DOES EVERYTHING REALLY NEED AN APP?

Imagine, noble reader, that you were suddenly rendered extremely old or infirm by some sort of DWP Incapacity Ray. You wake in a world where there are four competing ways to pay for sodding parking, your supermarket offers a better price if you allow it to follow you around digitally, and the loyalty card you once kept in your wallet now needs a phone with battery, reception, a remembered password and a software update.

And we're told all this is more convenient.

What we're on about is, shit was supposed to get a bit less complex and incredibly better. Instead, shit which used to be fairly predictable has become needlessly more complex and incredibly shitter. Nobody asked to stand in front of a car park payment machine and learn that the machine is now merely a weatherproof advertisement for something you must download. Nobody wants the NHS to feel like four different appointment systems wearing one big coat. Nobody should need a data plan to obtain a bus fare.

We're not saying wouldn't it be nice if it was 1991 again. Nobody wants that. We'd have to tolerate The Shamen again, for a start. Nor are we pretending that paper tickets were immaculate little angels and every queue a profound encounter with humanity. Technology is brilliant when it removes an obstacle. The difficulty arises when it removes the old option and calls the new obstacle progress.

There's a simple test: if the app breaks, can the person still do the thing? Park the car, board the bus, see the doctor, get their money, enter the venue? If not, you've designed a dependency, not a convenience.

Make it digital, by all means. But keep the human-sized door. And while you're about it, stop asking us to download software in order to perform activities that previously required a pocketful of coins and a functioning finger.