United Airlines Made Its App Stop Working On My Phone, And What This Says About How Broken The Mobile Tech Space Is

from the garbage-in-garbage-out? dept

This post isn't really about United Airlines, but let's start there because it's still due plenty of criticism.

One day my phone updated the United App. I forget if I had trusted it to auto-update, or if I'd manually accepted the update (which I usually do only after reviewing what's been changed in the new version), but in any case, suddenly I found that it wasn't working. I waited a few days to see if it was a transient problem, but it still wouldn't work. So I decided to uninstall and reinstall, and that's where I ran into a wall: it wouldn't download, because Google Play said the new version wasn't compatible with my phone.

Wait, what? It used to run just fine. So I tweeted at United, which first responded in a surprisingly condescending and unhelpful way.

Sometime later I tweeted again, and this time the rep at least took the inquiry seriously. Apparently United had made the affirmative choice to stop supporting my Android version. And apparently it made this decision without actually telling anyone (like, any of their customers still running that version, who might not have updated if they knew they would have to BUY A NEW PHONE if they wanted to keep running it).

Ranting about this on Twitter then led to an interesting argument about what is actually wrong with this situation.

But let's not let United off the hook too soon. First, even if United were justified in ceasing to support an Android 4.x capable app, it should have clearly communicated this to the customers with 4.x phones. Perhaps we could have refused the update, but even if not, at least we would have known what happened and not wasted time troubleshooting. Plus we would have had some idea of how much United valued our business...

Second, one of the points raised in United's defense is that it is expensive to have to support older versions of software. True, but if United wants to pursue the business strategy of driving its customers to its app as a way of managing that relationship, then it will need to figure out how to budget for maintaining that relationship with all of its customers, or at least those whose business it wants to keep. If providing support for older phones is too expensive, then it should reconsider the business decision of driving everyone to the app in the first place. It shouldn't make customers subsidize this business decision by forcing them to invest in new equipment.

And then there was the third and most troubling point raised in United's defense, which is that Android 4.x is a ticking time bomb of hackable horror, and that any device still running it should be cast out of our lives as soon as possible. According to this argument, for United to continue to allow people to use their app on a 4.x Android device would be akin to malpractice, and possibly not even be allowed per their payment provider agreements.

At this point we'll stop talking to United, because the problem is no longer about them. Let's assume that the security researchers making this argument are right about the vulnerability of 4.x and its lack of support.

The reality is, THE PHONES STILL WORK. They dial calls. They surf the web. They show movies. Display ebooks. Give directions. Hold information. Sure, at some point the hardware will fail. But for those wrapped in good cases that have managed to avoid plunging into the bath, there's no reason they couldn't continue to chug on for years. Maybe even decades. In fact, the first thing to go may be the battery – although, thanks to them often not being removable, this failure would doom the rest of the device to becoming e-waste. But why should it be doomed to becoming e-waste a moment before it actually becomes an unusable thing? Today these phones are still usable, and people use them, because it is simply not viable for most people to spend several hundred dollars every few years to get a new one.

And yet, in this mobile ecosystem, they'll need to. Not only to keep running the software they depend on, but to be able to use the devices safely. The mere ability to function no longer is enough to delineate a working device from a non-working one. The difference between a working device and a piece of trash is what the OS manufacturer deems it. Because when it says it's done maintaining the OS, then the only proper place for a phone that runs it is a landfill.

It is neither economically nor environmentally sustainable for mobile phones to have such artificially short lifespans. "Your phone was released in 2013!" someone told me, as if I'd somehow excavated it from some ancient ruin and turned it on. It's a perfectly modern device (in fact, this particular phone in my possession came into use far more recently than 2013), still holds a reasonable charge, and is perfectly usable for all the things I use it for (well, except the United app...). So what do you mean that I can't use it? Or that any of the other millions if not billions of people in the world running Android 4.x phones can't use them?

There are lots of fingers to point in this unacceptable state of affairs. At app makers who refuse to support older OSes. At app makers who make us use apps at all, instead of mobile web applications, since one of the whole points of the Web in the first place was to make sure that information sharing would not be device- or OS-dependent. At carriers who bake the OS into their phones in such a way that we become dependent on them to allow us OS updates. At the OS manufacturers who release these systems into the wild with no intention of supporting them beyond just a few years. And to various legal regimes (I'm looking at you, copyright law…) that prevent third parties from stepping in to provide the support the OEM providers refuse to anymore. Obviously there are some tricky issues with having a maintenance aftermarket given concerns with authentication, etc., but we aren't even trying to solve them. We aren't doing anything at all, except damning the public to either throw good money after bad for new devices that will suffer the same premature fate, or to continue to walk around with insecure garbage in their pockets. And neither is ok.

Filed Under: backward compatibility, mobile apps, transparency
Companies: united

Terrible Ruling Allows Untied To Keep Its Domain But Not Its Soul

from the pointless-generosity dept

Let's jump back in the wayback machine for a moment and discuss Untied, your primary source for customer and employee complaints about United Airlines. When we last wrote about the site in 2012, we first mentioned that Untied.com has been a thing since 1997 before detailing the lawsuit United Airlines filed in Canada after it found that Untied.com had redesigned its parody site to look more like United.com.

Untied, if you are not aware, is a site that started with a single person's complaint about United Airlines customer service before morphing into an aggregator of such complaints from both customers and internal airline staff and former staff. If you want a bible to be written on what United has done wrong in the realm of customer service, you need not worry because Untied.com is that bible. Had this suit been filed in America, it would face a mountain of caselaw suggesting that so-called "sucks sites" are well within the boundaries of protected nominative fair use. It's worth mentioning that Untied doesn't actively attempt to mislead visitors to the site into thinking it's affiliated with the airline. In fact, visitors are shown a popup upon visiting that alerts them to Untied's status as a parody site. Even a cursory glance at the site's contents would confirm that status, as the entire site is dedicated to taking a metaphorical dump on United Airlines' reputation.

Despite the site having existed for so long, and despite the fact that the Streisand Effect exists, United Airlines filed its lawsuit, bringing all manner of attention to Untied that it otherwise would not have had, even as the airline is and has been maligned in nearly every corner of the internet for its laughable attempts at customer service. In its filing, United Airlines insisted that Untied had infringed its trademark rights and copyright rights with the site. It requested an injunction against the site before suggesting that just to make sure the injunction was clear, maybe the court ought to just hand the site over to United Airlines to boot.

"If the Court finds in favour of United Airlines and determines that an injunction should issue, the injunction needs to be clearly understood by the parties, and in particular the Defendant. As such, the Court may need to consider ordering the Defendant to transfer ownership of the domain name and other internet presences to ensure the injunction is clear and will be respected."

Well, the court has ruled on the injunction. The good news is that the court declined to hand over the Untied.com domain to the airline. The bad news is that court does rule that the site is infringing both United's copyright and trademark rights and instead said Untied can only keep its name if it ceases to be Untied at all.

The Plaintiff is entitled to an injunction restraining the Defendant’s use of the United Marks and the copyrighted works. The Court retains jurisdiction over this matter to provide effective relief against the Defendant. The Defendant may retain the use of the domain name www.untied.com – however, this must not be in association with the same services as provided by the Plaintiff.

As the folks who run Untied explain, the entire argument that United Airlines made in this action is that it too provides consumer feedback and complaint services for its own business, which is why it declared the public would be confused by the site. Effectively, this ruling allows Untied to keep its domain, but only if it ceases to be Untied.

Keeping in mind the position argued by United, that one of its "services" is dealing with passenger complaints, this would mean that the injunction would prevent Untied.com from existing as a site hosting passenger complaints against United. I feel that I have no choice but to bring this decision to the Federal Court of Appeal. Even if the wheels of justice are stacked against me as a self-represented litigant, defending myself against a massive corporation with virtually unlimited resources, I don't want to throw in the towel in defeat.

It's nice to see someone want to fight this out, but the focus here also needs to be on what an absolutely atrocious ruling this is from the court. Parody is to be protected on matters of copyright, whereas trademark law is focused on real or potential customer confusion within the marketplace. Again, this suit was filed in Canada, so the exact American standard for fair use doesn't apply, but no serious examination of the Untied.com website would lead to the conclusion that confusion was any issue, only strengthening the stance that the parody status of the site ought to protect it from the copyright claim. To, in the face of all that, first rule otherwise and then make this meaningless concession only adds insult to injury. For United to spend half a decade doing battle with a site that echoes many others' disdain for United's customer service in the name of trying to censor that site makes zero sense from a purely business perspective.

Perhaps, rather than spending half a decade fighting a website about customer service complaints, United Airlines could have spent that time and money providing better customer service and not dragging paying passengers off their airplanes.

Filed Under: canada, complaints, customer complaints, sucks sites, trademark
Companies: united, united airlines, untied

United Airlines Sues Passenger Complaint Site Untied

from the really-now? dept

I had really thought that we'd reached the point where lawyers working for large, well-known companies recognize just how incredibly stupid it is to file lawsuits against websites that criticize them. Sure, a decade ago or so, it was common for big companies to go after so called "sucks sites" or "complaints sites," often alleging trademark infringement. But, at some point, many of them realized that (a) trademark complaints were a dead end since there was no confusion and (b) that these lawsuits only drew a lot more attention to the sites in question. Apparently, however, there are still some throwback lawyers working for United Continental, and they've decided to go after a popular passenger complaints site that goes by the creative domain Untied.com.

Untied has been around for fifteen years -- so you'd think United would be used to it. However, apparently they got pissed off that Untied redesigned its site to look something like United's current design. The top image is the Untied complaint site as it looked recently (it has since added some more features to make it clear that it's not actually United's site). The bottom image is United's site:

There are obvious similarities. The guy behind Untied, Jeremy Cooperstock, insists that this makes sense since his site is a form of parody. While the likelihood of confusion argument is certainly stronger here (currently when you visit the website, you have to agree to a popup that warns you the site is not United's), I still wonder how reasonable the lawsuit is. Cooperstock insists that it's a SLAPP suit, though others think United may have a legit claim.

No matter where this falls legally, however, I can't see how this could possibly make sense from a business standpoint. The end result -- win or lose -- is going to be that a lot more people become aware of Untied, and are likely to think of United as being a big bully against the small guy helping passengers who had bad experiences with the airline. Of course, some of the details may be in the actual filing, which doesn't seem to be public yet. The lawsuit was filed in Canada, and the docket page doesn't have the actual filing yet. Oddly, however, it does claim that the case is about patent infringement. I'm going to assume that's a data entry error somewhere, however...

Filed Under: complaints sites, streisand effect, sucks sites, trademark, untied
Companies: united