[techsupporter]

> the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?)

Yes. According to Pew, in 2021 there were 15% of adults in the US who said they only have smartphone data for Internet access and do not have what we know as home broadband. By age, that number skews towards younger adults, with the largest share being people aged 18-29, however even older adults hover in the low teens of percent.

Even if someone does have broadband at home, the number of "traditional" desktop and laptop computers have been dropping. Mobile phone and tablet devices (but, let's be honest, mostly mobile phones) have been replacing regular computers at a pretty high clip. And where a household does have a desktop or laptop, they may only have one, where almost everyone has a mobile phone device so it's probably convenient to just pull up the tax prep web site and get to it on the handheld.

Pew data: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

[viraptor]

Be careful with "there were 15% of adults in the US who said they only have smartphone data for Internet access" - it means that's how they get the internet, not where they use it. Due to broadband availability / quality there's going to be a non-trivial number of people relying on tethering either through phone or dedicated dongle.

[InitialLastName]

At this point, I know a non-negligible number of middle- and working-class adults who don't have a general-purpose computer in their household, purely because they don't need one. I've never thought to ask how they were doing their taxes; presumably they are outsourcing it, going to a library, or doing it on their phones.

[hanniabu]

I can't even imagine doing taxes on mobile....

[dham]

People seem to like to do things on suboptimal devices. I've never quite understood it. Just the thought of wasting time not being able to use a mouse and keyboard makes 99% of tasks unbearable. But it's almost like you don't know what you don't know.

My 6 year old was playing Minecraft on a tablet / console for a long time before moving to the computer. He's said several times about how much better he is at it on desktop. I've never even mentioned to him that one's technically better than the other.

[Izkata]

I don't know if mobile tax apps do this, but if they did I can totally imagine mobile being far easier for most people: Use your phone's camera to take a picture of your W-2, use OCR to extract the data & confirm with the user, ask the user a few questions for things not on the W-2, autofill the 1040.

[geoduck14]

>I can't even imagine doing taxes on mobile....

It's not that bad. I have this great app that's only $30

/s

[thiht]

I’m in France and I do my taxes on mobile because « doing my taxes » is just checking 2 numbers and clicking « next » 2 times.