Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone. Maybe he has dexterity issues that make using a smartphone difficult. Maybe he doesn't want to install their invasive app. Maybe he finds that paper tickets are easier to manage. Maybe he recognizes that the vendor made this change to benefit themselves at the expense of the fans, as it allows them greater control of the resale market.
I own a smartphone but prefer paper tickets. Luckily I can (and do) still get them at my team's stadium, although I have to pick them up in person.
In 50 years, everyone's going to have an advertisement-injecting brain implant, and stores are going to require you to have one in order to purchase anything, and they'll lock you out of commerce as a filthy Luddite if you don't get one. And, 50 years from now, commenters on HN will defend those businesses because the implant is "modern" and supporting those ancient smartphones and credit cards is hard to do.
Do the Dodgers have the right to exclude non-smartphone owners from participating in commerce with them? I suppose they have the legal right to, but we have a visceral reaction to it because it is morally questionable, and even smartphone owners can easily come up with examples where they'd be harmed by similar discrimination: The Dodgers also have the right to exclude non-smokers. They could say tomorrow that you can only buy a season ticket if you're a smoker, and I think that would be considered equally unacceptable to most of us.
When I run into this (most recently at a hospital), I tell them "The court doesn't allow me to have a smart phone because I'm a hazard to national security.†"
When they argue (very rarely), I tell them "Take it up with judge Kelso in the 225th District Court. He's in the phone book." That's usually enough for them to break out the backup non-smartphone plan. In my experience, there's always another way, but they're just too lazy to do it.
† Absolutely a lie, but I really don't GAF.
It’s vague enough about what a disability is, that something like “my hand tremor and farsightedness preclude using a touchscreen, I request a reasonable accommodation” is a valid request. If they deny admission and accommodation to somebody incapable of using a smartphone, there is a whole army of lawyers that will gladly take the case on contingency.
As you note, the app is not inherent to seeing a game, or preventing resale. There’s no reason an id and confirmation number can’t be used to get him in.
Such abuse is an insult to everyone who needs it, everyone who engages with it in good faith, everyone who spends gobs of money to make events and services accessible to those with genuine need.
I don’t rule the world but if I did abusers of protective rules would be summarily executed. (Don’t vote for me. I’ve got a short but significant list of similar policies. Scammers those guys would have targets on their heads, kidnap for ransom criminals those guys too)
For sure. If that was true the answer would be "charge the non-app users a nominal fee to cover the cost".
Invasive tracking is the point, not the cost. It's anti-consumer.
Then why is 'I don't wanna' sufficient justification to force non-critical services to support your preferences forever?
No policy or law shall be enacted that directly or indirectly requires a use of a computing device where any other alternative at all is possible. Where offering other alternatives presents a cost, that cost (and only that cost, with no markup) may be passed on to the consumer.
I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.
And there is precedent on the pricing. For example, FAA is not allowed to charge any more for any service than it costs to deliver said service, which is why if i lose my pilot's license, a replacement is $3.
In my country right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers' mental health and education. We've got schools banning phones, and the government wanting to introduce age checks for social media. Infinite doomscrolling in your pocket, endless brainrot short-form videos, it's not healthy and we need to get smartphones out of the hands of the young.
So there are good reasons people might choose not to get a smartphone.
Then exactly the same government also proposed people wouldn't be allowed to work without a 'Digital ID Card' - making smartphones (and google/apple accounts) mandatory.
It's 2026, we've seen that free speech absoluters don't actually care about protecting all speech.
We've seen 'small government' and 'no government power over your life' supporters suddenly just fine with it when women's right to choose is taken away by the government. Or when the government wants to decide/legally enforce gender their gender definition.
We've seen the 'less government' people do nothing as the Feds trample local laws, illegally seize voter roles (voting is a states issue), attempts to inject federal requirements into elections and attach what is a large cost for some people to the right to vote.
So we're going to need more nuance than a disengenuous 1980 platitude on the topic.
Maybe he doesn't then get any of the benefits of having a smartphone.
I don't understand why we need to bend over backwards for folks who have chosen to ignore modernity. There was a woman in my neighborhood association at one point who would throw a fit about us using email for communication because "not everyone has a computer you know." This was in 2018. As a society, we've gone completely out of our way to make living on your own terms legal and doable. You don't even have to get you or your kids vaccinated if you don't want to! But then going even farther and expecting to get all the same benefits as folks who've decided to accept and use modern technology is ridiculous... the Dodgers don't owe this man physical season tickets, just like Google doesn't owe me the ability to physically mail in a search term and have the results physically mailed back to me.
To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.
Swipe down from the top. No, the other top.
Click share, now click "find in page". Wait, that doesn't share at all?
It's definitely not only social sharing.
- Give the other app a temporary/transient copy of a document or a file
- Give the other app the actual file (R/W)
- Give the other app the actual file but some other way (there's at least two in Android now, I believe?)
- Give the other app some weird-ass read-only lens into the actual file
- Re-encode the thing into something else and somehow stream it to the other app
- Re-encode the thing into something else and give it that (that's a lossy variant of transient copy case - example, contact info being encoded into textual "[Name] Blah\n[Mobile] +55 555 555 555" text/plain message).
- Upload it to cloud, give the other app a link
- Upload it to cloud, download it back, and give the other app a transient downloaded copy (?! pretty sure Microsoft apps do that, or at least that's what it feels when I try to "Share" stuff from that; totally WTF)
- Probably something else I'm missing.
You never really know which of these mechanisms will be used by a given app, until you try to "Share" something from it for the first time.
Now, I'm not saying the UI needs to expose the exact details of the process involved. But what it should do is to distinguish between:
1. Giving the other app access to the resource
2. Giving the other app an independent copy of the resource (and spell out if it's exact or mangled copy)
3. Giving the other app a pointer to the resource
In desktop terminology, this is the difference between Save As, Export and copying the file path/URL.
Also, desktop software usually gives you all three options. Mobile apps usually implement only one of them as "Share", so when you need one of the not chosen options, you're SOL.
It's almost always to send the content somewhere, whether it's a platform, an app, the clipboard, etc.
Not always always, but almost always.
The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.
The former makes sense. The latter doesn't. I don't get to park in handicapped spaces that are closer to the store just because I'd like to.
An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.
Until I spent some time in a country whose predominate language (and signage) was not english.
Maybe those pictorial signs are a good idea after all.
When OP is 85, I hope some whippersnapper 20 year old says to him, "Come on, grandpa. You need to get that neural advertisement brain implant like the rest of us, or you can't buy anything. Why should businesses need to support your lame smartphone? Step into the 22nd century, pops!"
Suddenly you start seeing and using all the wonderful ADA affordances that have been installed in plain sight all around you.
My mom is 83, a retired school teacher and she has been using computers since 1986 and has an entire networked computer setup in her office with multiple computers and printers. She went from the original Apple //e version of AppleWorks to Office now.
I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
Edit: For those seeing an argument in my statement above re: forcing people to use technology or forcing business to make an accommodation for people who don't want to use technology: I am not making a statement either way. I'm simply saying it seems logical and reasonable, natural even, to value your time more when you have less of it.
But if you don't want to, then you shouldn't be expecting other people to accomodate you.
1. enter your language
2. enter your region
3. enter your wifi and password
4. select your wifi (why 3 didn't do this I have no effing idea)
5. create a MII, you can't skip this step though you can pick a pre-created one
6. link your MII to an account - you can skip this but the device is useless without an account if you didn't buy games on physica media
7. Setting up an account shows a QR code so now you have to get our your phone
8. Enter your email and get send a verification email
9. switch to your email app and find the code
10. switch back to your browser and enter the code
11. Fill out your name/address/phone etc....
12. Now you want to download an app so you can use your switch so, pick e-store
13. Get QR code and scan
14. Get told you were sent another email verification
14. Go to email app and get code
15. Switch back to browser and enter code
16. Type in your CC Card info
17. Now pick a game to purchase
18. The purchase button is off screen after a bunch of legalize before it and no indication you need to scroll down
19. Choose purchase
20. Get told you need to verify again (in a tiny box you can check "remember me")
there were more steps. The whole process took about an hour, maybe longer
Even with all of that, there just a ton of stuff about a Switch that's taken for granted or poorly designed. As an example, he wanted to play Switch Sports Golf. The Switch home screen assumes you're using both controllers. At some point Switch Sports Golf switches to using just one controller. That's not clear at all. Another example, you pick Golf. It displays a screen showing you to hold the controller down and press the top button (X), but also on that screen is a generic, "press (A)" to continue this dialog. It's a very poorly designed screen giving to conflicting directions.
I get it, he's not the target market.
I would say catch enough iterations to keep the basic premise in mind, because there is a bit of personal responsibility to maintain technological literacy in the modern age. A telephone isn't really an esoteric device, either.
As for resale: The attendee name is tied to the ticket in these cases, and ID is checked at the door. I guess an app could be more effective for preventing this than normal digital/paper tickets.
I don't agree that it's better. Why should I have to worry about my ticket running out of battery power or being such a high-value pickpocket target once I'm already in the venue?
The latter is a huge issue at music festivals for example:
- https://old.reddit.com/r/OutsideLands/search/?q=phone+stolen...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/electricdaisycarnival/search/?q=pho...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/coachella/search/?q=phone+stolen&in...
Can't just leave it at home if you need it to get in to the thing.
Engineers should be honest that everything is a tradeoff. For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets, you impose additional failure modes, dependency chains, and accessibility issues that simply weren't a problem with paper ticketing.
The "phone-ification" of everything will probably bite us in the behind in the future, just like the buildout of out car-centric environments does now.
Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)
Case in point: I traveled from St. Louis to Houston for a concert a few years ago. Before I left home to catch my flight, I installed the Ticketmaster app on a phone and verified that I could bring up the tickets. When I tried it again in my hotel an hour before the conference, it no longer worked because the fraud detection in their app was apparently confused as to why I was now in Houston.
Fixing this took 45 minutes on hold to get a support agent and a frantic call to my wife so she could check the disused email address I used to sign up for Ticketmaster 20 years earlier and get the verification code they sent.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike digital tickets, but this is one of them. I used to go to dozens of concerts every year. Now it's such a hassle that I don't bother unless it's small venue that doesn't play these games.
We attended a once-in-a-lifetime show last fall (a performer who is aging and likely won't tour again) a two hour drive away. I wouldn't install the Ticketmaster app and played an old man "character" with the box office to get them to print my tickets and hold them at will call. I played the "we are driving in from out of town" card, etc, and they accommodated me.
I tried that with a closer venue a couple of months ago and got told, in no uncertain terms, "no app no admittance". I knuckled-under and loaded the app on my wife's iPhone (which she insists on keeping because Stockholm syndrome, I assume). I feel bad that I gave in (because it makes me part of the problem). I really wanted to see the show and I wasn't willing to forego it on principle. (Kinda embarrassing, actually.)
Not to justify it, but we've been fighting this kind of crap for a long time with credit cards and their bonehead "anti-fraud" checks. I'm often on the phone with my credit card issuers every time I travel somewhere because their moronic systems think "different country = fraud" and lock me out until I call them and perform their pointless rituals for them over the phone. Even if you tell them in advance that you're traveling (which I object to because my vacation plans are none of their business), they still often get it wrong and flag you.
Don't do that. Create a new account with the email address you have access to.
Apps require you to sign in again all the time, and send a verification code to your e-mail to do so. Changing locations is, yes, a reason to require sign in.
Sorry, but that one's on you.
Because in the context of signing in, its role is that of a user ID.
Ticketmaster spams that address constantly. It's a valid email address, to be sure, but they've trained me over the years never to look at it. They certainly didn't do any multi-factor authentication when I bought the tickets, only when I was preparing to use them (despite having accessed them on that very device two days earlier).
I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.
Here you go; now you have: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/265843090383...
I believe their reasoning is much the same. They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.
Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable. There are other methods. Especially if you're only issuing paper tickets as an alternative, e.g. yes we will sell you a paper version, but understand that it is absolutely non-transferable and non-refundable.
Some people might not want to bring a phone to these types of events and venues, which I can completely understand, neither do I, but I can live with it. The thing that bugs me is the lack of an alternative, which isn't really that expensive and which most won't even use. Because to some, the app really don't provide value and in those cases they solely exists for the benefit of one company. If you're paying the price of season passes to pretty much anything these days, I think you're entitled to some small level of personalized service and customization.
That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc.
They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?
Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition...
[1] https://stadiumtechreport.com/feature/intuit-dome-leaning-on...
This seems to be an area where people will always find loopholes. Should this be a race-to-the-bottom in an attempt to make the most foolproof system possible, or do we at some point accept that maybe there's never going to be a perfect way to do this?
>And IDing every person can be a mission on itself.
I've worked the door at venues of various sizes, so it's not like I suggested this from ignorance. What we're talking about doesn't need to be "every person", just a specific set of ticketholders.
>Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.
I know I'm just me, speaking for me, and am a sample size of 1 that doesn't look like the general population in this regard, but there's no "with or without my consent" if I decide to opt out of going to games entirely. It'll be a cold day in hell before I give someone my biometrics just so I can watch someone try and hit a ball.
You just need good organisation, plenty of security stations, and an atmosphere that rewards people who arrive early - checking a stadium's worth of IDs over the course of 2-3 hours rather than over the course of 20 minutes.
What you can't do is charge $20 for a glass of beer then expect people to arrive 2-3 hours before the game starts.
>Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state.
Pretty sure, given the comments in this very thread, that HN collectively understands there's more surveillance happening on your phone than with another person making sure the name on your ID matches the name on your ticket, or that your badge photo matches your face.
Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.
This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.
They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
Very common.
Band X is playing at Stadium Y. Promoter Z buys 10,000 commercials on the local radio station, paid in part with cash and in part with tickets that are given to radio station sales department, which gives them to the clients; and the station's promotions department, which gives them to contest winners.
Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
Disney World had this trouble with their "Florida Residents Pass" - which was a lower cost annual pass just for Florida Residents. So they introduced face scanning technology to stop that. Other people would swap multi=park and multi-day passes to friends. So they introduced fingerprint scanning to stop that.
This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.
It’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.
Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?
This logic justifies buying any other unrelated product as a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets. Does this mean that the Dodgers should be able to make "owning a car" also a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets? After all, if you can afford season tickets, you should be able to afford a car payment. Maybe they should only let people in who own rolexes because, hey, a season ticket holder should be able to afford a nice watch, too.
I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition. There's probably an example that's not immediately coming to mind, but I don't think it was common or justified.
Notes:
Then you must not have been around pre-smartphone? Those of us who were will remember having to buy either banknotes or checks. Later, some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy. If you weren't willing to buy any of those things there was little chance of a deal taking place. Showing up with your goat to offer in exchange would get you laughed out of the room, even though there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Realistically, the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment if that is what's on the table, but, as I am sure you can imagine, it isn't worth the effort for those who have the luxury of choice. Where technology makes a seller's life simpler, they will demand it. Why wouldn't they?
Also, credit cards are free to get and checks cost a few pennies.
Not remotely comparable to being forced to buy a phone to get to a game.
Plenty of people can't even get bank accounts.
It's absolutely comparable lock-in.
If my bank gave me a free smartphone, I might be OK with using it for commerce. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know if I have a strong opinion on that one.
Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.
But it fits with the general trend of MLB being openly hostile to their fans for a while now.
It’s hard to argue that having to manage a smartphone and its ever-changing apps and UI flows for purchasing and handling tickets, is simpler than buying a paper ticket with paper money. Is it really better?
Smartphones, appification, and self-service is usually a downgrade from immediately preceding solutions for everyone except young folks who are money-poor and time-rich, so think nothing of wasting the latter. But this state flips for most around the time they start their career, or at the latest when they start families.
The guy might not be sufficiently disabled to qualify - but for example if you have a blind person without a smartphone, you can’t tell them they’re out of luck - because you can clearly reasonably accommodate them without causing “undue financial hardship” by giving them tickets at will-call.
If they have already moved away from paper tickets for everyone else, now there is financial hardship, not to mention the loss to the team's economic position from scalping. Also smartphones have supported usage by the blind for years, particularly on iOS.
(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)
But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.
Regardless, maybe there’s a path to legislation forbidding smartphone requirements for huge monopoly businesses like national professional sports leagues. I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
What is your reasoning for that sentiment? (I don't disagree)
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.
If you have money for a tea or coffee, you have money to send to me. Just because someone may have the means to buy something doesn't mean they they should be excluded from participating in cultural events for not purchasing and maintaining that particular thing. (Citizens often times over subsidize the stadiums in which the team is based in)
I think it's the golden state warriors that forces you to give them your biometrics to enter the stadium.
It is completely unreasonable, but for a different reason. This is not technology A (paper ticket) vs tecnhology B (phone).
It is about open vs. proprietary. Paper is paper, it does not forcefully tie the user to anything. A phone is a requirement to be forced to do business with one of only two megacorporations, for something completely unrelated. He wants to buy a game ticket, not a phone.
Imagine you want to buy a sandwich but are told you must first buy an earring, completely unrelated and not something you want.
He's 81 and that's your first thought? This dude was in his twenties before long distance telephone calling via phone numbers was commonplace. That was the new technology he learned as a young adult man.
Another comment suggested grandfathering in customers like this. Sure, that's one idea. But generally, don't punish the masses because of the crimes of the few.
I'm certain VIPs don't scan their phones when they come to the game. This man is nothing short of a VIP.
As long as the technologies you move to are equally freedom- and privacy-respecting. If I have to use a non-free spyware app to buy your tickets I'm not buying. Now, if you let me pay for and download a PKPASS that I can use on my fully-libre GrapheneOS smartphone then sure.
Not a difficult process, blocks scalping, and is unwelcoming enough that it'll probably only attract the people who can't or don't want to use smart phones.
They already had a ticketing flow they invested money into altering it. They could've put in the absolute minimal effort to keep some kind of flow for non-smartphone users.
This doesn't track to me. I can send someone else my QR code to use without actually transferring the tickets to them unless they're checking ID, and if they're checking ID then it doesn't matter whether the tickets are paper or digital.
I can't really see a way that digital tickets prevent something paper ones don't.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
That happens way less often than you'd think. I can still ride a horse on the road, I can still heat/cook with wood, I can still call customer support on a landline, I can still use email over landline. There are tons of things that were superseded decades ago that we still support.
It's certainly their choice to make (unless someone can make an ADA complaint or some kind of age discrimination case) but it seems like a shitty thing to do. If he can't use a computer or cellphone, they're clearly willing to _sell_ him tickets non-digitally like at a ticketing counter. Throw a cheap printer behind that counter and have the employee print them off. With the amount this guy is spending for tickets he'd probably buy the printer for them.
Perhaps. But in this case, they've moved to something worse. Digital tickets have their benefits, but paper tickets are still superior because they don't tie you into big tech relationships and don't require supporting infrastructure to work.
Phones, on the other hand, can be charged. And if they're smashed, you can just log into your account on a friend's phone if you haven't replaced yours yet. If you can't even do that, you can go to the ticket window and they can look up your account information and verify your ticket.
It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.
Many apps ask for permission to use your GPS position and other sensor data, even though they don't need it. Most non-technical people don't understand what that means and will just allow it.
What on earth are you talking about? I've installed hundreds of apps in my life and literally never seen that.
I saw your other comment, and that was your fault for not having access to your own e-mail account. Asking you to sign in with a verification code isn't blocking your ticket with "no recourse".
Not to mention, you can usually just go to the ticket office and they can look up your ticket if your app isn't working. Obviously they don't advertise this because they don't have enough people to handle if everybody did that. But they're not trying to lock you out from your own ticket.
Perhaps somewhere deep in the terms of service that approximately zero customers have ever read, it says "Use of this ticket is contingent upon having immediate access to the email address associated with your account." Regardless, it seems unreasonable for them to expect that every user will have connectivity. If that is a requirement, they should state it more clearly.
That's the point, though - we shouldn't need always-on, 24/7-access to email for everything always and forever. You're just victim-blaming at this point.
>Sorry but you've made that up. That's not a thing.
I have a very fun and exciting story about being locked out of my Google Wallet account for that very thing while on vacation. My primary Google account is still banned from performing any monetary transactions as a result, 10+ years later.
We're talking about an 81 year-old who has never had a smartphone before and you're starting the sentence with "if"? And that's just that app, not the phone itself or anything else that someone brand new to, and ignorant towards, this ecosystem is going to encounter and not know what to do with.
What about the other apps? What about the phone itself?
If you don't want other apps, don't install other apps.
Locations from flip phones have to be triangulated. Smartphones track more precise locations and a lot more than just location data.
This dude has previously paid hundreds of dollars per year because he wanted custom-printed tickets. He can pay a hundred for a cheapo Android to use exclusively for tickets and not give up any privacy at all, if he's more paranoid about tracking than the other 99+% of the population who uses smartphones just fine.
What if I do own a smartphone, but it runs neither Android nor iOS, it runs GNU/Linux? Do you consider that a previous technology, too? I'm pretty sure they provide no app for me.
How is this better?
Right, but he is wanting to choose the season pass over the smartphone. If he buys a smartphone then he won't have the money for a season pass anymore. It turns out you only get to spend x units of currency once.
No, this has not changed for the entire time physical tickets haxe existed. What has changed is the level of greed practiced by that industry.
This misses the point.
The question is: why would a smartphone be required, to watch a local game?
It's not. You can still buy physical tickets in person to watch a local game.
This is a requirement specifically for a season pass. If you don't want a season pass, you can still buy individual tickets.
It is required to satisfy the desires of a vendor wanting to sell something. They make a smartphone a part of satisfying their desires because it makes their life a whole lot simpler. Same reason they won't give you season tickets in exchange for 12,000 bushels of wheat. They could, but why would they? If you don't want to play ball, so to speak, they are happy to sell their product to someone else who will.
Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?
The problem is, in the end it leads to a society where you NEED a smartphone to enjoy basic human existence - and yes, access to cultural and sports events is a fundamental part of being a human.
That in turn almost always means: your smartphone must be either Apple or a blessed Google device. And that in turn means: no rooting (because most apps employ anti-root SDKs these days), no cheap AOSP phones, no AOSP forks like Graphene OS. And that is, frankly, dystopian when your existence as a human being depends on one of two far too rich American mega corporations. Oh and it needs to be a recent model too, because app developers just love to go the easy route and only support recent devices on recent OS versions.
And that's before we get into account bans (which particularly Google is infamous for), international sanctions like the one against the ICC justices, or pervasive 24/7 surveillance by advertising SDKs or operating systems themselves.
I've gone entire years at work where no one ever mentions baseball or MLB. It is a dead sport. The NBA? Sure. NFL? It's practically an official US holiday. So if they want to chase off an octogenarian fan who will buy their season tickets because they demand he get a smart phone that he doesn't want to learn to use and wouldn't use anyway... why not? They've signed their own death certificate with that. This is firmly in "Please drink a verification can" territory, and I have no idea why anyone would be apologizing for them.