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Pushy Apps

Published by marco on

These are just two examples of the inundation of UX frustration on any given day.

TacX

TacX asks every time I start the app whether it can use my personal data for a feature that I never use.

 TacX Requests Data

The language is not only supremely awkward but inspired in its use and non-use of punctuation (why ellipses rather than etc.?)

“To use live opponents, we will need to share some of your personal data, such as but not limited to you name, profile, picture, speed, watt/kg, what workout you’re doing,… with other people. Do you agree to us using this data in such a way?”

You’ll notice that “No” is not an acceptable answer to corporate overlords who already got a bundle of money for their machine and try to make its use contingent on my giving them data as well as money.

MacOS Big Sur

I am staying away from Big Sur for now, as I’ve heard that several features are still shaky. When the release notes for 11.2 include something along the lines of “make Bluetooth work better again”, then I’m not taking the risk.

However, Apple desperately wants me to upgrade, so they make it really difficult to avoid by hiding system updates for the system I have below the very prominent “upgrade” button.

 System Update Pending

Can you see that “More info…” appears twice and that the one pertaining to the security updates for the actually-installed system is passive-aggressively in a slightly smaller font than the “More info…” for the operating system I don’t have?

I’d clicked on “More info…” in the morning and wanted to reboot during dinner. I mistakenly clicked on “Upgrade Now”, thinking it was the button to apply the system update I’d downloaded. Instead, Big Sur started downloading, the sneaky bastard.

 Downloading Big Sur…

Even worse, that little cancel button to the right doesn’t do anything. You’re seeing 1.89GB downloaded because this is the second time I’m seeing the dialog—I triggered the upgrade again because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I had Activity Monitor open and found the process with an extremely long name that seemed related and killed it. The system preferences exited back to the main page.

It’s not clear to me whether the download continued in the background. When I just clicked it again as I was writing this article, the download is still unstoppable and it marches through the progress bar far faster than my connection would allow, so I’m pretty sure the sonofabitch just went ahead and downloaded 12GB to my machine somewhere. I’m also pretty sure that Time Machine picked it up and wasted a bunch of space on my backup drive as well. Thanks, Apple.