[XorNot]

No, it's a cost cutting measure. App-only reduces support and development costs with whoever they're outsourcing this too.

There's a line item which basically said "mobile web" and they wanted it gone to save some number of dollars per year.

[bonoboTP]

No, sending a pdf by email is no extra cost. They already have an email output interface for tickets and recipts and confirmations.

It's all about better tracking. I'm not quite sure what additional info they get exactly, but tons and tons of mobile websites (that work and don't get deleted) are close to unusable due to a barrage of popups telling you to use the app (e.g. Reddit and other socials).

Also there is no indication they will stop the mobile web version. Already today the mobile web version is there but it explicitly refuses to show the boarding pass QR code: https://i.redd.it/lj3wdnfp9mq91.jpg

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Not just tracking - also a chance to spam you with notifications until you figure out how to block them, and free ad space on your home screen in the form of the app icon.

[XorNot]

As an SRE I can assure you that "sending a PDF by email" is far from free to support, and anything email is pretty much top of the list to eliminate.

[wkat4242]

It doesn't need to be by email. They can simply show it in the mobile website.

But they refuse to do so in order to get all that data which they can sell. In a mobile app it's way harder to run ad blockers and much easier to sneakily collect information on the user. Especially on android which is by far the biggest OS in the countries where Ryanair operates.

[throwaway287391]

I really doubt it's that, as opposed to the maintenance cost of an extra flow to a boarding pass. Or perhaps just a perceived complexity/annoyance cost when something breaks in the desktop flow here and there.

I'd think it's only maybe 5-10% of customers at most who both use desktop over mobile to get their boarding pass and use an ad-blocker on desktop. And honestly I don't remember ever seeing an ad (even on Ryanair) when getting my boarding pass on mobile. OTOH I distinctly remember seeing many giant ads on printed boarding passes, most often on printed boarding passes brandished by other customers (usually printed in full color!). I'd think that's hugely more valuable as advertising real estate than the iota of additional data they get to collect on a few adblock users who have been forced to use mobile.

[wkat4242]

It's not the ads on their site/app but the data they can sell to ad brokers like Google. Remember an adblocker also blocks trackers.

And even without adblockers a mobile app can gather much more data on you than a website can.

[bryanrasmussen]

>I'm not quite sure what additional info they get exactly

probably more guaranteed location tracking - hey this guy is buying tickets from the expensive part of town on the newest model iPhone! Chance we can jack up the price, 99% good!

[Zenbit_UX]

I don’t often log in to HN to comment, but when I do it’s usually when I see this type of comment.

You can always spot them by the first word being “No” or “False” followed by a confidently asserted yet hilariously incorrect statement.

I suggest reading this [0] and approaching these discussions with more humility in the future. As you yourself stated, you’re an SRE, not a security expert, yet this forum is full of them.

0: https://peabee.substack.com/p/everyone-knows-what-apps-you-u...

[frm88]

Wow! The linked article is downright terrifying. It convinced me that spying is the real purpose of forcing apps on users. How do we look in terms of regulations on this issue? I assume the EU data act covers part of that, right? What do we have for the rest of the world?

[lenkite]

Yeah, this is the reason why Swiggy offers discounts for their phone app and not their web app. The discount is effectively paid for by your personal data.

[sally_glance]

We (software agency) recently encountered this line of argument for the first time here in Germany.

It definitely reduces costs to swap 3 platform support to 2, but it still came as a kind of surprise to me. They (customer) poured years and seven digit figures into the web-based version which is now effectively going to be trashed. The current prod metrics are not supporting the 90% mobile thesis... I guess they just have high confidence that it will become true soon.

I'm wondering if these are the first signs of an age-based bias I have and the next generation just can't really imagine a majority of users using desktop PCs.

[johnnyanmac]

Ther's a line between "we don't support this platform" and actively making it hostile to try and use a platform. It may have even taken extra development time to make sure they can reject showing the QR code on a webpage, if their app is just serving that same web page.

[XorNot]

If corporate no longer wants to support mobile web, then it means I don't have budget to host it. It means developers can't put time against fixing it, QA aren't tasked to test it before releases, and support staff are not being trained in supporting it. The last one is pretty key because it's a huge metric for cost center: how many support calls is a thing generating? And if the thing is not supposed to exist anymore, then I would have to answer questions like "why is it still accessible?"

Internal job tracking metrics would have to answer why any time is going to running this thing, and god help us if there's a security breach via this endpoint we were supposed to have eliminated N time ago.

An unsupported internal API is one thing - and they're generally a huge timesink anyway. An unsupported external user interface is a cost center which I can't justify, and impacts numerous other parts of the business.

[hulitu]

> No, it's a cost cutting measure

Only marketed as such. Selling user data generates revenue. Win-win

[wkat4242]

lose-lose for the customer :(