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Full price EA games with F2P-style microtransactions and ads
And this isn't useless, but I can't believe that to rent Photoshop for $20/mo, your creative projects are not your IP...
Windows
And that despite charging for it, they fill many versions of it with adverts, install without asking bloatware and crap paid for by other companies to shove down your throat, and also sells your personal information to (checks) at least 801 third parties.
Hey! Those 801 third parties are trusted third parties. All of them were properly vetted when they said they wouldn’t misuse our personal data.
Paid calculator apps.
Not only are many of them paid - but they are subscription as well. Imagine paying a monthly fee for your goddamn calculator.
I have mixed feelings here. I legitimately paid ($1, once, a decade ago) for a calculator app and feel it was a great value (I still prefer it to this day). But then again the free version was fine too and the one-time payment was essentially a donation to the developer for a great app that unlocked... Themes...
I like that model. You get to try the software for free and have a way to thank the developer and get something extra, rather than just a pure donation.
F-Droid has an Android port of the Unix maxima, which is a whole free and open-source computer algebra system, that handles all my heavier lifting. And I'm pretty sure that every phone that I've ever seen ships with at a software package that can act as a five-function calculator, if someone is just looking for something simple.
Calculator emulators are the way. Wabbit for ti-84 and similar, and hp prime (official) for a full CAS.
Money laundering? Or just going kids download on devices with their parents data to go unnoticed for months at a time?
They 100% bank on people forgetting cancelling
Also, Apple gave iOS a default calculator just a few months ago. When I had an iPad I had to download dozens and dozens of calculators to find one that didnt have ads or subscriptions
Edit: I meant iPad. They sold iPads without the calculator from launch until Q4 2024
After a long time of using CalcES on my android phone and cheating the ads away with PiHole, I finally spent the very little fee for the pro edition. The app is amazing and the creator absolutely deserves it.
Pretty sure I paid for some Ti and HP calc emulators at some point. Only a couple bucks each, worth it at the time. Would not pay to subscribe though.
I paid for the pro version of HiPER calc, well worth it as I use it daily.
Soulver is the best calculator on my Mac and has been for more than a decade now.
In a sense this is great news. If you ever need to earn some money (somehow, anyhow) you now know that there are people out they who willingly pay a subscription for their calculator.
Haseba Calc on iOS is amazing. Well worth it.
Teams
I was legit baffled by how such a shit peace of software could become so ubiquitous – until I got to know SAP and realized that Teams isn't even in the bottom half of enterprise software quality.
A someone who has used and supported teams, WebEx Skype and crazy shit I don't even remember anymore, Teams is downright reliable and user friendly.
I thought SAP was shit until I worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an ERP from alternate 1990s hell dimension. It has a built-in IDE that uses its own language called C/AL (syntactically similar to Pascal). The only source control is developers' ability to lock files they are working on. And the code editor is worse than notepad. Seriously, it does not allow to select or paste multiple lines, and in general, acts as if each line is it's own textbox. Forget about syntax highlighting or anything else other than black text on white background.
And, AFAIK, if your company needs to customize it, you are required to hire a "Microsoft-certified" NAV developer.
Oh, you're going to update without notifying me and then not restart?
You truly are the paramount of usefulness, Teams.
and then not restart?
I had Teams restart, twice, during an incredibly important meeting with the government, because it updated itself without my consent.
The entirety of Office365 has become crap, especially the online version.
The online version means I don’t ever have to boot into windows to use all the M365 stuff at work, so it gets a “thanks Microsoft!” from me.
Thanks, I hate it.
90% of b2b software. They literally charge thousands of dollars while giving the worse piece of shit software you've ever used.
They always want to charge per user too instead of just charging a monthly fee. They'd rather have no money than not charge per user it's actual crazy. Imagine any other industry turning away paying customers when it doesn't cost them anything to have the customer. Software companies are insane. Can't wait until their funding runs out.
Oof. Yes!
The proprietary cloud crap usually has worse or non-existent documentation, fewer features, and a terrible or non-existent API.
But it comes with a salesperson. So there's that.
But people with cloud server orchestration skills are terrifyingly expensive right now, so self-hosting a better product can be a very hard sell.
The Salesperson is incredibly important. They take the person responsible for making the purchase decision out to lunch and for rounds of golf, after all!
Sometimes the value add is security, sometimes scaling or uptime. Enterprise considerations aren't necessarily the same as for individual consumers.
Sometimes it's just a dogshit product though, and the sales team pulled the wool over some execs eyes.
Oh fuck yeah! So much of my research into new tools is just checking to see if they have a demo, documentation, and price.
When I'm looking for a new tool, I don't have the time to schedule a "quick" 20 minute call to do introductions and schedule a follow-up hour long meeting followed by a quote sent over in an email days later only to find out the price is so far outside the range there is no way it's ever going to happen!
I'm not some useless middle manager looking for any excuse to look busy; I don't have that kind of time to waste!
In a lot of cases, you only see the final price after signing up.
it's not an entire app but, discord profile decorations.
The fact it costs money isn't surprising, but the amount of money charged is hilarious.
17$ for some graphics that some look like they took about 20 minutes to make. Just to make your profile look different than everyone elses. Then the "discount" given for having nitro for it is even more laughable.
Whats equally insane is that people fall for it. I know some people that have easily spent 60$ on profile decorations. Spending equal or greater than the cost of discord nitro is insane to me, even if the decoration doesn't expire.
The thing that I find insane is having to pay for Nitro to have an animated .gif as your profile pic.
...The animation is played client-side, so literally costs Discord nothing to do this, and as a matter of fact it's actually more effort for them to intentionally block animations from playing until you pony up than just letting the browser container the app runs in natively do its thing. Given that the Discord app itself is basically just a glorified webview container with some stuff bolted onto it.
I don't want to sound like I'm on Discord's side (I dislike nitro too), but that's honestly just how a lot of paid add-on features on free apps work. They take away some functionality from the free one to incentivize people to pay.
what bothers me even more than the price is that they all suck, and none of them fit my aesthetic. I could make my own decorations, and I'm offended that discord won't let me.
Also how discord dœs stickers . Like custom emojes , they're tied to discord servers , unless you have nitro then you can use them everywhere . Such BS system , shoulda done them how LINE dœs them : you only need to buy the sticker pack once then you use them anywhere , no shitty subscription needed !
And the animations on them are so obnoxious I actively add custom CSS to remove them.
Vencord FTWOn a similar note, skins and other cosmetics in video games that do nothing to help with camouflage—or worse—make you stand out more. Never understood why people waste money on that.
Early days of of micro-transactions did help you blend in more, but I noticed they started diverging away, leaving the more natural camos to be unlocked by gameplay, and the obnoxious/distracting ones as a premium.
Difference is that that shit sometimes looks cool as hell and you see your skin constantly while playing(at least if you play in third person). You won't stare at your profile picture for hours.
I can see that for a free game that you enjoy a lot, and want to reward with some money. You can make a donation, or get a silly skin for the same money (and have it visible that you donated some).
Holy fuck, as if I needed more reasons to hate Discord... back when I thought it was just a new iteration of xFire I still hated it but could at least see a purpose for it, but it doesn't even do all the shit xFire could
Xfire was the shit. I'd have paid a couple bucks a month for it, instead of it just dying. It was so crazy ahead of its time. Text chat, voice, game detection and tracking, clans, server browsing, broadcasting, pic and video hosting...
All the free widgets that used to come preinstalled in Android before Google killed them to save the extra $2 of development cost from their yearly interns.
I recently tried out an "LED banner" (called LED scroller in the google play store) app that lets you scroll text on your screen. Pretty cool, I would totally pay $5 or maybe even $10 for it. In the free version, I don't think I've ever seen that many ads in such a short period of time. The paid version was $15 PER WEEK. That's $780 per year. To scroll some text. It's the only app I've ever bothered to post a review for.
I remember writing one of those using a bitmap font from some Arduino LCD driver program and publishing it for free on the Android store. Someone offered £50 for the source code and I wonder if they're related.
Not useless as such but a wallpaper app or something that expects you to pay £5.99 a month to use. Fuck all the way off with that
Didn’t MKBHD launch some wallpaper app for $12 a month? I heard about it and just figured he was another tech YouTuber who lost touch
watch face app, Facer I think is like this. and still bombards you with ads and banners.
The German Dreckstool website (meaning shit tool) hosts a hitlist of shitty tools/software. I don't think it's that popular, but the top/high-scored of the list may be indicative of some of the worst.
Outlook should be way higher. I cannot believe how in tarnation I cannot view the reply they gave me if I'm standing in my sent folder. I have to copy past the subject and searchthe mail again on my inbox. And the ficking alerts that don't trigger at friggin all WTF?
I hate the sent folder in the first place.
Old outlook had a setting to place sent emails next to the replied to email. That worked for all folders, except the inbox.
In Thunderbird I let it place sent emails always next to the context.
In the new Outlook, after every send, I have to go into sent and move it to the correct folder. (I have many folders for structure of various concerns.)
Crab Rangoon's. I just don't like them. I mean it's just fried cream cheese.
THEY ARE GLORIOUS
There's a Triad-backed Catonese place near me that makes crab rangoons with actual crab in them. They are fantastic.
Well, if it's good enough for the triads,
I guess I'm on boardI won't ask any more questions...
The “pro” versions of common social media apps that remove ads or give you a useless check mark.
There used to be apps in the iOS app store that were nothing but a big "I'm rich" symbol. They would be listed for some shit like $10,000 in the app store and all they did was,at best, have a button that played a sound to indicate that you were in fact rich lol.
Those "I'm rich" apps basically tested the app store price limit which was set to $9,999 (don't know if it's different now). Brilliant idea really.
I put this in the same category as the "Million dollar homepage" where some guy asked for $1 a pixel and hosted a page with the results. Something smart that if it gets enough attention could make someone good money for not a lot of work. And generally something that will only work once as copycats won't be seen to have the same value.
It is expensive, but its not surprising that it costs money
I remember when the iPhone was new and my friend paid money for an app that simulates a mug of beer on the screen so you can pretend to drink it.
That, but the entire genre of those fucking things cuz there are assloads of them now.
Novelty apps were practically the majority of what was out there in the early days of Android and iOS. I remember a lighter app, and an electric shaver app.
My favorite novelty app was that marble maze game on iOS that* used the accelerometer. I got really good at finishing those mazes in seconds, which upset my cousin because it was his phone and I demolished all his best times, lol. Only video game I was ever good at.
I've never really understood the imitation app developers. Like your first little run of the novelty, sure, makes sense, minimal effort that might pay itself off or even go viral, but why do the imitations think they have the same shot?
There used to be an app that was a Dragon Ball Z scouter. You could point it at anything with a face and it would tell you a random power level. Apparently mine is 10,550 (I can barely lift a jug of milk).
Our shit setup at work, where I am now using two browsers and two email programs because our Jira and Confluence can't be arsed to decently support web standards/Firefox and because Outlook is shit but Exchange has stuff I need Outlook for.
Today was the first time, after yet again something not working - issues on confluence and Jira ticket can't be closed, endless load on Firefox - where I genuinely felt relieved that a very different website for file transfer simply worked. I could open it, click download, and download the file.
It's absurd that I feel this way.
Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product. Our Jira and Confluence have plugins, and we pay admin company to integrate more customizations, and it just makes everything worse. The "changes only happen at night" I read from Atlassian is pointless because without notice or announcement stuff breaks anyway, and I have no idea who makes changes and when and what, because nothing is being communicated. Today was the third time we weren't able to add work time to tickets. Let's see when the next time will be.
It's a constant annoyance and stumbling over shit tools.
I have various CSS hacks in place to make Jira and Confluence more usable, but it's still shit. And man their HTML DOM is absolutely horrendous with only generated classes. Most of my CSS hacks use test ID attributes.
Shit Atlassian, shit Jira and Confluence, shit customizations. Annoying Outlook and Exchange.
Man this became a long text and rant lol
Unfortunately, they're not useless but apparently necessary. I don't see us ever moving away from them.
Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product.
I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it once and am now freed!
We were big into Atalassian when they announced they were going cloud only. We had on-prem versions of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket
We pretty quickly said "Fuck that", mostly because we have an on-prem policy for IP protection.
I was pretty happy to spend some time searching for replacements, mostly because it was my job to apply upgrades to these steaming, tottering piles of badly written java horseshit. They looked pretty, but the upgrade process was convoluted and quite often failed terminally. I still think that the difficulty of upgrading the hosted versions was a driver towards cloud only, mostly because it exposed how shite the things were and how many complaints they must have got for offering an on-prem product that was so hard to maintain, despite looking pretty.
I take some pleasure that the Atlassian share price is now half what it was before they did this.
(If anyone was interested; Confluence and Jira were replaced by Youtrack. Bitbucket by Teamcity. Both by Jetbrains, both much easier to upgrade (Teamcity is web-based one-click), and our licencing costs are about half what we paid to Atlassian)
Our biggest dependency is on the jira extension for adding work time and doing monthly and yearly worker Abrechnung.
I believe the hope was to be a reasonable migration to cloud, but if course man's issues and a lot of effort. Now we're in the cloud with that.
We wouldn't only need a ticketing replacement. But time, invoice, and lawful worker pay docs.
Jira breaking is a feature. Free time to do nothing
I cannot count the number of times I was able to fire off an email with a status update to the PM "JIRA is down, again, I completed XYZ, update your gantt charts, my part is done." I know that they paid a whole team of folks to craft the interrelations of those tasks for a system that hardly ever worked.
Workout timer that wants a subscription
For me, any office apps. Never worked in an office, never wanted to. None of that stuff. Even if it's free, if it gets installed with the distro, it's the first thing that gets tossed.
Sims freeplay. Haven’t used it for a long time but it sure asks for a LOT of money for a free game 😂
This list is too long
Near all paid apps on iPhone.
Real Debrid
Touted as necessary when it isn't, apparently if you have it you have access to a huge cache that you can use to continue to torrent dead files
The issue is that most files nowadays are torrented anyway, so it's essentially just a 'do it because I told you so' step for torrentio users.
Other torrent streaming software don't even need real Debrid.
Isn't it kind of a middle-man service so you don't get narc'd on by your ISP for large amounts of p2p traffic? That way all your ISP sees is you downloading data from one source rather than lots of.p2p traffic.
Unless you use vpn obviously, that doesn't have issues with p2p traffic or whatever.
And in many countries downloading is just fine, sharing isn’t.
And in a torrent swarm you always share (yes there are modded clients, but they’re a niche), making it risky
I discovered it only a while ago and during that time it has been clearly neutered. It just doesn’t work for stuff like it used to.
Most likely copyright strikes caught up to it
A few months ago they got told to quit it so they were like "oh shit apparently there are PIRATES using our piracy service. We never wanted THOSE GUYS as our customers!" and started neutering piracy, which was clearly their main source of income.
Its really slow without it. And its like a vpn but lighter, so you don't get caught torrenting by an isp.
Boost / Sync for Lemmy
What's wrong with Sync, lol
I read your comment, I thought a sec, and I just paid to remove the ads for boost.
Love boost.
Spotify and apps like it. Imagine paying a subscription to a subpar selection of music when you could just download mp3s. Imagine having skipping a song being a privilege. Are you an abused kid? Is drinking water a privilege too? I paid once for BlackPlayer simply because it's my favorite music player app. The most important features were free.
What if you want to listen to something you didn’t have the foresight to pirate locally first?
Music streaming is very convenient, even easier than piracy.
I agree with you in theory, and in practice for most people. I have weird enough tastes in music though that I haven't found a single streaming service that has what I want.
If I like the song, I download it when I have internet or mobile data. I support the creators in other ways if possible. $1 from one fan is the equivalent of like 13 million streams from them. I'm not paying to avoid ten minutes of obnoxious ads every time I want to listen to music. Anyway, they found Like the Wind, and it absolutely slaps so I'll download it on my phone.
Subpar selection? I can count on the fingers of one hand the songs I have found on other sources but not Spotify.
I don't even pay for Spotify, but I still use it to find new music because it's hands down the best way to do so. I create a playlist of all the new songs I want and then purchase them all when Bandcamp Friday rolls around. I'm getting all the benefits of Spotify without paying them a cent (my ad blocker even works on it too), plus being as supportive as possible to the artists themselves.
I sail the high seas quite often. I also pay for spotify because it's stupid easy.
Downvoted for hating on Spotify. That's just sad.
I don't care what crap Spotify offers; it's well known they go out of their way to avoid paying royalties to the artists. They're a leech, nothing more, and I will never support them.
I down voted them for the weird tirade about privilege and being an abused kid. Idk wtf that has to do with hating spotify, but lemmy would look much better without that garbage in the comments.
Yeah, on lemmy if you're not constantly deepthroating Xi Jinping's cock, you're practically digesting Spotify's cock.
Imagine paying a subscription to a subpar selection of music when you could just download mp3s.
Imagine having to go through the hassle of being at a computer and using whatever program you need to use to find the correct songs and then transfering them to your phone, when you could just find the song instantly, no matter where you are.
I used to download tens of thousands of songs back in the day, Spotify is way more convienient, a price I'm perfectly fine paying.
I forgot I time traveled to 2006. The politics never changed so I thought I was still in 2025.
Anyway in the future we have a thing called cloud storage where you could upload your whole music folder and download it on any device.
As someone who makes music and listens to my own nonsense, I set a onedrive folder as my default location so I can export an mp3 while I'm showering and getting dressed and download the mp3 on my phone when I'm outside.
Im with you on this one. I listen to wayyyy too much music to go back to downloading constantly
It really is a shame that blackplayer is not being updated anymore afaik
I haven't had any issues with it. I still use it today
I like Spotify. I don't often want to listen to an album. I want to listen to a vibe. It's good for that, and for introducing me to new bands and music.
But yeah, if you're just using it to listen to one album at a time, and you know which album you want, then you're using the wrong service.
