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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone had this too. You could mix timelines from Facebook and Twitter in one view. Messages from FB and SMS showed up in one list. I don't know how they got the licensing and API access to be able to do that, but it was great. Also they styled everything according to the phone UI, so everything was one font, dark mode was just one toggle, it always matched your phone theme, etc.

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No issue with licensing, all of those services had extremely lax and open APIs, it wasn't until the last few years that they started shutting down nearly all access. There was a huge push for open APIs for over a decade and then they started taking it away under the guise of 'user safety' when really it was due to 'can't make more money' with it.

It's been almost a year since Twitter decided you had to have a browser capable of running some disturbingly bloated JS app just to view what is essentially a series of short text messages with the occasional image or video. I don't use Twitter but I'm linked there occasionally, and the insanity of that realisation still remains a clear example of what the industry has become.

I might be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure there was a short time when “Twitter Client” was to iOS dev tutorials what ToDo apps were to JS framework tutorials.

This was absolutely common. The simplicity and openness of the twitter api was one of the main things that draw me into programming. These days i dont even can have an account as they do not accept my phone number as valid...

Remember the good old days when “works with SMS” was a design constraint?

> It's been almost a year since Twitter decided you had to have a browser capable of running some disturbingly bloated JS app

It was mid-December of last year. So almost 6 months.

Crazy that’s what’s become of a tweet that started as an sms. The sms service appears dead too.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/27/21238131/twitter-sms-noti...

Too hard to display their ads if people access their content via API. I am not going to be surprised at all if reddit soon announces features leaving the API or completely getting rid of it.

Knowing Reddit, they won't announce it. It'll just slowly stop working until it's unceremoniously removed.

Sounds like the current old reddit site. They keep adding the new features pretty much only to the redesign and soon it'll just be the bloated redesign. They slowly make the old stuff more and more shit until you either have to suck it up and switch or suffer through bad UX.

Case in point: Reddit has a /u/backtickbot, whose whole job is finding comments containing code blocks that don't render properly in old.reddit.com and alternate Reddit clients, and responding with a (link to) fixed code block.

See for example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n0qz5y/what_made_yo...

I feel like this would be a very easy change for Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) to implement and have support for by default.

But this gets into my similar point where you end up having to use tools like an extension or bot to fix functionality reddit leaves out.

It's gotten pretty annoying for some things already. Old reddit doesn't support polls but in a weird way you can still see it from old reddit like an embedded piece of media.

Overall it's already feeling pretty hacky and I'm sure it's just going to keep getting worse. I've tried to switch to new reddit multiple times and it's just so much slower. I'll admit it "looks" better, but I still get the same functionality but in a more efficient manner on the old reddit. The new reddit just feels slow and bloated.

RIP FriendFeed. It was really the golden age of social media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed

> There was a huge push for open APIs for over a decade and then they started taking it away under the guise of 'user safety' when really it was due to 'can't make more money' with it.

Cambridge analytica is a well known issue of what happens when these platforms have open APIs as well.

Especially for Facebook it began to seem like a downside that created PR damage I think - people were far more interested in attacking it for “privacy violations” rather than celebrating the openness of the api and data.

> Cambridge analytica is a well known issue of what happens when these platforms have open APIs as well.

One doesn't have anything to do with the other. As a user, having an open API meant that I could choose which client to use to interface with FB messaging. This has no bearing on CA having access to user profiling data.

WP also did things well the other way - being able to separate work and personal life - in a way that is not possible in iOS or Android, even in Microsoft's own apps.

You could use Outlook for both work and home, create a different icons for each, and merge multiple personal or work accounts together. You could pause notifications based on calendars, or on certain days, or quickly pause them for several days.

On the other hand, Teams on Android just won't shut up, and the longest you can make notifications snooze for is 2 hours. You have to block them entirely to get peace.

>You could use Outlook for both work and home, create a different icons for each, and merge multiple personal or work accounts together. You could pause notifications based on calendars, or on certain days, or quickly pause them for several days.

Work Profiles added this behavior to Android recently also; with a quick toggle to disable Work Access completely. (Outlook, Teams, etc all sandboxed and separate from host-applications; seperate marked icons/etc)

The longest you can make notifications snooze by default is 2 hours. It is, of course, possible to change it. It also doesn't require root access, just ADB :)

https://www.xda-developers.com/customize-notification-snooze...

Honestly I'm shocked that nobody has embraced this.

Google obviously wants to do the Unix "lots of small tools" app composability thing, but that depends on having a strong shell.

The contact list should be a shell. Let me click a contact and see all my texts, hangouts, calls, etc. in one unified log, and initiate whatever communication protocol be it video-chat or chess from there.

I loved using Nokia Lumia phones, right until Microsoft bought the brand and immediately gave up. Now that was minimalist design done right.

This was my favorite feature of Windows phone. I thought it was innovative and was the first thing I thought about when I saw this article. On windows phone a person was a person. When you clicked on them you got information from every service tied to them. It was pretty cool.

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