"Worse is Better" in the Google Play Store | Hacker News Reader

"Worse is Better" in the Google Play Store

mattspitz.me

26 pointsmattspitz10 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20131221150450/http://mattspitz....

> I hope that Apple sees the App Store’s model of infrequent, monolithic releases as a competitive disadvantage and finds some way to tighten the app development iteration cycle.

I hope they don't. Problems that a technical user might consider to be small shortcomings are a huge source of frustration to less technical users, who assume they did something wrong, or quickly come to distrust the product as a whole.

I observed this recently when I saw my wife play with a Windows Phone. The camera app was being difficult, and she quickly put it back on the display and turned to leave the Microsoft Store. My comments about the great display and the technical specs of the camera fell on deaf ears. To her, the experience quickly conveyed to her that the product won't be something she can trust, especially since she isn't comfortable enough with technology to feel justified in taking the time to develop workarounds.

In contrast, she loves her iPhone because it rarely lets her down. It's not bug free, but Apple appears to be very rigorous in stress-testing the paths non-technical users are most likely to encounter. My Lumia 620, which I like quite a bit, will sometimes stop responding to touch input when unlocked to answer a call, and will sometimes not respond to voice input while paired with the Bluetooth system in my car. These are easily worked-around (e.g. simply locking and unlocking it will make it responsive to touch input again), but to my wife they'd be deal breakers because she doesn't have a good mental model of the extent and scope of the bugs.

Well-said.

My point was more on shipping new features quickly, not shipping buggy software. It's up to your engineering process to ship solid software. The Play Store just enables your product team to figure out product/market fit ASAP.

Worse is worse. It's still much easier to find great apps in the App Store vs foraging from the sea of crap and copycats in the Play store.

It might be a pain for developers, but their approach clearly works for users.

This assumes that everyone has equal access to distribution in the app/play store, which is not the case.

Most apps grow organically at first, and at that stage, swift iteration is critical.

Also, there's a difference between shipping buggy software and quickly testing new features.

I've only found consistently high quality apps in the free software Android market, f-droid. I think the Play Store has been overrun with crappy, ad-infested apps since it was the Android Market.

Why are we renaming Lean/Agile development? The "New Jersey" approach? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development

The link provided in the article [1] shows the MIT/NJ distinction far predates any conception of agile development.

[1] http://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

And sorry for the downvote, that was accidental.

Good point. As for downvoting, I didn't even know that was possible.

It becomes available after you pass a certain karma threshold. It's just as annoyingly small and easy to accidentally hit but hard to intentionally hit as the upvote.

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