Recently I used a parking app on my phone to pay for street parking. I misjudged it slightly and came back to find out I had a ticket. A quick check of the time and I realized that I’d been given a ticket just three minutes after the expiration time. What’s curiouser is that I had mistakenly used the wrong parking apps for the three previous weeks and never received a ticket. The following week I decided to use quarters instead and was amazed to find that it was also cheaper to pay with coins that my app.
This is my supposition: the parking app provides fantastically useful information for parking attendants – whose compensation is based on the number of tickets they hand out. By using the app I was unwittingly increasing the changes of getting a ticket. And I am willing to bet that the parking police have started targeting people that use apps.
Which leads to the article idea: what apps are actual NOT good to use? Which phone apps make life harder, not easier? Which should we avoid?