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Apps Getting Worse

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Re: Apps Getting Worse

#411

Post by topkai22 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #225
blibble wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. I personally like features such as savings accounts (which require a treasury department), a brokerage, lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud, and so-on a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your cash to sit

I believe the point is that all those services have existed for Quite Some Time, don’t need consumer-facing changes, and any additional consumer-facing software changes are bunk.

You’d think so, but my wife uses a bank that spent a good 12 years without a substantial change to their website. It finally got a major refresh a few years back and everything just FELT better. It was like fixing up the lobby- it might be secondary to the primary purpose of being there, but it made it a better experience for the customer.

That’s ignoring things like online bill pay, mobile banking, and roll outs of new financial products that really are innovations from the last 10-15 years.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#412

Post by jltsiren »

bradlys wrote: post #99
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…

Blaming the engineers for wanting to follow trends is really passing the buck. Blame the industry (hiring managers, ctos, investors, etc) for not hiring people who don’t have the exact skill set that they’re looking for. To be competitive (aka get paid well) in today’s marketplace you need to have a skill set that is with whatever trends are most common. I’m fortunate that the company I was hired at doesn’t care that…

Wanting to be competitive (aka getting paid well) is the root of the problem. The top jobs are ridiculous in every field. Because there is so much competition for them, competitiveness becomes orthogonal to doing your job well.

In most fields, there are also second-tier jobs. You get to enjoy a nice middle-class lifestyle with a good work-life balance in a stable long-term job. The incentives are there to do your job well, because you have to face the consequences of your choices. I know plenty of software engineers in jobs like that. When the company eventually goes bad, they have no trouble finding new similar jobs, because good experienced software engineers are scarce.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#413

Post by mnutt »

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…

I thought it was interesting how Spotify acquihired uTorrent's creator, Ludvig Strigeus, to build the Spotify desktop client. uTorrent was tiny and fast and written in c++, and early versions of Spotify were also small and incredibly snappy. I assume the move to Electron was a necessity to support a team of hundreds all working on the client, but it's still regrettable.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#414

Post by mastazi »

HKH2 wrote: post #349
mastazi wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, true. I wish Spotify artists/playlists or Youtube channels etc. had RSS. So, the next idea would be a service that scrapes contents and builds an RSS feed.

YouTube does have RSS.

Thank you for pointing that out! I didn't know that until today. I also discovered that you can get RSS feeds from Reddit and a few other services (see my other comment in sibling sub thread)[1]. So, it sounds like I might be using RSS more.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111810

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#415

Post by dreamer7 »

Gmail is a very good example of a finished app being tinkered with. No one asked for Meet to be integrated. There was already a good app for Meet. Then came Chat and Rooms!!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#416

Post by mastazi »

benrapscallion wrote: post #380
mastazi wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! I was curious about how they do it and found out that Youtube actually has RSS feeds! At least according to this and a few other pages I've found https://danielmiessler.com/blog/rss-feed-youtube-channel/ Also, I can see that for other services like Twitter, there are indeed third party providers that can create feeds https://rss.app/blog/how-to-create-twitter-rss-feeds Also Reddit subreddits and users: https:/…

For reddit, you can also look at inline-reddit.com NewsBlur and a couple other RSS feed readers have built-in Twitter clients. You can also use rss bridge to get Instagram in your RSS feeds.

Thank you! This is all very useful info!

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#417

Post by hboon »

Maybe it’s the understanding of the premise that most software has to be created iteratively that is flawed. It can be created iteratively. But it doesn’t always have to be iterated upon so much after that. Certainly not all of them.

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#418

Post by [deleted] »

alkonaut wrote: post #14

> ...in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product. The AWS recipe is easy though: add another service instead of touching the old one too much. Great now there are 200 services and approaching them is like learning C++. If one considers "the product" to be the entire offering of cloud services - I'd argue tha…

[deleted]

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#419

Post by x0x0 »

mnutt wrote: post #413
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…

I thought it was interesting how Spotify acquihired uTorrent's creator, Ludvig Strigeus, to build the Spotify desktop client. uTorrent was tiny and fast and written in c++, and early versions of Spotify were also small and incredibly snappy. I assume the move to Electron was a necessity to support a team of hundreds all working on the client, but it's still regrettable.

I suspect it was more the economics of maintaining 5 apps: web, mac, windows, iphone, android. It basically forces you to a toolkit that makes nobody happy...

Re: Apps Getting Worse

#420

Post by nanidin »

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…

I think it shows a shift in priorities from users to metrics like engagement and profit. Then the prioritized parties are Spotify or investors. It stinks, but it opens the door for competitors that can compete on things like user experience even though there are powerful competitors already in the space.
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