University app accounts are weird

It is hard to convert aspects of real-life into software.

Self-driving cars are a good example of this. The cars convert real-life objects (e.g., pedestrians, falling snow, street signs) into sensor data, but the conversion process isn’t perfect. After conversion is complete, it actually ends up being kind of hard for the car to distinguish people from snowflakes from a stop sign. The cars end up being prone to silly errors like braking hard because they think snowflakes are people (or worse, not braking for the opposite reason).

I came across a low-stakes example of this recently: university app accounts. Their lists of apps look really fucking weird.

A lot of universities release apps. For example, let’s consider MIT. Its official app account has released many apps on the Apple App Store. Below is an incomplete list:

- MIT Mobile: This is the flagship app that tells students information like the bus schedule or dining hours. - MIT Voice App: This is an app that asks users to say certain words (e.g., “target”) and records them. I think this is for some sort of research project, but the description doesn't make it clear. - NICS Mobile: This one has no MIT branding at all, and seems to be some sort of an emergency response tool. I can’t tell if this is a prototype or if it is actually used by firefighters and such. - Private Kit: Another app without any MIT branding. This one lets you track your location history while maintaining privacy. The description is really vague about why anyone would ever want to do this, but from the reviews, it seems that this was meant to aid Covid contact tracing. - Tablet.2008x: This is an augmented reality app that walks you through the steps for disassembling a tablet. - SCL Go: Another augmented reality app that helps people travel using something called “Sidewalk AI.” - MIT Ori 2021 and MIT CPW 2024: Two apps with orientation activity schedules. I’m dying to know why an app was not used in other years. - OctoStudio: A really snazzy-looking app to teach kids to code.

On the App Store, all these apps are listed under MIT’s account chronologically, which is a really bizarre way to present them.

In real life, if I go to a college campus, I know I’m entering a small town with thousands of residents and tens of buildings. Real life makes it easy to grok that building A is a residential building where bulletin boards will have lots of flyers for upcoming social events, and building B is full of labs, where each bulletin board will have instructions for research study participants. The two buildings will look and feel very different.

The app account answers the question, what if there was a single bulletin board for the entire university? That bulletin board would have flyers for a dizzying array of activities. It would have some social activities for the students, some instructions for lab guinea pigs, and some thesis papers written by postdocs. The app account loses the detail that different parts of the university do different things, and simply presents all the apps under the “MIT” banner. It is weird and unintentionally hilarious.