I think it’s worth amending this to just “apps can kill”. I volunteer with search and rescue sometimes and have seen several people get into bad trouble due to reliance on phones for maps. Sometimes it’s dead batteries or just breakage without a backup plan, but no doubt other times it’s changing behavior in the app itself, OS decided to wipe cache, app has bad info, whatever.

You can say that people should know better but sometimes dead tree maps are not available, and anyway there’s no doubt that they are on the way out. The “safe/reliable” way might even seem to be up for debate, since phones can be more waterproof than paper, less likely to blow away when you’re on top of a mountain, serve as a backup flashlight/emergency comms, etc. But all it takes is a company that decides to force auto update and a PM that decides feature churn increases engagement and creates job security, and who knows what will break?

It is kind of like packaging that’s a choking or asphyxiation hazard.. if you’re doing anything that affects millions of people, it’s almost ALWAYS a safety issue even if you don’t usually think of it that way. No big audience or big user base without big responsibilities. Sure you’ll probably not be held liable in law suits, but on the other hand you should probably feel bad if you’re killing people due to indifference /negligence when thinking through edge cases.

This is really the fault of the insurance company (they geo-locked the app, Apple is just respecting that).

But really the idea of in-network hospitals for emergency services is nuts. Like, checkups, chronic issues—fine, your instance provider might have some preferences. But if it is an emergency (a situation in which you might die) and you have to figure out which hospital to go to first: Apple can not fix your malfunctioning society.

Article: I didn't care about a corporation restricting people's freedom until it hurt me.

Comments: Its not the corporation, its the government. Its not the corporation, its just the way things are. Its ok the corporation restricts freedom, everything is a tradeoff and everyone does this. Gollygee I hope this gets better.

real elevating curious conversation here /s that never self reflects, is our culture of software making the world worse? will one day our intentional naivety around power fail to protect us from that truth?

A lot can be said about Apple and walled gardens for sure, but is it fair to mostly blame Apple for the region locked insurance app, rather than the app developer? That was the developer’s choice to do, not Apple’s. Hopefully Anees’ insurance also has an website and contact numbers for emergencies. Android supports region locking and has some region locked apps too, it appears, according to Google. Is the Android version of the app in question not region locked on Android? We don’t know since he used an emulator. Maybe region locking is easy to get around if you’re technical, but in an emergency for most non-technical people, the outcome will be the same on Android as it is on Apple, no?

I went to a foreign country in 2019 and got a local SIM card, I couldn't install the ISP's app (I don't remember why I needed it, to make sure I got the quota that the seller promised?) because the app was region-locked.. huh, should I change my Google account's region just for the period I'm that country?