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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#451

Post by Razengan »

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…

> when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers.

What the fuck, it’s your decision to charge $1 because thousands of other devs do it, not Apple’s. If you want to charge $10-$50 and you think can convince users to pay that much, Apple is not stopping you. Seriously wtf.

Apple’s ecosystem got those hundreds of millions of customers in the first place because Apple lets the users decide how much they think apps should be worth.

Do you think users pay more on Android? https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/02/app-store-earned-twice-...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#452

Post by oakfr »

RNCTX wrote: post #197
city41 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you mean by « Spotify is designed to lose money »? Also, a decrease in number of users will definitely worry Spotify and draw negative investors’ attention.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#453

Post by rado »

iOS 15 Safari is the tipping point in terms of mass reach and awfulness. Scrolling an element (not the page), to view more of that element, shows the address bar over it. ?!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#454

Post by ganafagol »

Gnome Shell anybody? I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet.

About 10 years ago I switched from Gnome 2 to 3. Because my distro did. It was a huge drop in features. Over the years I had tuned my desktop experience on Gnome 2 with different panel apps, layouts, some custom hacks. It worked great. Gnome 3 ended all this. It was really simple, so that it was almost dysfunctional. It was new so I thought the community would soon catch up. But it never did. The experience is still much worse that in the Gnome 2 days. Even a few extensions that try to mimic the Gnome 2 experience can't really compensate, and many of them break with every other update. It's such a shame.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#455

Post by atkailash »

torgian wrote: post #371
g_p wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, take a look at fashion design. Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world. But designs for clothing always keeps changing, even if they are small, subtle changes. I think you can apply the same towards design of anything. Tastes change. While a certain design philosophy might be a godsend in 2010, it might be considered trash in 2015. To be fair, I also think a…

Haute couture runway isn’t intended to be worn. It generally shows a concept of the general theme for the season as well as ability. It’s not the same as UI/UX whose entire purpose is to be used, that’s more like the prêt-a-porter lines for fashion (which are also on runways)

Female jean pockets being small is entirely a driver for handbags and the like. It’s a poor decision for practicality but entirely a business decision — it’s sorta a dark design pattern I guess similar to how amazon buries privacy settings

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#457

Post by WanderPanda »

eisa01 wrote: post #436
irskep wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have finally got the option to test “Download to Apple Watch”, so only took Spotify 2-3 years after the feature was made available? Not sure if it’s widely available yet Had to buy the 4G version last time though, as Apples podcast and Music app is horrible at downloading, and Overcast was not much better.

I surrendered and bought the app Outcast. With it you can directly download podcasts on the Apple Watch. You have to disable Bluethooth on your iPhone, though, otherwise the downloads will be slow as hell.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#458

Post by starky »

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.

>Asking an iOS developer to work on Objective-C is asking them to sacrifice their future prospects.

This just sounds insane to me being a non-programmer. Literally nothing in my job requires me to be up to date on technologies that are less than 10 years old to be considered for a job.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#459

Post by jjav »

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…

> It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it.

One reason is that UI is a fashion-driven space so as the fashion changes there is increasing pressure to rewrite everything to look like all recent apps look, even if it breaks functionality.

Another reason is that if an application has a well-polished UI that all users love.. what's the UI team going to do? How does that newly hired UI PM get to make a big impact so they get a promotion? So there's also a lot of resume-driven UI change for the sake of change.

For the second problem, a partial solution is to have shared UI teams so they can keep busy improving the products which need the most improvement and leave alone the ones that are already good. Of course, hard to do in a smaller company that might only have one product.

For the fashion problem, no good solution. Ignoring fashion entirely works for software that targets technical people but for mass-market applications, no good solution.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#460

Post by TuringNYC »

torgian wrote: post #371
g_p wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, take a look at fashion design. Objectively, there are a lot of really crazy designs that no one would wear in the real world. But designs for clothing always keeps changing, even if they are small, subtle changes. I think you can apply the same towards design of anything. Tastes change. While a certain design philosophy might be a godsend in 2010, it might be considered trash in 2015. To be fair, I also think a…

>> Tastes change.

They do, but do they change as quickly as every season?...or sometimes people do those who make money off changing tastes tell you that tastes change that often?

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