Apps Getting Worse

Surely there must be a point where the product functions as intended and the peak number of users like it like that. Instead we carry on. Everyone has to keep proving their 'value' right? Always changing, always growing. Everything eventually gets iterated to death. Any piece of software or design, no matter how much you might like it will eventually be replaced. It's as true of software as it is of car shapes or curtain patterns.

Just imagine being the CEO of Evernote (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) announcing to the world that they are feature complete. It's a finished product and they are laying off everyone except customer support and marketing. They would be considered insane despite that decision delivering the best profits and customer experience.

In that...?

Locations start at 1 and increase from there. Page numbers are a disaster. In the book I discuss above, page numbers start at 1 alongside "page 1" of the book. There is plenty of material earlier than that, which doesn't have page numbers. It only has location numbers.

The pages of a physical book are larger than a phone screen. So several pages worth of the ebook all have the same page number, which prevents you from jumping to later pages by using the page numbering.

Jumping restrictions are even added in where they aren't needed -- in some books, jumping to location numbers doesn't work. Instead, you jump to a location that is determined by the app as being "near" the location you specified. This has the effect of preventing you from getting all of a particular passage on the screen at the same time, which I want for screenshots.

So no, there's no improvement to numbering going on, just a steady removal of functionality that used to work.

It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used the phrase in its television advertising.

Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better. When it only sometimes is.

You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included" because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and somehow we thought it was OK.

There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart. Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization.

In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will last the rest of our lives.

But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things like household basics.