this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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[–] TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world 221 points 5 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] lengau@midwest.social 100 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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...

[–] garretble@lemmy.world 52 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I paid for PCalc because someone put in effort to make it, and it’s good. Don’t feel bad about that.

But I wouldn’t subscribe to one.

[–] lengau@midwest.social 19 points 5 months ago

Yeah the subscription is mind boggling.

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.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Money laundering? Or just going kids download on devices with their parents data to go unnoticed for months at a time?

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[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 106 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

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.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 30 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] glitchdx@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] Venicon@lemmy.world 101 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] Graphy@lemmy.world 34 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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

[–] thal3s@sh.itjust.works 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

He then follows up that face plant by getting caught going 85 MPH in a school zone. MKHB is crashing out hard.

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[–] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 94 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] cashsky@sh.itjust.works 25 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Sounds like a front for either blatant adware or malware with botted reviews/downloads to bring it to the top in search results. I can't image there isn't a free app that does this.

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[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 58 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Albbi@lemmy.ca 51 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de 54 points 5 months ago (5 children)
[–] superkret@feddit.org 41 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Yaky@slrpnk.net 19 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] talos_the_true_god@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Have you tried webex? It’s like teams but on dumb-‘roids, the notifications are shot, the messages always pull your taskbar up, calls always get routed to either the wrong input or output, calls drop half the time… and the list goes on and on…

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[–] RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Oh, you're going to update without notifying me and then not restart?

You truly are the paramount of usefulness, Teams.

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[–] SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip 45 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] irreticent@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

to rent Photoshop for $20/mo, your creative projects are not your IP

How is that even legal?

[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't think that's true.

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] filcuk@lemmy.zip 10 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Sorry but the same article links to an update that backtracks.
There's just no way this would ever pass without them losing all their business customers, any legality of such disclaimer aside.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 44 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

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[–] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 42 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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).

[–] TokenEffort@sh.itjust.works 37 points 5 months ago (1 children)
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[–] jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.world 15 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I don't know, not the worst in this thread at least.

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[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 38 points 5 months ago
[–] ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago

Workout timer that wants a subscription

[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 24 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I googled nr. 1 and watched their promotional video.
Sooooo many buzzwords. From their marketing material, I have literally no idea what the software even does, but I can already tell it's utter shit.

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[–] bokherif@lemmy.world 24 points 5 months ago (5 children)

The “pro” versions of common social media apps that remove ads or give you a useless check mark.

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[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Crab Rangoon's. I just don't like them. I mean it's just fried cream cheese.

[–] Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago

THEY ARE GLORIOUS

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[–] harcesz@szmer.info 17 points 5 months ago

Microsoft Sharepoint has a Wiki. The Wiki can not generate a table of content.

[–] Kissaki@feddit.org 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

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.

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