasions, but it involved sending a contact - possibly the number was displayed at the screen during that process, but neither I nor the receiver really read it, and it that way even before smartphones were a thing and sharing a contact happened over SMS.