Apps Getting Worse

My wife asks me why this happens all the time. This is the way better answer that I usually give her: “money.” So I’ll be passing along this blog post to her.

There are many apps that get worse over the years. I literally don’t know how to use most apps these days and I don’t care to. On an app we use for work, I went irate that a button I used often mysteriously disappeared. A few months later, I was having a beer with one of the devs that works on it and it came up. He laughed and said that 40% of users had the same reaction I did. It was less than 50% so they shipped the change. :sigh:

There used to be an acceptable Scrabble app. No more.

>>As for iPhoto, I never used it much, but my eighty-something mother did, and took lots of great photos with the Sony RX100 I gave her when I gave up on pocket cams. She’s not geeky but has a Bachelor’s in the sciences and is really smart. At some point they broke iPhoto so she couldn’t figure out how to do anything, and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried to get her fixed up, but she doesn’t take pictures much any more. I miss them.

Literally the exact same thing happened with my mother and Google's own Picassa. It was fantastic application to easily manage your photos collection, until one day google just went...nah? The app itself still works, but a lot of the functionality is just broken, and without the google photos integration working anymore my mum lost the easy to use way of sharing the photos she takes. And the actual google photos interface is horrendous, I'm willing to bet that it's constantly being redesigned so that someone at google can justify a raise/promotion, not because there's any actual reason to keep redesigning the whole thing periodically, other than someone's career progression.

I think this is an incredibly good example of missing the forest for the trees. The PMs aren't like this because they're glory seeking idiots. They're like this because as far as most of them are concerned, it's their job to constantly tweak the product to achieve business goals (which are almost always "growth").

You can't just fix this by saying "ok let's promote PMs who are obstinate about not changing things" -- this will not align their behaviour with existing customers any better, bad things do still need to change. You'd need to adjust the business goals to be aligned with stability, and that's not something you can fix in a performance review. That's not even something you can fix at a company level.

It's just consumption-driven capitalism in action.

This article sounds rather ‘truthy’. On HN, you’re always getting to get some upvotes for saying “technology used to be so much better, amirite?! Bloody product managers ruining everything!”.

But it’s harder than that. Apps need to keep up to date with operating systems, technology changes, business changes.

Take The Economist mentioned. Maybe they noticed an uptick in cancellations, so the change was designed to stem that. They have data you don’t.

Similarly, iMovie. I agree, I preferred the old version. But my wife, who had never used it until last year, got on fine with the new one.