sitting in my car in a Seattle parking lot. there's a knock on my window. it's an old lady, who asks me "how do we pay for parking?"
so the thing about these apps is that the web design would be just as bad.
because the parking company goes "it sure would be nice to have an app", and then "but parking isn't that lucrative and most of the money goes to the top anyway"
so they hire out the lowest bidder company that churns out trash and it's devs have an understanding of how to memorize and implement commands, but not really anything that goes on under the hood. they aren't told, they don't know, that there's more to it than that. This is being reductive, definitely, but a lot of business-to-business apps, internal company apps, and municipal gov apps have this sorta vibe. their managers don't know anything either, so drive them ragged.
And everyone expects people to actually, you know, do what they tell you they will (a common problem these days, because that used to be true within their class) and everyone is alienated from dev labor enough that they have no way of knowing if that money actually will get what they want (BUT THEY SHOULD HAVE AN INKLING, too bad business school is taught by consultancy retirees.)
so you get, well, you get the lowest bid software that comes 6 months late and costs 3 times as much as getting someone who can actually do it. same as middle class suburbanites hiring the lowest bid general contractor for renovations and then complaining endlessly to their reports at work that they have to pay 3 times as much just to repair the water damage in their new bathroom because they used drywall in it that wasnt meant for wet environments.
no one learns their lesson, because money is everything when you've got people to answer to, and people only care about numbers.
I showed up for jury duty once and they had an app that let you know if your number came up so you could go out and get lunch. it took fifteen minutes to successfully make an account. surely those cellular buzzers at an Applebee's are cheaper than an app subscription. Or like, just calling you with an automated message with caller ID that says "jury duty" and not "unknown number (potential spam)".
or a text! THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS A TEXT MESSAGING ANNOUNCEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE. but no, neoliberalism requires everyone be disconnected enough that core branches of municipal government don't talk to each other enough to know what the hell anyone else is paying for.
It's like the nuclear family, artificial fractures so you can sell one lawn mower per house instead of one lawn mower per block.
