Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I spent the last ten years of my career building iOS apps, all but one you would likely known at the time, and whoever in charge of this app is an idiot. Shipping an app to the general public with symbols intact? Really? If they didn't know/didn't care, it tells me no one there likely cared about any other quality issue either. It's highly likely that any relevant lead person probably screamed about this daily, but higher ups don't give a shit.

At my last job our legal team would have had a cow shipping labels. Our apps are gleaned by blogs looking for scoops on upcoming features.

I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight. Their app was a POS and they had hired someone to write a new one -- the same company. Now they had no idea why it was so delayed so they wanted to hire someone to embed in the other company to spy on what was going on. Of course I wanted nothing to do with this travesty. This was years ago, no idea what happened.

You'd be amazed at how pathetic mobile development can be even at big companies. Mobile doesn't have to be hard, but if management tries hard enough, can make crap at scale.

Speaking of United shipping apps with symbols intact...

Last week I came across some unminified JS on United's website[0]. I love the warning it starts with:

   /* Minification failed. Returning unminified contents.
   (5218,49-69): run-time error JS1300: Strict-mode does not allow assignment to 
   undefined variables: nearbySearchErrorMsg
   */

Never seen a minifier fail by not minifying before. Also interesting seeing all the commented out code and TODOs.

[0] https://www.united.com/ual/bundles/js/flightsearchresults

> I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight

Oh it goes deeper than that. Almost every airline (Southwest is the only exception coming to mins at the moment) also outsources their web design, their pricing structure, and their availability tracking. I've worked with several airlines that legitimately could not give us a list of all their current routes. Some of them actually paid us to scrape their website and tell them where they're currently flying and how much it cost on average.

I like what Duffel is doing as far as creating a nice, consistent airline booking API goes: https://duffel.com/

Maybe some carriers should integrate with Duffel and build their apps on top of the Duffel API instead of shipping all the logic off to accenture or whatever

Duffel is interesting, I wonder what they use on their back end. I've written airline booking API when I was at an OTA (now sadly gone like so many) on top of our parent company's res system. It can be complex, made more in my case so by the pathetic res system itself and its limitations. In fact at the time we had no way to do test bookings without real money (and mostly un-refundable except for a single route).

I travel on United probably 6 flights a month on average. Overall I think it’s a pretty good app but like anything I use routinely, I could easily come up with a list of 10 complaints, from a UX perspective.

My biggest is the UI only considers one half of a RT “trip” a trip.

It seems like multimillion $ companies everywhere can simultaneously declare widely that mobile is their future, point to stats like 75%+ usage of their services is through the app interface, and then basically their entire dev/maintenance crew is one person stretched across multiple projects already.

> At my last job our legal team would have had a cow shipping labels. Our apps are gleaned by blogs looking for scoops on upcoming features.

They don’t need symbols to find stuff…

It's an airline. Of course they dgaf.

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