Apps Getting Worse | Hacker News Reader

Apps Getting Worse

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25 pointsbusymom012 comments

This can be Applied to not just Apps. But many other places, and not just Project managers but politicians, civil servants, purchasing, sales, marketing, operation , they all work for their own self interest. Along as it doesn't rock the boat too much.

As Steve Jobs said:

"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."

> in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product

Well yeah, starting off with a beyond-terrible UX is one way to prevent product managers ever making it worse.

Does it count as crippling the product when a new feature has a UX so bad that it makes the entire product worse? I’m thinking of AWS Organizations. The console UX is several steps beyond terrible, and it drove me to find alternative clouds.

(Of course, the others have their own problems.)

This phenomenon is inevitable, at least for any apps or websites that have to earn their keep. The problem is, features need to be added to expand the user base and keep up with, or stay ahead of, the competition. Adding almost any feature will make the interface more complex.

It's true that 95% of the users don't use the more complex features, but product reviews and corporate purchase decisions are driven by the feature set.

> No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.”

Great line. Hard to have a long term stability when people are motivated by short term incentives.

I think Apple started this idea of planned obsolescence and disposability (buy a new phone every year).

And their yearly OS updates exist purely to slap a new wallpaper on their yearly hardware micro-iteration for marketing purposes.

Mobile phone companies have been pushing their customers to upgrade their phones every time their contract came up since forever.

> I think Apple started this idea of planned obsolescence and disposability (buy a new phone every year).

iPhones generally get at least 5 years of software updates.

The current iOS 16 will run on an iPhone 8 from 2017.

Batteries do age but it is usually possible to get them replaced.

[2021] I was sure to have read it some time ago, it is still valid however.

... and here is the previous thread on HN (623 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109842

The best response I saw there was that it's simply become fashion. Apps change for the sake of changing. The same is true for cars so that people can tell that the older model is older and the newer one is different. It's also in Apple's designs, square edges -> rounded -> sharp edges, thin wedge, slab, etc.

Yup. But, amazingly, The Economist has since released a new version of their app, which is somehow even worse than the regression he describes. It was the first thing I thought of when I read the title.

Wevsites getting worse edition: old Reddit vs new Reddit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com