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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#41

Post by nebula8804 »

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #6

This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource. "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers. The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling. Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months. My older relatives have…

I keep trying to adopt this workflow and it ends in disaster. For example: Yesterday I installed a clean copy of the latest release of Ubuntu. Lets ignore the numerous annoyances that are unpolished such as the mouse tracking or the OS filled with apps that are worse than its Windows/Mac counterparts. No one seems to want to produce a cohesive OS + apps anyway.

The one thing that is absolutely unforgivable is an app that you expect to trust instead ends up failing you.

My example: After installing I needed to compress a folder of important code and pictures. Just use Archiver right? Well I compressed the folder into a zip file. Something seemed strange. Ubuntu's file manager was reporting 0 bytes for the file after compressing. Strange, so I copied it to another folder. OK 8.5MB. Maybe the file manager was just not able to automatically refresh. The file size seemed small given the input was 300MB. Me being a little worried after seeing this and having been burned in the past, I opened the file and attempted to decompress. First, I was able to see the files so I could have stopped there thinking the file is fine but I continued and clicked extract. It failed. Turns out the file was corrupted.

Imagine if I had not done this sanity check and 6 months later I go to uncompress and the archive is corrupted. That is a potential anxiety attack.

This is not a joke, if you cannot ever trust the damn system to do basic things, you will constantly feel like you are walking on thin ice. Its 2021 how is this still an issue? When you go to complain you are treated with an uncaring groups or more likely an actively hostile group of people.

I have been going back and forth from Linux(various distros) for 15 years now. Not once have I ever felt that I could fully trust my system. The people who develop this stuff don't seem to care about basic quality. If it works for them, ship it. I don't know how to solve this problem without a financial incentive. There are no consequences to shipping regressions and thus even though the software is free as in freedom the incentives are not really aligned with many users.

Maybe I need to sit down and read through as much of the code of the OS and associated apps as possible and set specific version that I "FREEZE" on that are good known versions. But then I will not be able to get any help when something does break since im on old versions and typically googling issues returns fixes for the latest version...so now I would be left with fixing the code myself.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#42

Post by nirvdrum »

gpsx wrote: post #21

I remember hearing a talk by Bill Gates a long time ago where he said the biggest competitor for Word was previous versions of the program. That is no longer true with forced updates. Granted, there are many reasons why it is not practical these days for old versions to be a competitor, but that would be a good message to companies that some of their new "innovations" may not have been a good idea.

I think this is one of the biggest issues with SaaS. I appreciate that a stable revenue source is necessary for ongoing development, but UX decisions are much harder to evaluate. If I purchase a desktop application and opt not to upgrade, that's useful data to have. If you jam a UX update down my throat and I don't cancel my subscription, that doesn't mean you made a fantastic UX decision. It generally means the cost of changing is too expensive or, more likely, you've locked my data up in a format not easily exportable.

I think it'd be nice if our tooling made it easier to support multiple "versions" of a deployed application. As it stands, it's far too expensive and error-prone to let customers opt into UI upgrades. As a product consumer, I can't stand continuous deployment. It just means my workflow can break at any time.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#43

Post by brentis »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…

Spotify is atrocious. Feel bad for all you younger folks having to deal with repetitive auto tune crap injected into any station.

Can't say much positive about Pandora or Tidal or..

Miss old Slacker days and prior.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#44

Post by mattmanser »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…

One of the frustrating things about their mobile app too is that they don't keep the controls on screen when it's playing.

I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got so far from the core product experience that they actually hide the controls of a music player.

I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to click to see the 'skip' control.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#45

Post by sixothree »

smallerfish wrote: post #33

Then there are apps that are just bad, but shouldn't be. Take HBO Max (please, take it). Once you're actually playing media, it basically works fine, but the sheer number of bugs and brain-dead user flows is astonishing. It's so awful that user engagement numbers must be horrendous. How does a major strategic play like this go so bad for so long? The guy they brought in to build & run it (Tony Goncalves) must be grea…

I’ll file YouTube TV in that list. I have no idea what they are thinking. All I know is Google is crap at making software you can use.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#46

Post by flenserboy »

WhatIsDukkha wrote: post #6

This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource. "outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers. The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling. Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months. My older relatives have…

Here is where OSS could really shine - make clones of old programs and give them modern features while keeping the old-school, actually-working interfaces. Rather than cloning the current (or near-current) iteration of Office, make a file-compatible version that's a snap to use and avoids as much interface fluff as possible. Applications are for work, and should facilitate work.

Imagine a Word 5-equivalent WP (and no, AbiWord is nowhere near that), a WP 5.1 clone, a XyWrite that knows OpenType, a dBase-style interface (definitely not a clone) for a modern, free database system. Those older programs simply worked, had command systems that could be explored and learned (shoot, before the Ribbon even Office could be sussed out through experimentation), and were about work. As much as I appreciate what I can do, capability-wise, with modern systems, the people who design them don't seem to be the people who use them.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#47

Post by egypturnash »

Evernote. Evernote used to be a crucial component of my life. Quietly synced my notes between my computer and my phone. Let me collaborate with my husband on a few things.

Then they rewrote it from the ground up as a sluggish piece of Electron crap. Added a bunch of new stuff that sure looks pretty but gets in the way of the core function of “taking out your phone and scribbling down an idea before it vanishes”. I could roll back to the not-shitty version on my Mac but every time I pull out my phone it takes multiple seconds to load, then multiple seconds to leave the “Home” screen to search through my notes, or for the editor to be ready to use to write a new note.

I still haven’t found a replacement and I really need to. (Requirements, before you suggest your favorite note app: needs Mac, Windows, iOS, Android clients; must not be a goddamn web view crammed awkwardly into an app; needs to let me access local copies of my notes when the internet is down; needs to let me share some notes with my husband. “Actually having a nice UI for handling sync conflicts” would be nice too, EN always did the bare minimum of “now you have two copies with a note about sync conflicts on one of them”.) Right now I am kind of thinking of spending a week trying to press Scrivener plus an external sync service (Dropbox, etc) into service, since their clients are all Very Native, and one of the things we actually use EN for is a writing project...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#48

Post by egypturnash »

eplanit wrote: post #4

One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me oth…

God this is every media app, try organizing your e-books in a pleasing fashion someday. You just can’t.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#49

Post by malwarebytess »

wonnage wrote: post #39
Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…

Spotify has steadily gotten worse over the years. I remember a long time ago they had a cool feature where you could long press on a song to preview it. There was also a decently organized library tab, not as advanced as itunes but passable. All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...

But it increases three and a half key metrics, including engagement!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #29

The worst offender recently in my opinion is Spotify on desktop. It used to be that when you clicked on an artists page you would see all the music tracks listed. Now it's all buried deep in and you have to search through the individual albums. Even the list of albums itself is not shown on the main artist page, you have to click "See Discography" first. The "Home" page is even worse. Where is my discover weekly play…

Spotify on Android degraded in the same way. It's a garbage of an app nowadays.

I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."

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