In most cases this works amazingly well, except when it doesn’t.

Recently I wanted to try this new app that promises to match¹ you up with people who play the same games as you, on the same system(s) as you, and ideally on a similar skill level as you.

The screenshot on the left is the final step in their onboarding, forcing you to start a (free) trial that would auto-renew at €17.99/month (!) after a week. There is absolutely no way to skip this step. It comes after you already invested a significant amount of time creating your profile, which includes connecting your various platforms via OAuth and other painfully annoying steps.

As I don’t want to support these kinds of predatory scams, I decided to not use the app. But the way their onboarding works of course also means that they now already have my data, and access to any kind of delete/revoke features are hidden behind this subscription-wall.

So I accepted the free trial, instantly canceled it (which really is commendably easy on the App Store) and went back to the app to delete my account. I was then greeted by the right screenshot.

Maybe this kind of onboarding that forces a trial on you is okay by the App Store guidelines. I don’t know. Sure, the trial is free, and it is fairly simple to cancel. I don’t care. The app mainly targets kids, and this disgusting behavior should not be allowed on the App Store. I’d love to hear them explain how this is better for the customer than the unimaginable horrors of someone who isn’t a Hey customer accidentally downloading the Hey app. It could not possibly have anything to do with the fact that one of the two things is bringing in more services revenue, could it?

Or maybe it’s actually against the guidelines anyway, but the amazing App Store review process didn’t catch it. I don’t even know which possibility I’d find more depressing.

That is a pretty picture! It’s by Mika Baumeister, whom you should totally check out – ton’s of amazing photographs. Now here’s a little quiz, which of the following two statements describes the image better?

• “silver imac on brown wooden table”
• “Ten iPads charging up. They are used for eLearning.”

What a silly question, obviously one of them is some ML-generated SEO garbage, and the other one is the actual description, provided by the very human being who uploaded the picture. You will never guess which one Unsplash decided to use as the alt text of the image!

To be fair, their auto-generated descriptions are often pretty good. And users probably sometimes don’t give a description. But why prefer the unreliable ML content to the human content when it is available?

Thanks Fuchen for the hint.

I almost had a heart attack when I saw those checkboxes, because a minute earlier I had already submitted the same form for another item – without paying the checkboxes any attention, as they had always been unchecked by default. Checking them without good reason can result in a metric ton of useless busywork, I was absolutely horrified.

Luckily, the checkboxes in the screenshot above are not checked. This is what they look like when they are checked:

Don’t fucking do that. Just don’t style default controls. (Of course they aren’t even actual checkboxes but styled <div>s.)

Displaying more text is really hard, it seems.

Thanks Fuchen for the submission!

Try online dating, they said. It will be fun, they said.

How do I sign out of only a single account? I don’t want to log back into three accounts just to get rid of one of them.

Thanks Fuchen for the hint!

Looking at an iOS app in App Store Preview offers a button to see the app in the Mac App Store. That would be a great if you could trigger an installation on your other iOS devices there. Unfortunately you can’t do anything except look at the same information that’s already shown on the website.

Another classic “You’ve seen how our operating systems, devices, and services, all work together in harmony.” moment.

When trying to resize the image for the previous post I stumbled upon this. The image was over 8 MB after saving with “Best” quality, so I guess it’s a display bug. I can reproduce it – whatever I try to export as JPEG in Preview, it will always only show one estimated file size.

Submitted as FB8974381.

If only there was enough room to display the other half of that sentence.