Apps Getting Worse
tbray.org
Apps Getting Worse
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Re: Apps Getting Worse
#2> Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.
I remember back at the Snow Leopard release of what is now macOS, when it was announced that this was not going to be a feature release (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/archive/20090...), but rather a release of, basically, catching and squashing old bugs. I was so happy about that release.
Imagine if the Apple of today could manage to do that, rather than taking away yet another battle-tested, decades-old desktop convention in favour of continuing to pretend that conventions developed for mobile interaction will always, or even often, be well suited for the desktop.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#3This isn’t wrong but it misses other factors like dark patterns. These show up when there is an incentive to maximize time on the app, spending, get people to opt into surveillance, or herd customers into a cloud option so they can be put into a subscription model later.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#4One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me other movies. I can scroll only in order of newest-oldest purchase order. The more titles I have, the worse the experience is.
Fuck 'em and their dark patterns. I'm happier going old-school and buying blue-rays from the criterion collection.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#5Firefighters are heroes for fighting fires. The fire marshall who prevents fires is treated as a waste of money or a pest.
Basically same thing here. Companies don’t promote those who preserve good things. They want new things.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#6This is one of the reasons my desktop and as much of my phone as possible are opensource.
"outdated" "old" is an actual stable experience with bug fixes and responsiveness to actual users and not product managers.
The migration to swipes for everything on the phones is mind boggling.
Super cool for the tweens and twenty year olds that are used to being pushed to the next thing every 2 months.
My older relatives have no concept of what a swipe is and why it should do anything.
Total chaos and brokenness for them and millions of others.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#7My experience: It's much more common that the dramatic decline starts when the original creator(s)/product owner(s) leave the company, rather than when some product manager later on decides to go rogue.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#8I can only comment on The Economist App, the experience has indeed worsened over time. Simple features like searching an article, bookmarking it going back to where you left off etc.
Similar behavior I feel among other apps as well.
- New features aren't that useful. (bells and whistles because everyone has it, so should we)
- Old features aren't maintained or getting worse with each release
- Apps seem to be getting slower.
- They don't seem to be completely native (probably using incorrect terminology). When you minimize an app and go back to it, it'll refresh the page. You were reading something?, thought you found an interesting product and paused to look up something?
I don't mind paying a subscription either. If I'm using an app regularly, it needs to be maintained over OS versions but so many apps are getting worse.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#9The 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 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.
It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore.
I've recently switched from VSCode to Panics Nova, and for a very brief moment I felt like I was back in the old days of Mac Os X where things just worked, and where I felt at home with my OS, without constantly waiting for a better alternative to come along.
Re: Apps Getting Worse
#10It's not about # of customers. Even apps with billions of users can survey those users, or use some sort of a/b testing to figure out what impact any change to a product will have. The issue is just that sometimes a change might be good for new users only, or might be good for some metric the business cares about that you don't (ie maybe the Economist needed daily actives instead of weekly actives for some reason so they launched daily news). Not saying the changes are always net positive, but I don't think it's a simple as "they want to get promoted and can't talk to all their users".
Also, as much as I love AWS as a service overall, it's actual user experience is pretty terrible and I wish it did change over time (for the better).