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Comment by jbm | Hacker News Reader

I opened the App Store today and it had its list of "Top Apps of 2022". To my shock, Microsoft Teams was at, or near, the top. Yes - Microsoft Teams (which makes me input my login / password twice, can't let me pair program by dual sharing screens, and can't let me tag Japanese people) is a "top app". It was actually rated higher than Tiktok, which seems completely at odds with reality.

I remember when I used to look for apps actively, but it seems like the last time I really did that was when I had an iPhone 4S.

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These rankings are often based on Downloads, and since Teams is required in many companies, it is downloaded often.

In my area some crappy banking apps made it to the top list for the same reason: often downloaded.

I have no doubt you are right, but IMO, the title creates an expectation that this was an "Apple curated list" - which is clearly isn't.

Apple doesn't curate.

I'm not entirely convinced it truly ever did, but it's all just algorithms now. Even if the algorithm is only "sort by download between Jan 1 - NOW".

They do curate. The home view of the app store is all curated. They have a full team dedicated to that view and getting selected can get you significant installs. Also all the editor's choice apps are curated.

Then they should all be fired. What I'm looking at now, this is rubbish.

Hardly. Calling a list 'curated' doesn't make it so. Technically an intern could look at a sort and call it curated. On both app stores the editor's choices and top downloads are all bullshit and/or gamed.

Apps drop their inflated prices for a huge perceived discount to drive downmoads and get to the top of the list.

Editor's choices are supposed to be curated by some anonymous eponymous editor but the apps are just always already popular apps, so another sort by downloads.

I'd not put it past these companies to say they their 'AI'(hate they all use this term) is curating the lists for us, so technically sort by downloads is their curation.

Google play store is worse- the sales tab is always the same scam games, top paid makes no sense, editor's choice is bullshit.

I fell into the same trap, I thought it was a curated list given it's so prominent but... No, it's just a dumb list sorting by some counter (or score based on download count, reviews, etc.).

I'm in the same camp as many other commenters on this thread, some years ago (7-10) I used to use the App Store to actually discover apps, nowadays I just open it to search for exactly the app I'm looking for, mentally skip the 1st result as it's always an ad and then look around for what I actually searched for.

Terrible experience, the storefront aspect is completely useless now. Haven't bought any app that I discovered myself, it's usually through recommendations from friends or internet reviews.

Tim Cook is an extremely good bean-counter and logistics guy but definitely shouldn't be at the helm of being the judge for product development anymore. In that sense Jobs was actually pretty unique and had good taste.

MS Teams is great

Its absolutely a piece of trash software that needs to be open sourced so it can be better. My hatred for MS teams is insurmountable. Its buggy, slow as fuck, very sluggish, takes up a shitton of my resources and RAM. I hate MS teams with a passion.

I forgive all for the "Join on this device" button that lets me log in to a meeting on two devices.

MS Teams is the buggiest thing I have ever had the misfortune to use. I have to log in daily to use it – the browser is a better option than the standalone client as it's easier to wipe everything and start again. Yesterday, I received the following errors during two meetings:

1) I was unable to login in Chrome – "An unexpected error has occurred"

2) In an incognito mode browser window, I was unable to login due to not permitting the use of 3rd party cookies, despite whitelisting those in Chrome's preferences

3) I wiped cookies all cookies and tried again in a normal window – I was able to log in, but when trying to have a call, I was told "This feature is only available in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge". I was using Chrome.

4) I therefore swapped to a chrome-based browser that spoofs its user-agent as the previous version, Iridium.

5) This enabled me to start a call. It worked fine, but during the process of the meeting, the mute/video/screensharing/leave bar completely vanished, leaving a black box at the top (and me unable to mute myself or share my screen)

6) During the next meeting, about 30 s after the end of the previous one (I refreshed the page to get the box back), the camera periodically turned off with the message "Your video isn't working. We couldn't access your camera".

7) I have previously emailed M$ support highlighting these issues. The response I received was "We are aware that Teams isn't perfect and are working hard to improve it continually".

It's not fit for purpose.

The only way to get MS Teams to work reliably on my Mac is to start it up first, then click on the meeting link to go to the browser and then on to Teams. I start the process 5 minutes before the first meeting.

My personal anecdote, I don't have any issues with Teams on my Mac. Our organization is a Microsoft shop. I'm one of 3 Mac users only because I develop our iOS apps, so it isn't like our IT has some exceptional skills with Apple products.

This hints at system configuration issues affecting MS Teams: i.e. there's something on my Mac which interferes with Teams running properly.

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