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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#401

Post by oscardssmith »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #353
emodendroket wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You forgot that maintenance contractors aren’t kept on permanent retainer. Why bother keeping software maintenance crews on permanently?

The big difference is that if a competent plumber looks at a sink, it will take them 30 seconds to figure out. If a competent programmer looks at a new codebase with 30000 lines of code, it will take them 6 months to understand it, and then still be missing 80% of the details.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#402

Post by oscardssmith »

mark-r wrote: post #383
hanniabu wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. Similarly with the Google Play to Youtube Music transition. Play was so clean, snappy, and intuitive. Youtube Music is similar to what you describe of Spotify where everything is buried, busy layout, and nothing is intuitive.

Google Play was perfect for playing the .mp3 files on my Android phone. No need for an internet connection. Then suddenly it was ripped away, and YouTube is not remotely a replacement. I still haven't found an adequate replacement because I don't know how to search for the features that are important to me.

Vlc is quite good

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#403

Post by busymom0 »

p1peridine wrote: post #235
kilroywashere wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

soulseek is far better than spotify.

True. I cancelled my spotify sub the same day I discovered soulseek. I keep my music collection (~100GB) offline now, all organized in folders.

Is soulseek available for mobile? (either iOS or android?)

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#404

Post by siproprio »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #195
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…

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!

What's your industry?

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#405

Post by SilasX »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183
simonw wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only feature I want from Evernote is the one they fail to deliver: if I know I have a note about something, and I search for that note in the Evernote mobile app, I want it to find and display that note. Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later" I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my no…

This is literally why I'm still not buying the "searching is better than organizing" line that so many companies, including Google, try to push down our throats. Searching is only better than organizing if searches are exhaustive, and I can trust that they are exhaustive . My experience with variety of products, including Evernote, Google Drive and GMail, tells me I can't trust that. I had plenty of instances when I…

Yeah, I've noticed that searching my Gmail account on iPhone will often fail to find messages entirely even when I know the exact phrase in the email or the sender.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#406

Post by Solstafir »

grishka wrote: post #144
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'…

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.

In my experience, I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry) or the the backend starts to crumble with the weight of new ad-hoc features, increased number of users etc.

With agile, practically, many times development is just in time with little regard to long term requirements or the evolution of software so it's all layers of layers of things that work. There's rarely a time for fundamental restructuring of the codebase to meet the new requirement correctly.

Once the cracks begin to show, we start thinking of software rewrite.

For a construction of buildings, the redevelopment is about once 40 years, for software, it's about 5-7 years.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#407

Post by jay_kyburz »

siproprio wrote: post #404
jay_kyburz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

What's your industry?

I'm in Games.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#408

Post by SilverRed »

irskep wrote: post #391
SilverRed wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature.

Most users will though. Apple music implements that feature and charges the same amount for subscriptions. So if spotify wants to stay competitive they need a team of developers to keep up with whatever Apple and Google are doing. It's not good enough to just say "oh well the app is feature complete so we won't be working on anything new"

Nothing is ever feature complete when you have competition.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#409

Post by tomoko »

Ecstatify wrote: post #187
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…

My Spotify home is filled with podcast suggestions. I hope podcasts kill the company, sick of companies shoving their agenda down my throat.

On the flip side, for those who do want to listen to podcasts on Spotify, the experience is horrific. It's all so confusing and they are always trying to mix podcasts with music, almost treating them as same media. For a company that is spending millions on acquiring podcasts to their platform, I feel they really shoot themselves in the foot with such a non-intuitive UI. I used to be an occasional Joe Rogan listener, but ever since Spotify has acquired it I have ultimately stopped listening to it.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#410

Post by glenngillen »

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…

Agree. I appreciate this suffers from a No True Scotsman fallacy, but the framing from the OP completely misses the point on what a Product Manager _should_ be doing. There’s a near infinite list of things customers want. From missing features, to bug fixes, minor UI improvements, to whole new products. If people are making change for change sake it’s usually more of a symptom of not doing the work to actually identify what would be impactful and valuable. It’s reaching for what feels easy versus doing the hard work.
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