Apps! Apps are everywhere! We have an app for almost literally everything. Social media? Based on apps. Start your car? App. Want food? App.
Apps make life so much easier and more efficient. But are they better? Safer? To be determined.
Having everything together on one little device can make things easier mentally. Especially since you almost always have your phone on you.
I like not having to battle the snow to find a parking meter, or sit in the cold while my car warms up or order food without having to talk to someone. But I also don’t like having to make sure my phone is always charged, or I have data available or am connected to a hopefully secure network so I can do the thing I am trying to do. I do, however, like the points you get from some apps (free coffees!!) and I like having flyers immediately available in my hand without all the paper.
But how secure are the apps, really? For so many of them you have to enter personal information and just hope for the best. Take the Honk app, which lots of NAIT students use for parking. While the app has no public record of having any data breach, you still have to enter so much personal information. Is it worth the risk?
And while it’s getting more and more rare, there are still people out there that don’t have a smartphone, and apps require us to have one. With technology taking over, is it fair to say that we have to always carry a smartphone “just in case?” I don’t think so. Forcing people to carry a smartphone and download an app and upload information, regardless of the benefits to our bank accounts, is unfair. Have you ever had to teach your parents how to use a smartphone? It requires a master’s degree in patience. It’s not easy to explain how to download an app to someone who didn’t grow up with a cell phone, much less a smartphone, so trying to explain how to use said app can be downright frustrating.
So, is it fair that we have apps for virtually everything these days? No. It can feel like your personal information is just out there for anyone to grab; it’s almost like giving them your phone altogether. Is it helpful to have apps to contain points, flip through flyers and warm up your car during cold Alberta months? Absolutely.
There are pros and cons to everything, unfortunately, and that means that we will have to accept that apps are here to stay — useful and safe, or annoying and complicated.
So, sorry Gen X and Boomers, there is no escape, only updates. Welcome to the default settings of reality.
