Agreed. I lived somewhere that switched from a credit card reader on the machines, to an app.

The credit card reader was instant. You could just put in your laundry, swipe your card, and that was it. Instantly started.

They switched to an app by the same service company, and now there were a bunch more steps involved. Put in your laundry, find the app, open it, scroll through their “what’s new in laundry!” news that nobody cares about, click a bunch of buttons until you find the machine number that matches yours, go through the menus to pick washer settings, then pay there, and still need to push the start button on the machine itself.

So much worse, and also more error prone — I would regularly get errors when a machine disconnected from the internet.

Why people think it’s better, I have no idea. The only thing I can think is that credit card fees are cheaper on a $20 transaction compared to 20 $1 transactions

I guess the value to the user is a notification when the wash completes?

If I use a CC to pay in app, there’s still a fee. Is an IAP considered lower risk, so lower fee than a physical card at a terminal?

The cost for a vendor processing CCs is something like (iirc) 3% of purchase price + $0.10. The benefit to vendor of selling you credits (aside from the fact that you might not use them all), is that they only have to pay the $0.10 portion of the fee once for every, say, $20 worth of washes instead of paying the flat part of the fee every single wash.

intermediation. they get a chance to have their own laundry bucks currency. they get better tracking. they get to show you ads, and have marketing touch points with you every time you need to do laundry.

I’d certainly prefer to use an app rather than having to hunt for quarters. If the app didn’t exist, I’d probably have to go to a bank to get quarters or an ATM to withdraw cash and beg the closest convenience store to give me change.

Granted, there are probably better solutions that require neither quarters nor a mobile app, but between those two, the mobile app wins for me.

There is an in between. Our buildings laundry has a payment machine that takes credit cards and either gives you a credit card sized laundry card or recharges it. You tap the card to start that machine. You can also use the smart phone app, but I don’t think it’s used by many.

It works pretty well.

Parking meters are another thing that seems to be going the app route. I use one locally but when I travel it’s usually not the same network so its figure out how to do it.. (website, payment kiosk, another app…)

>when I travel it’s usually not the same network

Apps tend to be a pretty good solution for regular local users. They're less good when you're dealing with different apps/kiosks/etc., with different interfaces, and different ways of storing value in different cities.

'Parking meters are another thing that seems to be going the app route.'

Gone that way already in the UK, ironically in lots of places where there is very patchy or no mobile signal at all.

The problem is that it's not an either-or.

Adding app operation alongside coin operation would have been an improvement in useability. Replacing coins with apps is just making it suck in a different way.

From the consumer perspective, probably. But from a laundromat's perspective, even if only a fraction of users use coins, they still need to deal with coins.

Once you're below some use threshold, a lot of places would prefer to ditch cash entirely.

It reminds me of the cycle of enshittification: once you have a captive audience, you start bumping the profits at the cost of the user experience.

It looks like something similar is in effect here: instead of meeting the different customers where the customers alrady are, it's the company's preferred way or the highway.

It is an either or for some businesses. Coins in the USA are in a massive shortage the last few years. Change machines aren’t cheap and repairs can be costly. It makes financial sense to switch to these apps or people wouldn’t do it.

But then you have two problems: keeping the app going AND dealing with cash

Yeah, getting quarters is a real problem, especially when all of the banks in your area are only open during business hours and not on weekends. That said, I'd personally prefer quarters over an app, since quarters are much more fail-safe. The system that I'd prefer overall though would be some kind of prepaid account and an NFC card. UCLA had this system when I was a grad student there and it was really easy to use. You just tap your card on the reader by the door and select what machine to use. Everything ran smoothly.

Using the app is not the only problem. But the lack of freedom and privacy in obtaining the app.