Ask HN: Why is today's Internet experience so user hostile?

I suspect that there is some sort of short-circuit between the clients (those that ask for features) and the programmers (both the "software architects" and those that actually implement the apps/sites).

Speaking of Government issues (in these times of COVID-19) there are certain categories here in Italy (restaurants, hotels, cinemas and similar places) that have by Law the need to check customers' "green pass" (officially EU Digital COVID Certificate (DCC)).

This can be done exclusively through an app (Apple or Android) written by what is loosely the IT branch of the government.

What the app does is simply scanning the QR code and check the validity of the pass (by some algorithmn and checking also a sort of blacklist).

There is no technical reason on earth why this could have not been made OS/device independent, or at least the Irish (EIRE) one is a "normal" site[1] that works on any recent browser.

Questions are:

1) was it the government asking for a dual (iOS/Android) app (and no site)?

2) or was the SOGEI (the government connected IT firm that wrote the apps[2]) to decide to NOT make such a site?

[1] https://app.digitalcovidcertchecker.gov.ie/

[2] BTW the actual Android app at least - cannot say the iOS one - needs a relatively recent Android version, cannot remember exactly, probably 8, so that using your old phone wouldn't do.

Floppy discs or CD-ROMs or game cartridges used to cost real money. Broken software would be publicly embarrassing and long-lived. Some users might never update and just think your software sucked. So we had to try harder to get software right up front, to test in advance and write code that would make it function in difficult situations.

But with no marginal cost to shipping, businesses experiment with the question "how shoddy can our engineering be while still turning a profit?" and "what features can we add for our profit, even if it obstructs or hurts users?". They run those experiments daily now.

I believe this has successfully brought down quality norms in almost all categories of software: UIs respond in 100s or 1000s of ms as standard, not 10s. You lose your train of thought often with bad UIs, and they're all differently bad.

Secondly - a user in 2021 is less likely to be the person directly supporting the author of that software.

So the users' decision to use (or bin) the software for the long run doesn't need to be core of any software business' success. They can be compelled into using bad software by network effects (I know, pioneered by 90s Microsoft but the internet turbo-charged this). That's not just about evil business models; bad government or banking software has forced lots of people to bad software who never wanted a computer in the first place.

Thirdly - the other surprising evil from the network is the end of data ownership. After all the fuss 20 years ago about the politics of the MS Word file format, many users can't reliably separate data from the application that processes it any more. File format interoperability (whether reverse-engineered or open) used to be a smart way in for new competitors - do more things with your old data. Now that's impossible without continued cooperation of the companies producing the data. APIs to online data are treacherous and only kept around while they serve the business, not its users. So many "experience" apps aren't even clear what data they keep for you, and the law is still catching up.

Don't get me wrong, it's (maybe) a good thing that there are more people in 2022 doing things with software than there were in 2002. It's very often enabling. But the ideal of a computer being a tool or a "bicycle for the mind" is something you have to choose & fight for now.

(OS security & power management "innovation" is the other end of this rant, but for another day :) )

Freee market delivers best results for the people, and if it doesn't, it's the people's fault!

Windows Mobile was a barely consumer-friendly version of Windows CE with a truckload of vendor-specific implementations (which made for a very inconsistent user experience) and the abomination called Windows Phone was completely incompatible on the app side with everything that existed on the Windows Mobile world and on the developer side with everything else.

Symbian was (effectively) a Nokia-only OS, which meant that developers were pretty scarce and again it was incompatible on the developer and user experiences.

Then came iOS as the first "disruptor" where the jailbreakers (!) of the first days showed just how sorely behind the competition was... the first iPhone was EDGE-only ffs and still it was radically different and better than everything on the market including the back-then flagship models with Windows Mobile from HTC. Android followed up and obliterated the competition, which was easy enough to do given Google's budget and Microsoft's complete inability to react - the iPhone was released in 2007 and the comical disaster of Windows Phone took until 2010!

The rest is history, everything not from Apple moved over to Android - the longest holdout was Blackberry with their moat of business users and the BlackBerry Messenger. And somewhere along the line, Samsung managed to destroy both HTC and Sony... what remains now on the market is Samsung, Xiaomi, BBK (Vivo/OPPO) and a bunch of low budget stuff fighting for the scraps. Very sad indeed.