On a recent vacation, the United Airlines app staunchly refused to load my boarding pass. After waiting in a long line for a desk agent, I used Hilton’s app to check into my hotel remotely, which was convenient right up until I went to my room and found the app-based digital key Hilton had been promoting didn’t work, making me trudge down to the lobby for a keycard.
It’s handy to view gate updates at a glance or adjust the thermostat from the couch, but analog options being downplayed or phased out is a headache-inducing development. Apps can break, or be, or just be badly designed. They can flood you with notifications you don’t need amid the ones you do. And they’re often simply tedious, forcing you to once again pull out your phone even though we’re all trying to spend less time staring at them.
Those aren’t hypothetical concerns. There are plenty of examples of people who can no longer control their thermostat because theirThe death of analog options is also an accessibility nightmare. As ubiquitous as the smartphone has become, 1 in 10 Americans. Among people over 65, that number grows to 24 percent. And not everyone who does own a smartphone will have the technical acumen or physical capability to juggle all these apps and their perpetually shifting interfaces.