I personally believe it is on purpose, to try and get you to download the app.
Then they can get way more of your data to sell.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
77 points (94.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
47796 readers
735 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm gonna have to agree. It's been a growing trend for years and most sites don't even give you half the features on the site.
The other day I went to place an order for a pizza on the Dominos website on my phone and it would crash every time I tried. Went to my PC and it worked perfectly first try. I'm not downloading your fucking app when I only eat your food, like, once a year.
It gets even better. Load it on your mobile in desktop view, and watch how it miraculously works without issues.
It's more about ads than data. It's much more difficult for the average person to block ads on an app than on a website.
To add to this, I think this is why so many “smart” appliances/products have companion apps (I speak from my own thoughts so I don’t use certain language).
For example, we had a perfectly good, ordinary air fryer (which is essentially just a miniature convection oven). But, my dad got a “smart” air fryer with WiFi connectivity and a companion app. All it really does is allow for remote control and send notifications when your food is done cooking, but you should not be leaving these things unattended to begin with, so the app’s usefulness is questionable at best.
I have a sneaking suspicion that much of this is done to enable data collection. For example, they could hypothetically learn how frequently you use it and when, and then silently track your browsing history to suggest sponsored recipes. They could also have deals with other companies who are more specifically interested in user data. It’s yet another avenue for data extraction.
I personally would not download these companion apps. They’re generally not necessary and if they are, there’s often an alternative product that does not require it. I’m of the opinion that an air fryer does not need an Internet connection. I feel that if remote accessibility was the true purpose, there should be an ability to access the device over a local network, rather than going through a server somewhere else.
99% of the internet is trash. Pages bouncing all over while loading, constant cookie or login popups (even with various blockers), links not connecting, old long outdated content being pushed to the front of searches, junk AI slop non-answers articles or marketing lists about a problem vs actual detailed answers....
Then there are all the various billing systems for various marketplaces, that all wanna require memberships for one time sales, before they tell you the shipping cost.
And so so much more.
It's all heavily dysfunctional and lame and not user friendly at all anymore.
Apps get more permissions than websites do. Websites being bad is on purpose to make you use the app so they can collect and sell more data.
Its enshittification
No, but only because I do not use apps, so do not have a reference to compare with. If I can't do it on your website, I don't do it.
If I can’t do it on your website, I don’t do it.
I guess you're not gonna ever file for unemployment...
(ID.me has joined the chat)
Oh funny thing. My dad, a citizen of China, had to renew passport and China now forces you to use their app to do the renew... lol
Comming soon to the west... ETA 2026
ID.me is super painful, but you can verify yourself without a smartphone or any apps. I've done it.
oh?
I think they make you do a video call for "random" "additional verification" because it got flagged or something and the web thing is broken...
Yeah, I did the video call on a desktop PC.
If I have to use ID.me for something, I just don't do it.
If you look at most apps they’re just wrappers around the websites. Usually they’re using the exact same domains for payment processing so I can only imagine that the payment details are 99% the same.
Personally I haven’t experienced an increase in card declinations on websites.
Same here. I've never had a card declined on a website. I'm decidedly anti-app and haven't ever had a problem
Some financial institutions are much worse than others. I think it depends on what system they're using for fraud detection.
But don't they have to send that info to the card issuer?
Like don't the merchant side have to log and send your IP addresses, what client (browser or App), and like every little info about you to the financial institutions so they can run it through their stupid "fraud prevention" system...
So I assume perhaps somewhere alone the line, some shitty AI assumed that "normal behavior" is "using the App"
(Just a wild guess, no clue how it works behind the scenes)
I doubt it. I find it far more likely that the merchant is arbitrarily declining if they can't scrape enough of your data to sell later...
Nope. You can literally just send them the exact fields needed for processing a transaction.
The amount of sites claiming there's suspicious traffic coming from my IP is getting ridiculous
Same here. So many websites are now virtually unusable. It doesn't seem to happen with Chinese sites, though.
Nah, Chinese sites would try to auto-download the .apk file 10 times lmfao
I was just trying to use Baidu Street Views for childhood nostalgia... fuck off with the apps lmfao
They also require a phone number attached to a government ID to register an account 😭
Even the new version of my banking app seems bad in comparison to the old one. Sure looks nice, but having a white screen until the web app has downloaded isn't really good design
First Covid happened and I noticed every piece of tech started getting bad updates.
Then AI happened and things got worse…
Grubhub’s website seems intentionally unusable. Slow, constant errors, randomly logs me out, etc.
Clothing sites nearly always make my phone (iPhone 13) run hot after a few minutes of browsing. Often the phone as a whole will start to get really slow (thermal throttling?) and I have to force quit the browser and maybe even restart iOS.
I have a 13 Mini and even Lemmy makes that happen sometimes but it’s gotten way worse for me since the update to iOS 26.
I agree completely! So many sites have forced me to download an app to accomplish what I need!
Which country do you live in ?
Provider, dns settings, browser ,search machine, adblocker, extensions, VPN , all can cause delay or block on a website .
No problems here
USA
I always use real IP on Chrome for any money activity
So often I get a "card declined" bs
Like seriously, you can swipe it in the store and it works...
Europe here , I use ironfox ,vanadium , librewolf . Never heard of real ip .
I think they mean they don't mask their IP (as in, use their real/true IP) for payments.
It's mostly better than it was in the 90s when things first started trying to be more than just static text and images. But government websites are somehow even worse.