Apps Getting Worse

Meanwhile in the growth-hacking section, they’ll raise an project proving that they could get 40% more users if they had a single specific button, if only these were not the users we betrayed in the first place.

Expect more with AI.

At some point Amazon introduced "real page numbers" for their ebooks. Those are supplemental numbers intended to synch up with the page numbering of physical books. You could display your "page number" instead of your location number.

Recently, the option to display your location number was removed in the Android application. So here's where things stand:

- Going from Kindle to phone, you open the book on the phone and go through an unnecessarily long sequence of button presses until you finally reach the "go to" command. This is already a significant step backwards in usability compared to the UI of the Kindle Keyboard from 2010. But once you're there, you can enter in your location number and jump to it.

- Going from phone to Kindle, you open the book on the Kindle and go through, yes, an unnecessarily long sequence of button presses. Once you finally reach the "go to" command, you are presented with the option to jump to a page number or a location number. But the page number option is grayed out, so you have to enter a location number. But the phone app won't display a location number -- it wants you to view your physical page number instead. As far as the phone is concerned, you shouldn't be allowed to view your location number even if you want to.

- The Kindle is similarly opinionated. It displays the option to view page numbers instead of location numbers. But, much like in the "go to" command, that option is grayed out. This is technically a step up from the phone app, where the option to view location numbers doesn't even exist. But it's not much of a step up.

- There is a workaround, for now, in that the phone app will display your location number in the "go to" command's popup dialogue. I assume someone is at work as we speak hunting this down so they can remove the information from the dialogue.

- Amazon's customer service people aren't familiar with their own products. They struggle to understand the concept of "I want to display location numbers in the phone app". One of them unilaterally disconnected from chat.

- make it less something you settle with longer-term and more something that's basically roughly the same axe but differs on a pretty short timeframe

- use the changes to probe what people care about to a greater / less extent

- take away as much that the average person doesn't care about enough to get really annoyed about (which is fine if it's cheaper/better for the consumer but often it's more about hiding the change in the blizzard of activity so you don't get it cheaper or notice the cuts that save the producer without passing it on).

In software the one that was eternally annoying everyone I worked with was WebEx - initially a product that was great in my firm but eventually became the reason no one could start meetings on time because you couldn't rely on it launching in a timely manner because there'd be some idiotic update. It carried on until we ditched it abruptly - great move PM :)

Anyway, it's annoying but at least it's not as bad as the other modern trend: wilfully messing things up for you, so they can charge you to have the non-messed up version back (eg airline seats being broken up on purpose for no good reason! Unless you pay a fee for them not to be a total pain!)