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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#391

Post by irskep »

SilverRed wrote: post #305
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.

Spotify has a lot to work on. Integrations with new devices is a big one. They recently added support for streaming songs directly on the Apple Watch but are still yet to support saving them locally to play offline if you don't have your phone. New required features like this are constantly popping up. As well as other infinitely big tasks like optimizing all of their server side software to support and ever increasi…

To be fair to Spotify, Apple Watch development is pure hell, and I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature.

On the other hand, the LG TV app for Spotify doesn't support gapless playback, which completely blows my mind.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#392

Post by largbae »

azalemeth wrote: post #147
pantulis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, evernote had painted itself in the corner with the plethora of native apps without a common codebase: new features (even the crappy “enterprise” ones) had stopped coming. Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete. I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year…

I don't want new features. I do want cross platform, native apps (Linux, MacOS and Android for me). I've yet to find a good solution that "just works".

I just came to this thread and searched for Evernote specifically to upvote or add this. Evernote evolved from a perfect extension of my private memory available rapidly and anywhere I needed it into a bloated collaboration suite. I would be surprised if any customer asked for it. I canceled the service but will gladly pay twice as much for an Evernote Classic that gets back to basics and does those well.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#393

Post by wayneftw »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #189
wayneftw wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I might be the Lone Ranger that agrees with you. I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines. Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.

Yes, perhaps we're alone in this thread but with 14 million users (out of an estimated 24 million) world wide we're probably in the majority.

Picky users might complain but from what I see, most users are just fine with Electron apps. We all use Slack, Discord, etc. at work and everybody loves it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#394

Post by nopeYouAreWrong »

This misses the biggest problem I see that has been unquestionably standardized. Living Software. At least once a week I open an app that I use regularly and it interrupts me with a notification "we've added xyz, check it out!"....like...thanks a lot for interrupting me from using your application. Or the periodic UI revamps that force me to relearn how to use something I already knew how to use. There has to be some point where we all say..."alright...enough is enough...it's done..."

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#395

Post by shp0ngle »

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…

Yeah trying to switch from VSCode to Nova was the opposite experience for me.

For a while, I had that same nostalgia... everything looked great... but then, nothing really worked, the plugins were all kind of bad (half of my work is Golang, which Nova does not support), and VSCode allows you to have the same stuff on all three major platforms.

I realized the Mac software from your studios looked great, and yeah had unified Mac feel unlike the messiness of Windows world, but usually had worse functionality. (And they were all always paid.)

There was recently an article from Sketch, that says, how proud they are to have a native app in 2020.

https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-wh...

Yeah, nice, but... Figma is not native, it has a "worse" looking/feeling app, but... allows you to collaborate instantly - it's "collaboration first", not a feature side-bolted to existing app. And it can be run anywhere.

Chromium is horrible in abstract (why do I need to take whole Chrome with every app?). But they win where matters I guess.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#396

Post by shp0ngle »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #74
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…

Just to add another viewpoint, I think Google photos is their best product, and my grandparents both are able to use it without issue. They haven't even contacted me about it. I wish they still did unlimited storage, but the app is quality, with some pretty smart search built in (you can search things like "sunset" with great accuracy). The editor is pretty easy to use as well.

I love Google Photos. Especially the AI search! So great.

The only thing is I wish it had the smart photo off-loading of iOS Photos. I don't want to delete all synched pictures from my phone, only the least recent ones. So I can still send the new ones to family without re-downloading. Why cannot I do that? iOS Photos can do that.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#397

Post by neilparikh »

baron816 wrote: post #368
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…

Some things I miss: Liking/saving all the songs of an album. You used to be able to do that with one click and they would be added to your liked songs play list. Now you either have to like all the songs individually, or like the album and not have it appear in liked songs. Being able to search through all the artists for songs you’ve liked/saved. You can now only follow an artist. You can’t just browse through all t…

The triple dot menu on the album page has an option to like all songs (at least on iOS).

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#398

Post by peterkelly »

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…

The stupidest part is why it changed:

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu...

According to https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desk...

"We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI"

They could have just left things as is, but no.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#399

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

cemkum wrote: post #357
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what Spotify is doing with the Android app. They seem to be pushing podcasts really hard and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the app from doing that. I didn't enjoy using it at all. I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.

I've found their changes quite nice, however that's because I mostly use the app for podcasts. Maybe they are pivoting?

Companies with 6 billions dollars in revenue don't really pivot. They are diversifying.

I guess they have determined it makes sense strategically. If I had to guess, podcasts and music listening are rival goods for a lot of their most valuable segments and they were worried about moves some of the new entrants in the market could have made. Might allow them to target new customers too. Hopefully more than the move will lose them in existing customers jumping ship.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#400

Post by busymom0 »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #233
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…

I don't know what Spotify is doing with the Android app. They seem to be pushing podcasts really hard and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the app from doing that. I didn't enjoy using it at all. I finally bit the bullet last month and moved to YouTube Music. Migration was a pain but I find the generated playlists better and the UX less painful to use.

The pushing of podcasts too much is what got me to leave Spotify too. I tried YouTube music for a while but I wasn't a fan of how my YouTube likes would get mixed up with the YouTube music. Disabling the setting would often get rid of songs too.

So I ended up buying a cheap Android phone ($190 USD for a very good phone - 8GB ram, 12gb space):

https://www.amazon.com/UMIDIGI-Unlocked-4150mAh-Capacity-Sma...

I use Firefox for YouTube with the following add-ons:

1. uBlock Origin

2. Video Background Play Fix add-on

This allows me to use YouTube as a background playback music player. And if needed, I use YouTube-dl to get the audio files and put them on the phone.

I have basically gone back to how I used to use MP3 players back in 2000s before streaming became a thing.

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