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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#311

Post by makeitdouble »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #194
MattGaiser wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Shipping products is boring when the products themselves are boring. That’s why people want to work at small companies who have a lot more stakes in each releases and pay close attention to what they build, how it reaches market and make it evolves after.

To throw another log in this rant bone fire, a few decades ago software was seen as harder and more expensive, and while there was some frivolous and/or stupid apps, big enough development projects were usually bound to some purpose.

Our industry in its current form is more open to build meaningless things and trash after a while. I knew devs who were specialized in home page redesigns, and they viewed it as facelifts to show the client company is still alive. It has a business purpose, but in the grand scheme of things the only person that really enjoyed the project was the guy using it to learn vue.js.

Or a team porting an app from Objective-C to React native, not because they think it’s shiny but because hiring is hard/expensive and/or the business wants to have one size fits all apps for iOs and android.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#312

Post by willhinsa »

g_p wrote: post #247
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 do wonder if to some extent the inherently subjective nature of UX/UI design is what keeps it forever going? Designers want to stay employed and not just become a "bring in one-time at the start" contractor, so they justify changes through continual enhancement or similar, assuming the current solution may be one of a few local optima rather than the global optimum. Lacking objective numerical comparison, perhaps d…

There are objective measurements that can be done, but they’re difficult/expensive to do effectively.

Like, “How many interactions/seconds does it take our users to find X?”

It’s difficult because you have to know what “X” a user was looking for, which requires some varying degree of asking lots of users and reading those responses to be accurate.

Measuring “engagement” is far easier to orchestrate practically and organizationally, even though it produces awful software.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#313

Post by emodendroket »

grishka wrote: post #191
maficious wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#314

Post by SilverRed »

overgard wrote: post #268
gherkinnn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron has killed it. Fast browsers have killed it. Saas killed it. There are many problems with Apple’s stores, but I don’t see how this is one.

Apple seems to have driven the cost of all (mobile) software to 99c or free, roughly. How can anyone really make any money just making something solid and usable without turning it into a "service" or something at that price? And I as a user don't want any of that stuff because I don't want a service to lock me in, I want to pay up front for something good and leave it at that.

Pro/power user apps still cost a bit. Apps like Procreate and Luma sell for >$10 and seem to have great sales. I guess the issue comes when you have sold your app to almost everyone who is willing to buy it and then you are unable to make any more sales which forces you to either go to subscription model or to create a new listing "Procreate 2" to charge everyone again. Both of these options make people pretty upset though.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#315

Post by actually_a_dog »

grishka wrote: post #232
jagged-chisel wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the point is that all those services have existed for Quite Some Time, don’t need consumer-facing changes, and any additional consumer-facing software changes are bunk.

Yes. And they somehow existed even before computers were invented. Computers sure did help streamline the processes tho.

Computers allowed the development of ACH, debit cards, and ATMs. They gave us the ability to bank by phone, and by web. But, I think your general point, sans snark, is correct in that I can’t think of any significant, novel banking service that’s been introduced since about the 1970s. (I count ACH as novel, because it enables you to do things you couldn’t do before. Banking at home in your pajamas isn’t any different than waiting until Monday morning and physically going to the bank.)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#316

Post by SilverRed »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #196
WA wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Procreate, Concepts, and fusion are the ones that come to mind. There are probably very few paid apps people buy for purely content consumption outside of games. But for content creators there is a fairly wide selection of pro apps that are pretty good.

Luma fussion just updated to allow you to video edit directly from an external SSD without having to import/export to local storage.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#317

Post by SilverRed »

burlesona wrote: post #110
kowlo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was wrong with VSCode?

For me the electron tax is frustrating. File switching and text input just feel sluggish compared to Sublime Text. The VS Code ecosystem is superb though.

Its more the electron tradeoff. We have picked slightly slower software if it means more software at a cheaper price which works on more platforms and has more features.

Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#318

Post by CoryAlexMartin »

It's far easier to make something worse than make it better. There are few good solutions to problems, but infinite bad ones. Sometimes change is called for, but it needs to be done carefully and only when necessary.

Fundamentally, you need a healthy balance between conservatism and liberalism. Software companies don't have enough reverence for the former, and perhaps they're structured in ways that incentivizes the latter far more than they ought.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#319

Post by actually_a_dog »

emodendroket wrote: post #313
grishka wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.

I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#320

Post by emodendroket »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #319
emodendroket wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.

I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.

It happens to be the case that software maintenance requires essentially the same skills as software implementation, so we don’t differentiate between the two jobs. And besides that, the nature of what people demand is different: nobody expects a single-family home to suddenly accommodate 50 families, but the equivalent of this is not exactly rare in the world of software.
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