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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#191

Post by grishka »

maficious wrote: post #185
grishka wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.

Exactly, but banks aren't a good example. Some people here mention feature plateaus and completeness of the app. Obvious question is, what should the employer then do? The software is complete, from now on there's only maintenance, which is relatively less work compared to building from scratch, so as a consequence I guess developers should be paid less then? Or like you said, fired? Obviously the manpower could be j…

What does a construction worker do when they complete a building?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#192

Post by pbronez »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #158
TeMPOraL wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you on the free tier? Free users can't even see individual songs anymore :(

I can’t figure it out on Premium either, but if it’s actually just removed for free listeners then maybe it’s a money thing. Perhaps hiding direct song access pushes people to listen to music with cheaper royalties or something.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#193

Post by rdiddly »

Engineers would tend to want to optimize a thing for efficiency at that thing's ostensible purpose. Which means there's good engineering (the result is efficient) and bad engineering, if everything is framed within that engineering mindset. But that's not the only mindset. An allegory: A traffic engineer wants to time the traffic lights for maximum traffic throughput. It's the "right answer." Just like a music search feature with a goal of straightforwardly finding shit is the right answer. But lo and behold, the mayor and/or the local merchants don't want people to just drive easily past their businesses, they want you to have a good look, and plenty of time to consider whether to go in and shop there. So the mayor has the engineer time the lights to create a longer delay, makes him do bad engineering, to try and herd mindless, hapless consumer-meat into the store. The design is still optimized though, it's just a different parameter being optimized.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#194

Post by PragmaticPulp »

MattGaiser wrote: post #124
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…

Developers get 1-2 years at a job before they fall behind in compensation. So my resume always needs to be fresh. I can’t be working with older technology because when it comes time to jump again, I won’t have the skills to do so. Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects. Devs have a lot of the same incentives product managers do.

That may contribute, but we saw the same pattern in devs who had been there for 5-10 years.

I also see the same pattern in "Ask HN" posts and many comments here from people venting about how they've started so many side projects but can never finish them. Starting new projects is fun. Shipping things can be hard and requires some tolerance for boredom.

A lot of people get into the field because they like to program and play with new programming things. Regardless of jobs or compensation, there's a strong pull toward doing new and different things. There's also a strong aversion to working on someone else's project.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#195

Post by jay_kyburz »

godelski wrote: post #177
sushisource wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don'…

I hope there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hinti…

Fashion.

Also, in my industry, if you're software is not visibly changing, people assume its dead and no longer supported, not going anywhere.

People want to feel like they are part of something that is going somewhere. Software is not a tool, its a journey into the future!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#196

Post by orhmeh09 »

WA wrote: post #25
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…

There are high quality apps, maybe more than ever. Maybe not on the Mac, but for iOS. In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.

I’m just curious because I’m not a heavy mobile app user. The only apps on my phone right now that I feel really good are free. I paid for many apps but most haven’t been updated in years and have a lot to improve. Where are the good apps?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#197

Post by RNCTX »

city41 wrote: post #164
sushisource wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don'…

I canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was simply impossible for a myriad of reasons. I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab, white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was rock solid . I couldn't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the tab open for weeks and it'd play…

Subplot: I doubt they care. Since spotify is designed to lose money it has little reason to care if customers cancel, it's only going to be concerned if investors lose interest.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#198

Post by pbronez »

bjustin wrote: post #145
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…

Sadly, the Apple Music app on macOS also has major issues. For example, I’ll open it and try to search, and the results view says “Showing results for ‘query’” followed by a bunch of unrelated songs and albums. Running the search again actually produces results. Apple Music on iOS has its own major issues, but at least search works the first time.

I tried Apple Music when I realized the HomePod Mini can’t play songs from Spotify. Try as I might, Apple Music just didn’t cut it for me. The biggest annoyance was the playlists and discovery features. It was MUCH harder to find a playlist/radio station for a particular mood.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#199

Post by [deleted] »

mikelward wrote: post #186
godelski wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hinti…

I think the clock moved to balance out icons on either side of the big center notch. Then next year they moved to a left-side holepunch notch, but didn't move it back. Or even offer the option. :(

[deleted]

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#200

Post by IshKebab »

> No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.”

What about the Nest PMs? That app hasn't changed at all in at least 3 years. Ok maybe it doesn't count if they've abandoned it.

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