Apps Getting Worse

All gone. Now you get an algorithmic homepage that's constantly shifting and trying to push podcasts on you...

Can't say much positive about Pandora or Tidal or..

Miss old Slacker days and prior.

I mean, seriously, this is basic stuff, how can they have got so far from the core product experience that they actually hide the controls of a music player.

I don't want to have to figure out what random UI element to click to see the 'skip' control.

I mean, after many years of not using their service, I recently had to spend a good half hour in front of their app, trying to figure out how to a) list all available songs of a given artist, and b) play one of them. And I couldn't do it. This task is pretty much impossible with their current design. All because, instead of treating their users as adults with agency, they really want to drip-feed them with "recommendations" from their glorified Markov chain. "What do you mean, 'browse the works of an artist'? No, have a 'radio station' of their albums instead."

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't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose. About as pure an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.

The trend started with Windows 8 and continues to this day. And if someone brings up "improved security" as a benefit of more modern Windows systems, then they pretty much immediately concede the argument, because it's really not the job of the end-user machine to provide you with enterprise grade security.

Nor is it really true that older OSs simply aren't able to be made secure without releasing additional UI/UX changes alongside security patches.

Apple Music on iOS has its own major issues, but at least search works the first time.

Generally: ideally we imagine UX & product roles as creating a strong experience rewarding the user on for their engagement, by user standards. In practice, in order advance their career, these roles need a narrative of wins they can sell to higher management. That usually means change one can take credit for, if possible paired with a metric management is invested in. Sometimes this metric is even connected with a rewarding experience for users. Sometimes. The incentive for change is there, though, regardless, at least as long as there's money in the dev budget for it.

Spotify Specifically: was founded under the premise that consumers could be drawn into a product that acts like a record collection buffet in the cloud, but only pay broadcast prices! (ie, free or flat rate). This premise was correct, but also relied on the idea that Spotify was entitled to pay artists broadcast-royalties while effect occupying the space where recording royalties used to live, cannibalizing the market for recordings. And so you get execs telling artists that it's "entitled" to want rates as high as a penny a listen for their music and Spotify wasn't built to solve the problem of artists getting paid it was built to solve the problem of piracy (artists not being able to get paid or set their prices is indistinguishable from the problems of piracy). [0] This tells us that either Spotify isn't getting enough revenue to pay a penny a stream, or it feels entitled to keep what it is collecting.

And here's what else we know about Spotify: their revenue per user is essentially fixed. Their model doesn't have much in the way to collect more from a user based off the users own values/actions. They can increase ads, but that's probably not a user driven win. What else can they do?

Well, they can do what the rest of the social media companies do with their feeds. Randomize appearance of content, mix in known engaging user rewards with other things that let Spotify sell user attention -- to a label or individual trying to promote music/audio in a given space, to third parties wanting to advertise or place another content.

That degrades user experience? Sure. You think the company that is founded down to the core on exploitation cares even a little bit about that? Especially now that they're such a huge name in music they outshine Apple in a lot of markets?

Eventually, I suppose, other people will be dissatisfied in the same ways you are and maybe in a snowballing number of ways caused by the kind of bad-incentives driven rot. But it's likely to be a long slow ride down the curve, with an exodus as fast and complete as FB.

[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/29/spotify-executiv...

Entire albums simply do not work without gapless playback.

All I can imagine is that there is some confusion at Spotify and the developers must have the sign backwards, thinking that research findings are what not to do. It’s a consistently shitty experience.

I still find it hard to navigate and find things, and the performance is bad, but before was really really bad, the last iterations come out well for me.

I will like more features.

For example I really want a feature to make playlists with albums, you can create playlists with all the songs of many albums, but is not possible to see it as a list of albums with the cover arts, like the Library. For example make a playlist of favorite albums of 2021, favorite albums of 90s rap, favorite albums of Bowie, etc.

Also improve the Library feature, I want to order/filter all my albums by year, decade, genre, artist.

A "listen later" feature on albums and songs will be great too, I want to have a place to "test" music, and later add it or not to my Library or Liked songs.

Lately the streaming platforms and the music industry is focusing on songs more than albums, and this is reflected on the features that their apps have. I find great the power that playlists give to consumers, but I find that the album experience give me a layer of artistic exploration that can't be captured with playlists, discovery weekly, top charts, etc.

Liking/saving all the songs of an album. You used to be able to do that with one click and they would be added to your liked songs play list. Now you either have to like all the songs individually, or like the album and not have it appear in liked songs.

Being able to search through all the artists for songs you’ve liked/saved. You can now only follow an artist. You can’t just browse through all the artists you’ve liked before, which makes it hard to go back to song you liked years ago before they made the “follow” change.

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-fu...

According to https://community.spotify.com/t5/Community-Blog/The-New-Desk...

"We're working on bringing back a list-like Discography view, something many of you have mentioned missing in the new UI"

They could have just left things as is, but no.

But now, if you click on a movie, it starts playing immediately. If you want to see what it's about, you hover over the movie, wait for it to expand, then click a small caret symbol to expand the movie page further to see details.

And if you want to see reviews or customer ratings, too bad because Netflix decided those aren't useful so you have to go to IMDB or some other site to see what other people thought about it.

The original player (in QT, iirc) was incredibly good : light (some mb of RAM), fast, zero bloat, well crafted UI.

I signed up for Spotify because it was an incredible product, but I stay because I’m forced to (shared family account and nothing really better in terms of bloating).

Sometimes those stories makes me wonder that the golden age of « life changing » software is behind us (I’d say exactly the same thing with Dropbox).

Curious to know if anyone finds it usable!

https://github.com/toothbrush/Spotiqueue

You can't shuffle all songs in your library anymore, since they removed the songs tab completely. There used to be a workaround with a playlist of all your liked songs (which turned into all songs in your library). That was killed too, so now the only way is by using a playlist and managing it manually. Playlists are limited to 10k songs though...

Generally they seem to remove features in every second update and i'll move on to another service after my current sub runs out in 3 months.

In these apps, you just had to have normal windows operations, like drag and drop, select multiple things, copy paste and many more things you just... did with computers. Also, if you wanted to list all songs by singer X by genre Y... you could just do that. It's just something music apps could do as a basic requirement.

Now spotify makes drag&drop like ~somewhat~ work, but you still can't sort your music and at least the 1/4ths of the screen permanently shows an empty "connect with facebook to have 'friends'" sidebar, that can not be minimized.

It's funny to me how the invention of these JavaScript apps has thrown computing back by a good decade. If you look at how careful Win9X was designed and researched, and how careless 100% of the current UIX is designed (mostly blindly A/B testing I guess), it is such a contrast.

Are there any UIX designers or frontend devs here on HN? How do you deal with essentially being representatives of the dark ages of your profession? Are you embarrassed, or do you yourself think that your "craft" doesn't really matter for the bottom line? Or has design already been replaced by AI/ML anyway, and we are all yelling at windmills here?

I really wonder how you release something like Spotify et. al. as, say, a lead designer or lead frontend developer, lean back in your chair and go: "Yeah, I did a good job here".

This is why "it's the PMs" is a refrain -- because the changes they make are very tangible in the end product.

I’m fortunate that the company I was hired at doesn’t care that I haven’t worked on Kotlin or React. But I was passed up by many companies because I didn’t have react experience - can’t help it if my last few jobs were all angular.

Many engineers are focusing on doing what will help them get the most compensation. And following industry trends is part of that.

I am just writing some hardware test app using C++ and wxWidgets.

But in general, yes, you are completely right. It's just virtual signalling between developers. You can't just write something, it has to be Instagram friendly. It needs to be popular and have hundreds of stars in GitHub.

Surely there must be a point where the product functions as intended and the peak number of users like it like that. Instead we carry on. Everyone has to keep proving their 'value' right? Always changing, always growing. Everything eventually gets iterated to death. Any piece of software or design, no matter how much you might like it will eventually be replaced. It's as true of software as it is of car shapes or curtain patterns.

Just imagine being the CEO of Evernote (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) announcing to the world that they are feature complete. It's a finished product and they are laying off everyone except customer support and marketing. They would be considered insane despite that decision delivering the best profits and customer experience.

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.

Developers want to change stuff and do greenfield because it's fun, but that's a whole different beast to a career track whose job it is to change things. This goes beyond just poor incentives ["Googler gets a raise because shiny new thing"], into "upper management have created a construct whose purpose it is to disappoint existing customers who like what's already there".

There may be an argument that you'll draw in more people with shiny stuff, than you'll lose when you break old stuff. I only have anecdotes and personal experience that that's untrue [digg? reddit? metro?], and no examples of cases showing that argument to be right.

Also, personally I get my jollies working on other people's old code. I work with several FORTRAN codebases that pre-date my birth, and I enjoy it.

Swift is hardly new anymore... are you going to maintain an ObjC codebase in perpetuity?

No wonder they don't want to work on someone else's code, they don't even want to work on their own old code :)

It really feels to me as if developers these days care much more about the development process itself, and how their code looks, than about the end product of their work that the users see. Same for designers — they want their UIs look "clean" and enjoyed like works of art, disregarding obvious, glaring UX issues that arise when any person at all tries to use the thing.

What is it in it for the developers to work on Object-C and other older technologies?

Some of the best software I've used are mostly developed by solo developers or small teams (Sublime, YNAB4) because they actually care about their product instead of the underlying tech.

Probably because Google says Kotlin is the way. You can't use Compose, Google's reboot of the View system, from Java. Why did google create Compose? To eliminate a decade of cruft and problems for one, so congrats ... now your developers are stuck with it.

It's a hard problem. Sometimes it's unnecessary but sometimes the tech debt is real. It's not uncommon to have one blessed path for doing most things but hey, here's this edge case that doesn't fit our mental model and is a pain to test and bloats our bundle and we keep getting paged for it and the engineers who built it left the company and didn't leave any documentation or tests, so let's just kill that feature.

And now users are pissed and don't understand, because from their perspective, they think the cost of leaving the feature alone is zero. But the truth is the cost of keeping it is quite high and there just isn't enough usage to justify engineering effort to reduce ongoing maintenance costs.

This isn’t actually the developers’ fault, either. I think we need to blame the tech industry as a whole for this.

Resume driven development is a bad anti-pattern and leads to software nightmares. Avoid it.

> Everyone wanted to work on greenfield projects and technologies that would look good on their resume going into the next job.

Greenfield = easy. Fixing a 10 year old architectural mistake = hard.

> Blaming product managers is an easy out

Resume driven development and product managers who make changes for the sake of their own resume are two sides of the same coin. It's all putting good for yourself over good for your customer and good for your employer.

Backend folks do this too btw. I’ve seen adoption of Docker, Kubernetes, microservice architectures, Rust, etc. driven more by a desire to use the latest trends than the best tool for the job.

Despite hating the game, I'd probably create similar incentives if I had a company. Because the other option is stagnation.

Is there a third option?

While I don't think appealing to new hires should drive your tech stack, telling them we still used SVN was something you kind of said under your breath with a bit of shame. As for "nobody wanted to work on someone else's codebase" is true, but I think needs some give and take. If you're making someone responsible for something you need to give them some latitude for running it their own way. I'm going to grumble less about dealing with my own mistakes over someone else's, but rewriting everything every time someone quits isn't an option either.

That doesn't mean you should actually do it, but as someone who's had more than enough time to get over the new and shine syndrome there's a lot to be gained by migrating as often as needed (ie. the productivity gain from the new outweighs the migration/current support cost in a reasonable timeframe).

Programming tools, techniques and languages are still evolving quickly and even in the same ecosystem I don't use many of the tools and a frameworks I did 5 years ago.

In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.

Is there some place that catalogs development companies that are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support these guys and keep them going.

Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup, Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are not 99ct and do just fine...

There are many problems with Apple’s stores, but I don’t see how this is one.

It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used the phrase in its television advertising.

Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better. When it only sometimes is.

You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included" because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and somehow we thought it was OK.

There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart. Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization.

In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will last the rest of our lives.

But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things like household basics.

It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful customers who would for good software, all you had to do was target the Mac. Obviously it’s harder now.

Considering that companies like Unity were in the same boat, I'm a bit hesitant to point the finger squarely at Apple without considering the decisions these companies made for themselves.

Decisions such as making a 99 cent one-time purchase app and still expecting to succeed as a business.

They all sound like band names, which shows the passion, that went into these endaveours!

When I jumped into Apple in the early 2000's, there was amazing software. I recall in particular my first Intel-Mac-laptop. There was this amazing program that changed the GUI to look like the Bjork video "All is Full of Love". It was absolute magic (beyond the random crashes of the first Intel macs which SUCKED).

I think the problem with all app-stores is this:

1. There's lots of very low quality software. 2. There's no way to verify the software does what it says it does before purchasing.

I can't tell you how many times I've bought an app for my daughter--even from "reputable" companies that only has a few minutes of content before it starts begging for money, coins etc.

Or even if the game didn't beg for money, it was just nonsense. I bought my daughter a game that had no pay mechanics-- but, you had to earn "coins" to do impossible challenges to get prizes. I ended up playing most of the game for her because it was just too hard for a kid, and it was just too hard for an adult who cut his teeth on Atari and Nintendo. It wasn't fun, just tedious. The game required you to make 300ish correct decisions with about one second each in-between them.

In the old days, I was happy to drop 25$ on an interesting app.

I'd love to check out Panics Nova but the Apple Ecosystem isn't viable for me anymore. :-/

Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.

For a while, I had that same nostalgia... everything looked great... but then, nothing really worked, the plugins were all kind of bad (half of my work is Golang, which Nova does not support), and VSCode allows you to have the same stuff on all three major platforms.

I realized the Mac software from your studios looked great, and yeah had unified Mac feel unlike the messiness of Windows world, but usually had worse functionality. (And they were all always paid.)

There was recently an article from Sketch, that says, how proud they are to have a native app in 2020.

https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-wh...

Yeah, nice, but... Figma is not native, it has a "worse" looking/feeling app, but... allows you to collaborate instantly - it's "collaboration first", not a feature side-bolted to existing app. And it can be run anywhere.

Chromium is horrible in abstract (why do I need to take whole Chrome with every app?). But they win where matters I guess.

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-...

It's not just Apple, this has been a general trend for several decades. In the nineties I paid for Office (about £400 I think), now I use Google Docs. It was the same for development tools, £1800 for an MSDN subscription, now I use VS Community, git and open source components.

I suspect this is inevitable because the marginal cost of software is so low.

Now Evernote is releasing new features every couple of months and while it still not feature complete when compared with the old iOS or Mac native apps at least it has chance to compete.

I switched to DEVONthink earlier this year but keep my Evernote account just to see how things are going. I want them to succeed, the key is wether the churn of existing users can be offset by new users.

Instead, about half the time it returns an error screen that says (paraphrasing) "That note can not be displayed right now, try again later"

I do not want to look at my note later. You have one job: show me my notes!

(I have nearly 3,000 notes in Evernote spanning back over more than a decode, so my hunch is that I'm tripping some edge-cases that most of their testing fails to cover)

How they managed to fuck up the UX on that core button is insane. Two clicks to create a new note. Why? Just why?

Wunderlist had the same problem. A todo list app that runs 10+ processes when it's not even open? WTF?

I noticed the same about discord, slack and basically all modern apps. Why do these basic things need to run so many processes in the background? They are completely over-engineered and sluggish and slow.

At this point i only use the web versions of most software when i need them, so they don't clog up my system with useless processes.

Atlassian are the current, unchallenged, world beating champions of S L O W and have been for a long time. But the purchasers don't care they don't have to use the crud.

I wish they still did unlimited storage, but the app is quality, with some pretty smart search built in (you can search things like "sunset" with great accuracy). The editor is pretty easy to use as well.

One thing that has likely exacerbated this issue in recent years is "data-driven" product design. While I'm fanatical about evidence-based decision making, so many of these products are designed around a vague concept of "engagement" which is all about getting users to interact with the app as much as possible. While this is the natural end state for ad-driven companies, I find it very frustrating that a subscription-based service like Spotify feels the need to take as much control away from the user as possible.

This is the TED Talk you're talking about.

I mean, Winamp had skins and plugins more than 20 years ago. Surely it isn't some hopelessly lost skill, like making the roman concrete or the greek fire?!

I would fine tune that conclusion a bit: it's not that everybody each had their own different individual preference particular to them. It's that there really were specific, objective answers and that it wasn't specific to the individuality of each and every person. But the "right" answer wasn't one but three or four different right answers. But importantly, there weren't Zero right answers, and there weren't infinity. There were three or four.

I find these "7 billion" apps are often effortlessly smooth for basic tasks that I don't want to spend mental effort on. They seem to know what I want to do and make that just about the only option.

Everyone is focused on the journey of the 80% user.

I think it'd be nice if our tooling made it easier to support multiple "versions" of a deployed application. As it stands, it's far too expensive and error-prone to let customers opt into UI upgrades. As a product consumer, I can't stand continuous deployment. It just means my workflow can break at any time.

The one thing that is absolutely unforgivable is an app that you expect to trust instead ends up failing you.

My example: After installing I needed to compress a folder of important code and pictures. Just use Archiver right? Well I compressed the folder into a zip file. Something seemed strange. Ubuntu's file manager was reporting 0 bytes for the file after compressing. Strange, so I copied it to another folder. OK 8.5MB. Maybe the file manager was just not able to automatically refresh. The file size seemed small given the input was 300MB. Me being a little worried after seeing this and having been burned in the past, I opened the file and attempted to decompress. First, I was able to see the files so I could have stopped there thinking the file is fine but I continued and clicked extract. It failed. Turns out the file was corrupted.

Imagine if I had not done this sanity check and 6 months later I go to uncompress and the archive is corrupted. That is a potential anxiety attack.

This is not a joke, if you cannot ever trust the damn system to do basic things, you will constantly feel like you are walking on thin ice. Its 2021 how is this still an issue? When you go to complain you are treated with an uncaring groups or more likely an actively hostile group of people.

I have been going back and forth from Linux(various distros) for 15 years now. Not once have I ever felt that I could fully trust my system. The people who develop this stuff don't seem to care about basic quality. If it works for them, ship it. I don't know how to solve this problem without a financial incentive. There are no consequences to shipping regressions and thus even though the software is free as in freedom the incentives are not really aligned with many users.

Maybe I need to sit down and read through as much of the code of the OS and associated apps as possible and set specific version that I "FREEZE" on that are good known versions. But then I will not be able to get any help when something does break since im on old versions and typically googling issues returns fixes for the latest version...so now I would be left with fixing the code myself.

Imagine a Word 5-equivalent WP (and no, AbiWord is nowhere near that), a WP 5.1 clone, a XyWrite that knows OpenType, a dBase-style interface (definitely not a clone) for a modern, free database system. Those older programs simply worked, had command systems that could be explored and learned (shoot, before the Ribbon even Office could be sussed out through experimentation), and were about work. As much as I appreciate what I can do, capability-wise, with modern systems, the people who design them don't seem to be the people who use them.

  Windows without a title bar that can be moved only by dragging them from a specific small and narrow area.

plain white/black windows with no divider line, yet you can only drag from the tiny sliver of the now non-visible bar at the top

same thing happens when a dialog appears, you can only drag from that tiny little sliver even though the whole window is darkened... ugh

This is absolutely the worst thing that interfaces do. It’s terrible, I hate it so much.

All of the above are still examples of product managers runing everything.

This could be one of those things where you don't know it can be better until you see it.

Things like - faster computer, more comfortable car, better mattress (for you). Sometimes you live fine until the glass shatters and the old one will never be the same.

Edit: this sounds very consumer-y, it's just the examples that pop in to my head. It can be better bosses, more competent plumber, whatever.

Meanwhile in the growth-hacking section, they’ll raise an project proving that they could get 40% more users if they had a single specific button, if only these were not the users we betrayed in the first place.

Expect more with AI.

So, eventually I gutted its controller/display and replaced it with arduino, HD44780-based display, and HX711 mass sensor module (that reads the existing four sensors), with any form of wireless module for communication being easily addable, if needed.

Now, it's 1-gram precise, which is enough to be used as a large kitchen scale if need be (I plan on adding a switch), I've added supports customized calibration, and customized averaging (it takes N measurements, and displays that).

Further, I plan a smart home integration, and will replace the display and functionality with smartphone app with current user selection (presets + guest), logging, etc. (and subtraction of the phone's weight from the total).

It never supported those "fancy" additional measurements as water and/or fat percentage, but I guess those are relatively easily addable as well (aluminium/copper tape as sensors?). With this, formulas used for calculations would be the greater challenge.

Really, this is the only option of 100% future proofing ones hardware - do it yourself... plus, it is saved from a landfill.

> I’m not going to claim that our UX was generally excellent because it wasn’t; the fact that most users were geeks let us somewhat off the hook.

Has this person used the Amazon website? The UI looks much older than AWS. Which I don't mind, don't get me wrong, but it just surprises me for such a popular website, it really looks like the owners stopped updating it in the late 90s (and the search function works like something from the pre-google era as well). Amazon's shopping site is the last one I visit when I'm desperate and can't find it on normal sites, it's always a fun ride of page after page of "this is not what I looked for" and "even if your price field is a string this sort function should work better". No, it's not the geeks that let you not update the UX I think.

It works auto-magically for me all the time. I read a lot of books, and I often switch between my Kindle and my phone several times a book.

Maybe you don't have your Kindle connect to your network or whatever, but the reason you're struggling is because you're following the less trodden path.

It works for books I've uploaded to Kindle too, though I always use the upload service via email, precisely because then it's available on both devices.

Then synchronization works flawlessly.

Why do you want to do everything in such a manual way is beyond me.

Efforts like youtube-dl are a constant arms race between google making changes that prevent it working, and the youtube-dl devs pushing fixes. It's a piece of software where "too old to be useful" is measured in months as tons of things don't work anymore.

These companies will never willingly give up control over the user experience (especially if they NEED that control in order to serve ads), and they'll use every method at their disposal in order to do so. Discord already threatens to ban anyone who tries to use a third party client - how long until twitter does the same?

The original provider wants to make money off this, so they use the UI to provide you with ads and a bunch of tricks to keep engagement up. No way they let you off the hook to use what's costly without being exposed to what drives the income stream.

Open APIs, that's what you need. Obviously Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Chat, etc don't have any, for the above reasons.

I'm honestly surprised that email is still a thing. It's the last somewhat open API around. (Unless you count HTTP..)

Turning them into regular audio files and using your favorite player and having proper backups of the files is so much nicer. I'd straight up not use Audible if that was not an option, it's just not worth it.

I think it's pretty obvious why they got rid of it...

The “tabs” feature is such a borked UI. I suspect they added tab groups to try and “improve” the tabs feature, but they definitely stuffed it up even worse!

Closing a tab is now horribly inconsistent and multiple clicks (plus swipes if in landscape) - arrrgh. To close a tab, the best option is now to long press the [n] tab icon (next to the vertical ellipsis), which pops up a “X close” menu option (a fairly hidden feature).

The new tabs UI is so painful I did investigate other browser options.

we... did?

Separate to that it's not such a great example here even if you hate the change as it's a major version. Gnome 2 didn't change much where you find things and how it works for many years. Gnome 3 has been going on in a similar vein of not having changed much from a UI perspective (at least that I've noticed) for what, 8 years or so? I don't even recall the last time I had to learn something new about using it. You're completely within your rights to dislike it. There's mate and xfce for you that might be more to your taste. And as an aside, isn't just seriously cool that we have good options and alternatives if we don't like the way something goes on the linux desktop? When Apple/MS change you go with them or dump everything you use and how you use it to shift to a competitor. Gnome to xfce is pretty straightforward and you use it to use all the same software applications.

I used to get constantly brigaded by people on HN for claiming there's a point of completion.

I believe people in general have come around to this idea more lately.

It's possible to get to a point of "no further improvement, only maintenance"

Considering that often people complain about the lack of Product Managers or similar roles in most of the FOSS projects, and that nevertheless the same kind of things happens there (it is just a bit slower thanks to the lack of resources), I guess PMs are not the only culprits indeed.

I guess it just comes down to working ethics. Doctors are a good example. Among them there are people who just do a job, who aren't passionate about the whole saving lives. And those are people that work directly with patients and heal people. Now imagine how bad a situation is when a person doesn't work directly with people and responsibility seems little. Among developers, there are people who are genuinely concerned about quality of the code they produce, but they are a minority. There are far more of those, who came in the field just because that's the next big thing and where the money's at. They just spend their whole day ramming that badly written code in a badly written codebase because manager told them to get it done by the end of the day. They don't see the consequences of their actions.

I read something like "a bunch of developers are controlling data of millions of people" some time ago. It feels relevant. Quite a lot of developers don't realize the scale of impact their software can have on people.

Sometimes I think it would be an interesting mental exercise to convert most (all?) web pages and PC apps to something like a bog simple Windows 3.1 application. You could melt an online banking site to a handful of drop down menus and dialog boxes.

You have to wonder what the effect of ever-more-obtuse interfaces combined with visual gingerbread has on people with vision problems.

OTOH, there's apps that have been around for years where you have to wonder what they were thinking to begin with. Calibre. After Effects. Gimp.

I wonder though, whether b2b software also suffers from this, because such software isn't really made for public recognition and etc. in the first place.

Where are my recent transactions? How do I change the currency? Where are my account details? How do I pay someone?

All these things worked and were clear at some point in the past.

Now you can still do them but first you have to click the wrong things a few times first before you find it.

Purely UI though, the actual sending of money still seems to work.

Turns out there's someone in my country that rents movies via snail mail. I suspect it's just someone with a very large collection trying to recoup some of the money spent on it. It works really well.

Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV right now:

- The Grand Tour

- The Grand Tour presents: Lochdown

- The Grand Tour (again? must be a different season?)

- The Grand Tour (yes, again)

- The Tomorrow War

- The Office

- The Office (again)

- The Office (again)

- The Office (again)

And just for fun, let's list the next 9:

- The Office (again)

- The Office (again)

- The Office (again)

- The Office (again)

- The Office (again)

- Borat 2

- South Park

- South Park (again)

- South Park (again)

It's baffling to me that table-stakes features like this can be completely neglected for a product which is obviously a massive capital investment. I do think I understand now why it is that my friend with Prime Video watches The Office almost all of the time...

Edit: Apparently searching for "stand-up comedy live" or simply "comedy live" does show the type of content the search implies. I'd be keen to have someone explain what non-live stand-up comedy looks like to justify the difference in interpretation. Perhaps they could also tell me about how "stand-up" carries zero usable information...