Ryanair will no longer accept printed boarding passes ...

True but its another dark pattern. You can use a wallet app, but I don't see Ryanair advertising this approach and most users aren't computer savvy enough to know that

Instead they're pushing people towards the app so they can harvest and sell data from customers who already paid for their flights (at a handsome profit as well)

These arguments always go the same way; you get absolute die-hards in favour of maintaining the status quo using increasingly outlier examples to try and argue against something >90% of people do day in, day out with absolutely no issues whatsoever. The perennial (and perennially tiresome) cash v card/contactless one is the exact same. I'll never understand it.

A few years ago my phone was lost (or stolen…not sure) a few hours before I was due to fly back home. On this occasion I was travelling on my own so I didn't have the luxury of borrowing someone else's phone to get through the gates. Losing the phone was a horrible feeling, but at least I had a hard copy of the boarding pass. I can see myself bringing my old phone along as a spare next time I make a solo trip, because there's no way I can bring myself to rely on one device.

Well they probably do have a smartphone at this stage, its more the hassle of trying to get setup with the app and if something goes haywire

I could actually see it causing a lot of delays at the gate because staff will probably have to help people with getting their boarding pass up

They can apparently get it printed for free in the airport, but thats another queue and more hassle for something you could do easily at home

Oh it's 100% that

If Ryanair want more people using the app then that's fine, but they should sell it on its merits rather than forcing it to be the default option through enshitification of other options

I use the app because it's more convenient. I also print off boarding passes as a backup because I don't want to be holding up the queue if something goes wrong with my phone at the wrong moment

Please explain to me the improvement this brings for customers, because I'm not seeing one

People aren't actually required to celebrate when a business makes their service worse, the world isn't quite that dystopian yet

I love tech, and I work in tech and do some cool things in my spare time with tech, and if there's one thing I've learned in all that time, its that tech is incredibly fallible. Like the others who've said it, I'd still print out a version of my check-in also just to have a backup. What doesn't make sense here is what is 100% a process policy being introduced that limits an option with no technical reason for it. You need to scan a QR code to board the plane. It shouldn't matter if the code is on paper or a smartphone, the technological step is the same. It'd be like saying you can no longer fly if you wear sandals. Doesn't affect how the plane works at all and people are getting stopped for what's essentially a nonsense reason.

I'd be much more in favour if this was just a sustainability push "please save the trees! only use the app for boarding", hell I'd even applaud that, but flat out refusing something that would work if it was scanned is a bad policy in my mind

All because they won't accept printed out boarding passes. I can see how that makes sense