Has Our Love Of Smartphone Apps Finally Gone Too Far?

You can’t go anywhere these days without facing pressure to download an app for one reason or another. It all started innocently enough; we’d get a few for our favorite social media platforms, maybe one for the bank so we could check our balance on the go, and a handful of others for the brands with which we truly wanted to engage.

But now it’s become more of a necessity than a convenience.

A mid-flight glass of pinot

Vox writer Emily Stewart recently shared her experience on a commercial flight to highlight our increasing reliance on apps. When she asked to purchase a glass of pinot grigio “to help calm the nerves,” she was informed that it could only be ordered via the airline’s app.

“I was motivated to get the plane wine, but not that motivated — I gave up somewhere between downloading the app on the shoddy in-flight wifi and uploading my credit card to it,” Stewart wrote.

Now, that partially downloaded and never used app is taking up space on her phone along with all the others that she never wanted and probably won’t ever use.

Chances are, there are at least a few apps on your phone that fall into that category. So what are we supposed to do about it?

Weighing the pros and cons

It’s always a good idea to be realistic about what you’re getting out of each app. Some offer discounts, others promise convenience, and some are just nuisances that are all but impossible to avoid.

But as Electronic Frontier Foundation analyst Karen Gullo explained, they tend to have something in common: “Unfortunately, most businesses use apps to harvest and monetize our personal data.”

In many cases, you can simply visit a brand’s website and get virtually the same experience as an app.

Chris Agee June 3rd, 2023

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