“Everybody worth transacting with” is more accurate. Makes sense for business, but a shame when government (or an essential business that should be a government utility) does it.

Well as software engineers there’s not as much we can do for people who don’t have computing devices, but it’s still important that information be accessible without them.

Well, people can have laptops, or "unsupported" phones (i.e. non-iPhone/Android).

Locking all sorts of basic stuff to two for-profit closed platforms sounds rather non-ideal to me. It's also quite a shift from stuff being web-based, where in principle you or I could sit down and write a compatible browser and/or port an existing browser (some work, but very doable).

It's not all that different from locking everything to Windows and/or Internet Explorer like it was 20 years ago, except worse because it's so much more pervasive now. The old "mandatory Microsoft tax" got replaced with a "mandatory Google/Apple tax". Any startup has basically zero chance of entering the market.

These were browser benchmarks not app benchmarks.

Worldwide, smart phone penetration is at 70%. I don’t know if that number is just considering adults.

Statistics I saw for the US is 97% of adults have smart phones

Would you accept an engineering solution with 1 nine of reliability?

So do you have an engineering solution that will get bits over the internet to people who don’t have a phone or computer?

Probably a well supported postal service as public infrastructure!

Yes, you can make an app or sell a widget without supporting transactions via mail, but many companies providing critical services are starting to require cellphones to participate.

Or you could just have a program where you tax cell phone and home phone bills to subsidize giving phones to people who can’t afford one….

https://www.fcc.gov/general/lifeline-program-low-income-cons...

This use to be limited to land line phones. But now is expanded to cell phones

It’s much cheaper than physical infrastructure.

But do you expect Amazon to except postal mail and work like the Sears Catalog?

TIL

This is great to see. Yes, assuming it is implemented well this is better than the sears catalog.

For landlines it’s been around since 1985. For cellphones since 2005.

My country has a large religious demographic with dumbphones. I'm glad to have them, as I have a smartphone but I'm not about to install an app for banking, an app for charging the car, an app for the supermarket, etc etc.