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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#91

Post by b3morales »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #52

> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile…

This is a fair criticism, but except for the inevitable bugs/regressions introduced by the rewrite, the devs aren't directly affecting the UX (making it worse). More importantly, they're not deliberately sabotaging functionality -- the article's Economist app example -- in their quest for the current hotness.

This is why "it's the PMs" is a refrain -- because the changes they make are very tangible in the end product.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#92

Post by ascar »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #50
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…

I use Spotify on Android regularly and can only somewhat relate to what you're describing: when I know the artist, but not the song title and I have to literally search through his discography. But even that is doable in one click (see discography) from the artist main page (tried it just now, up to date app on Android 10) and playing the song is just tapping on it.

For regular use the search button is right in the middle on the bottom of the app and right next to it is the button to my library

Your criticism seems a bit harsh to me.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#93

Post by bingidingi »

_fzslm wrote: post #23
j-pb wrote: post #9

The ecosystem has also lost its mojo, and Apple is the one that killed it. The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software. But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a…

how do you find Nova, and what kind of code do you write with it? i mostly work with Node.js and React, and really like VS Code for working with that tech... but Nova is looking very attractive to me as a Mac-focussed alternative.

personally I found Nova to be kind of old school interface-wise… it’s good, but I’ve grown too used to IDEs like Atom/VS/etc, which seem more minimal on the surface

Of course you can customize it and do whatever you want, but I found it hard to find a reason to switch outside of my affinity for the people at Panic (and I’ve got plenty of other ways to give them money).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#94

Post by noveltyaccount »

egypturnash wrote: post #47

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 co…

I think OneNote ticks all your requirement boxes.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#95

Post by oakfr »

Orou wrote: post #73
simonw wrote: post #18

I think another thing that affects this is staff churn. It's common for PMs and product designers to move company after about 3 years. Many of the apps I use have been around for more than a decade now. That means I've likely been using them for significantly longer than the people who are making design decisions about them! Changes that are "obviously bad" to me - based on my very specific patterns of using the app…

This is right on the money. Everyone wants to do new and interesting work on a product, which naturally means changing things even if it isn't really an improvement. No one is going to put "maintained system that wasn't broken" on their resume. One thing that has likely exacerbated this issue in recent years is "data-driven" product design. While I'm fanatical about evidence-based decision making, so many of these pr…

Engagement metrics apply well beyond ad companies. Basically any product used by many users interacting with a UI is eligible.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#96

Post by ddon »

egypturnash wrote: post #47

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 co…

Switched from Evernote to Joplin, pretty happy, and since it is open source, it evolves and gets better all the time.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#97

Post by wayneftw »

donatzsky wrote: post #76
kowlo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was wrong with VSCode?

That it's an Electron app, mostly.

That's the reason it's excellent IMO. I get nearly the same exact experience on every platform... including when you embed it's components within a web app which is very useful.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#98

Post by akomtu »

gambiting wrote: post #15

>>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…

That's the reason I disable auto updates for all apps on my phone. Only recently I had to update Uber because it refused to work otherwise and sure enough: the new version is a bloated slow pile of garbage.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#99

Post by bradlys »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #52

> It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted This mentality isn't unique to product managers. Mobile…

Blaming the engineers for wanting to follow trends is really passing the buck. Blame the industry (hiring managers, ctos, investors, etc) for not hiring people who don’t have the exact skill set that they’re looking for. To be competitive (aka get paid well) in today’s marketplace you need to have a skill set that is with whatever trends are most common.

I’m fortunate that the company I was hired at doesn’t care that I haven’t worked on Kotlin or React. But I was passed up by many companies because I didn’t have react experience - can’t help it if my last few jobs were all angular.

Many engineers are focusing on doing what will help them get the most compensation. And following industry trends is part of that.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#100

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I'm not particularly thrilled by "hybrid" apps, or cross-platform framework apps. Never have been (cross-platform frameworks have been around for decades, and hybrid apps have been around, almost as long as smartphones have).

Great sales pitch: "Fire all your expensive, experienced native developers, and hire cheap JavaScript programmers right out of bootcamps, that write everything on the server, so the native app is really just a WebView!".

"Write once, deploy everywhere." Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah...they said that about C. They they said it about Java. They said that about X11/Motif. They said that about Qt. They said that about React Native. Now, they are saying it about Web apps.

Don't get me wrong. There are some applications that I think hybrid or PWAs are the way to go. If someone asks me, and the use case they describe fits my vision for that, I will recommend they explore hybrid/PWA/WebP/Whatever. I recently pulled several native apps off the App Store, because I thought another developer had a better solution, using Ionic.

It's just that native will always give a richer user experience than any kind of abstracted framework. If delivering the best UX is important, we still need to go native (which is generally delivered via built-in frameworks, anyway).

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