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Comment by aclelland | Hacker News Reader

I've come to accept that it's just a cost cutting measure for larger tech companies, why offer users an option when you don't need to? It costs extra to document, test and offer support for.

I can't really think of any software from a major tech company that I use frequently and that's been updated to give me _more_ toggles to customize the app. It's always to take things away.

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Exactly.

For example on a small company we had one user that needed RTL support, this ment we create backend code to store his perferences, front end code to add UI for it and testing the feature. We implemented because for a small company each user is important where big companies or projects(Firefox,GNOME will force this minorities to go elsewhere)

Uhm, there are literally hundreds of millions of people in the world that use RTL languages.

For mainstream, global software this is not a niche feature but a core requirement.

Sure, but as I said I was in a small company, 2 developers only that this was the first time we worked with RTL. The project was not targeting a global audience or a casual home user, it was something about helping with your job, only supports english... my point was that we did not answer with it is just 1 customer we can ignore them , we decided we can do the work, gain a new customer this week and maybe a few more in future , every one is important. If we code the things right we don't need to touch this code at each update.

It depends on whether you're talking about tools or appliances. Visual studio, Intellij, AWS etc. are constantly adding features.

Appliances shed the sharp corners.

Apple actually does really well at this where it matters. Their accessibility settings allow a huge amount of customization for making the devices easier to use for disabled people. They just don't have android rom style settings like changing the unlock screen to swipe down rather than up or turning the battery indicator in to a circle.

Configurability matters in a lot more cases than just accessibility.

example: set Spotify to be the default music app.

Or the ability to change your system apps.

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