Haha this is bizzarely specific to my back-of-the woods brain. Feels like something that would be super relevant to someone in San Francisco but not as much to me
There are many events you can't get into now without a smartphone. Unfortunately on-phone digital tickets are far too common and far too commonly mandatory. There's a huge audience of people who are required to use them. It may be specific, but it's also what we're stuck with.
> There are many events you can't get into now without a smartphone.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
At least Apple's Wallet app works offline. There is nothing worse than having to use a dogshit proprietary app, waiting for it to handshake with four thousand data collection services before you can reach your My Tickets page, in a location where cell service is shit because thousands of other people are trying to do the same thing.
At least you can still almost always get a normal old PDF that you can print or open on your phone. Somehow these methods even work without sending gigabytes of data to 300 random services, requiring access to every sensor and going through the most botched workflows and UX choices you can imagine. A technological miracle if you ask me.
I'm enjoying the time before it gets really bad, because so far it's usually just the extremely large and centralized companies who let themselves engage this kind of abuse. Small venues, movie theaters, rewards programs or hotel reservations still find complex digital tickets to be too weird, and let us do things the boring old way.
I don't go to many events, but the last one I went to was a concert, and the tickets required the app and could not be screenshotted or PDFed because there was some motion thing on the QR code to ensure that it wasn't a screenshot. It really pissed me off, but there's not much I can do about it other than boycott the show.
Someday, I'd like to try capturing an animated gif or short MP4 or something of the motion, and see if that works, but the pragmatic part of me overwhelmed the hacker side of me. I would hate to lose my money on the ticket and not be able to see the show because I tried to hack the process
You do understand it there because people have been trying to pass of screenshots as the app right? This happened during Covid as well. The Danish Covid passport initially just had QR code, then people started selling screenshots on Facebook. Same with the drivers license, people tried to pass off screenshots as the actual drivers license app.
It's not hard to imagine that people would sell screenshots of QR code ticket online. So rather than accepting that we've created a system that is fundamentally flawed, companies try to pave over it with more and more features, instead of just providing physical tickets.
frabert · · focus · HN ↗
boplicity · · focus · HN ↗
corytheboyd · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
At least Apple's Wallet app works offline. There is nothing worse than having to use a dogshit proprietary app, waiting for it to handshake with four thousand data collection services before you can reach your My Tickets page, in a location where cell service is shit because thousands of other people are trying to do the same thing.
tavavex · · focus · HN ↗
I'm enjoying the time before it gets really bad, because so far it's usually just the extremely large and centralized companies who let themselves engage this kind of abuse. Small venues, movie theaters, rewards programs or hotel reservations still find complex digital tickets to be too weird, and let us do things the boring old way.
freedomben · · focus · HN ↗
Someday, I'd like to try capturing an animated gif or short MP4 or something of the motion, and see if that works, but the pragmatic part of me overwhelmed the hacker side of me. I would hate to lose my money on the ticket and not be able to see the show because I tried to hack the process
mrweasel · · focus · HN ↗
It's not hard to imagine that people would sell screenshots of QR code ticket online. So rather than accepting that we've created a system that is fundamentally flawed, companies try to pave over it with more and more features, instead of just providing physical tickets.