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Comment by mFixman | Hacker News Reader

Is there any product being developed by a giant company for >10 years that isn't a bloated mess at this point?

I see feature creep and sloppy functionality in the core as a symptom of the usual tech project management style, where there's pressure to make up random metrics to have flashy results over maintaining existing functionality.

Proper testing has the same impact for your performance than just ignoring the metrics you are supposed to test. You can also get praised when you fix the problem your sloppiness caused.

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I developed on Android in ~'11 and it was a mess then. Again in ~'17 and it was... also a mess.

There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with it that resists change. Plus in some cases Google simply doesn't seem to give a shit about the platform, letting it lag behind JS versions of their service SDKs for fairly basic functionality, or announcing big UI overhauls but then severely half-assing the developer-facing side of those features.

Well, it's a walled garden. Half of it locked down in the name of security. (While "free VPN"[0] apps steal your data while you play 30 seconds of some "game".) The other half is for performance and "consistent user experience" reasons. Oh, the remaining is just the battery saver killing everything for good measure. The docs are shit. The IDE is okay, but the build system, tooling, emulator and everything provided by Google (Flutter stuff! Flutter web!) always turns out to be just a bunch of interdependent unfinished binary blobs with a laughably DIY "installer".

Sure, devs get used to it fast and can be productive in no time. But it's ridiculous how much hoops they invent out of sheer corporate-ness. (Importing projects? Nah, it never works on the first time. Upgrading projects? That basically only works if you recently sacrificed someone's firstborn. Adding some 3rd party library and getting the build system and the IDE work without spending hours fighting them? I hope you started this journey with two kidneys.)

[0] I just made it up, but wouldn't be surprised if someone does that

iOS?

Yep iOS changes but not in a way where it trips you up and with much fewer features that overcomplicate or cause breakage.

Funny as how many change away from iOS because of its strange changes.

What strange changes are you referring to ?

In my experience, major iOS updates don't contain drastic changes and at first glance they don't look too different. Each update feels like a refinement of the previous release, especially compared to Android.

I'd like to meet some of those people. iOS changed, but not in a way that it hampers usability - and by this I mean basic usability. Texts, calls -> these are the important bits in a phone, not 5000 weather apps that do the same thing and flood you with ads as a bonus.

Android is a bloated mess and this bug should be a giant red flag for both Google and MS to get their shit together. Windows is currently a huge mess as well, bloated beyond repair and with "features" nobody ever asked for, but hey, who doesn't like advertising on their login screen and unrelenting telemetry?

My SIL is one of them. She is a graphic designer and has been a 100% loyal apple user for 15 years. She had everything apple, including an iPhone. But for her last phone she decided to go for an android because she was fed up with several things on IOS.

She still uses Mac thoug.

As someone who did the same move with the release of Pixel Pro 6, I deeply regret it. Google Maps in a minimized view fared worse than my iPhone 8 plus for multitasking, that is bound to cause some traffic accidents if a driver tries multitasking while on a car mount.

Frustrating how the best software engineers can't compete with a hardware company (Apple Inc).

> Frustrating how the best software engineers can't compete with a hardware company (Apple Inc).

Allowing for a moment for a moment the premise that Google has the best software engineers, the company seems to be structured to ensure they output mediocre work. Awful performance, poor to terrible UX, poor documentation, weird or ill-advised implementations of public-facing interfaces (say, libraries), et c. There are exceptions, but "high quality software" is not something I associate with Google.

Give her a cycle or two of getting used to something, then having the rug pulled out from under you with a cancelled product or service, an inferior UI overhaul, etc. and she'll be back.

I went through that over and over again for the better part of the decade before finally jumping to an iPhone and swearing off joining any new Google services. Being a Google user is being in a perpetual state of beta testing where you pay them with your data. I'm convinced they're never gonna learn their lesson.

Even MacOS, honestly...

Excel?

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