> They don't care about Material design, fancy animations, beautiful buttons
If they don't care about those things, they aren't doing a very good job of voting with their wallets. It's much easier to sell a product that is pretty.
> "elegant" code
That isn't for users' benefit. The people paying to maintain the software do care how much it costs to maintain the software. Elegant code is an attempt to make it cheaper to maintain.
> a ton of niche features
People buying software do care about that, and they are often a distinct group from users.
> mobile apps, your annoying push notifications, your fancy menu bars that you also fix to the top of the screen for whatever reason, your autoplay videos, your little "delightful" asides that interrupt the content
None of those are for users' benefit. Those are for the benefit of customers (advertisers).
So perhaps saying that users expect more isn't telling the whole story. However stakeholders certainly expect more.
> they aren't doing a very good job of voting with their wallets
I'm tired of repeating this, but here it is:
Voting with your wallet. Is. Bullshit. Consumers don't pick from the space of all possible products, they choose from what's available on the market. Especially in software, it's producers who collectively determine trends. If they all fall into a fad, customers have no way of saying no.
Exactly right. Just like producers have decided that all upcoming editors, chat apps etc have to use Electron. They all talk as "Overwhelmingly users have spoken that they want bloated, slow text editors with million plugins for next gen development."
IMO they are exactly like military-industrial complex where increasingly complicated software will need newer and complicated hardware because "customers demanding it".
Your argument would be true if on any given software market there would be around 3 or 4 developers and products.
This is very far from current state of affairs, where for almost every possible kind of software there are a lot of different developers with vastly different products, different designs and ideologies. They may not be as well-known, but they exist in their niche, and you can definitely vote with your wallet for one that looks to your liking.
Extreme example - mobile todo app. I think that one in ten professional developers released one to app store just as part of his portfolio. And users still choose apps with mainstream design, look and feel. If that's not voting with their wallets, what is?
If they don't care about those things, they aren't doing a very good job of voting with their wallets. It's much easier to sell a product that is pretty.
> "elegant" code
That isn't for users' benefit. The people paying to maintain the software do care how much it costs to maintain the software. Elegant code is an attempt to make it cheaper to maintain.
> a ton of niche features
People buying software do care about that, and they are often a distinct group from users.
> mobile apps, your annoying push notifications, your fancy menu bars that you also fix to the top of the screen for whatever reason, your autoplay videos, your little "delightful" asides that interrupt the content
None of those are for users' benefit. Those are for the benefit of customers (advertisers).
So perhaps saying that users expect more isn't telling the whole story. However stakeholders certainly expect more.