An App for Everything?

You know what I'm getting sick and tired of?  Apps, that's what.  It's the new obsession amongst retailers, service providers and the like - you can no longer simply use their website to interact with me - oh no, you have to download and install their bloody app on your phone.  I just find it extremely frustrating as most of these apps are poorly designed and barely work.  Indeed, often what used to be a simple process taking seconds on their website now becomes a long drawn out ordeal on their bloody phone app.  Take my mobile phone provider, for instance: I used to be able to top up my credit really easily, in seconds.  But now they've forced all of us pay-as-you-go customers onto their app.  Which, I found after I downloaded it, isn't fit for purpose.  It steadfastly refused to take a payment directly from my debit card, (my usual method of payment, crashing not just the app, but the whole phone, every time I tried.  After doing some online research, I found that this is a widespread problem, which the provider knows about but either can't or won't rectify.  Instead of this most simple and direct form of payment, you instead have to either buy a voucher from them, (which means going back to their website), the code of which you then have to enter into the app, or to pay by debit card via Google Pay.  I took the latter option simply because it was undoubtedly quicker, but it means that Google now has my current card details which, bearing in mind their recent track record with regard to protecting my data, I'm not happy about.

So this supposed step forward in customer convenience actually represents several colossal steps backward - the whole process ultimately took me over an hour!  It isn't just my mobile provider - a while ago I was trying reschedule a Royal Mail delivery I'd missed but found that I could only do it via their app rather than on their website.  At which point I gave up, as I decided that there was absolutely no way that I was going to download and install yet another app to my mobile, which is already cluttered up with the bloody things, particularly I would only ever use for this single task.  Everywhere I'm being exhorted to download people's apps - if I go on eBay now they keep trying to get me to install and order via their app, when I'm already on their site in the process of bidding on something.  FFS, I'm not wasting time to download more junk onto my phone in order to carry out the same task I'm currently carrying out on my main interface with the web - my laptop.  Which, I suspect, lies at the crux of the problem - that companies seem to think that we spend all our time on our phones.  Maybe it's my age, but I really don't see why anyone would use a phone to access the web in preference to a laptop - those tiny screens make it difficult to read or see anything and also make it difficult to navigate properly.  Moreover, I don't grasp why dedicated apps are considered such a great idea when, via a decent web browser on my laptop, I can access any website of any organisation with ease.  Which again, I suspect is part of the problem: it's the 'walled garden' mentality that service providers can't seem to shake, the idea that they have to lock you into their own proprietary section of the web, for fear that you'll click away and look at someone else's content, instead.  Which is surely the point of the web.