Their streak of blunders(1) has already made it challenging to convince myself to give them money this upgrade season. Polluting my experience with even more(2) ads has a really great chance of being the final straw.
1: mismanagement of bug bounty program, declining software quality, ham fisted CSAM efforts, endless series of App Store fiascos... off the top of my head right now.
2: their push notifications pushing [to me] useless services, noise in the Settings.app, parading Apple Music all over iTunes Store, Maps.app editor's picks seem like glorified ads, App Store search is both useless and has ads. It's already bad.
> if an app has ongoing development that you benefit from, it seems entirely fair to pay a subscription.
Agreed. Though, this latest development – the move to Electron – is a negative for me, so it leaves a part of me wondering what kind of development I have been paying for. I imagine I am not alone with such a sense of disappointment.
I could have written this comment myself, albeit less eloquently.
That is a very accurate representation of how I feel about this, too. I enjoy building apps, but I don't know that I can keep using these devices.
I was looking forward to upgrading to the new hardware in the fall, but now I'm not sure I can stomach the implications of buying a new device that may at any point start policing what I do far beyond what I'd accepted at the time of purchase.
I've never used Clubhouse, but on iOS and macOS Telegram looks and feels very native.. but better. Snappier, faster, more responsive, yet still looks correct, and works as I expect native apps to work.
The thing is though, apps that look native often look like they were made by beginners. The native look on both iOS and Android is also starting to look dated in terms of graphic design.
Most popular apps don't use native design but rather artistically always a step ahead of native. Think of e.g. the Airbnb, Uber, Slack, Discord, Instagram apps.
If Instagram or Airbnb used native iOS/Android design they'd lose users pretty quickly IMO.
Of all those, I have tried Discord and Slack, and I had a really, really horrible time. Neither are things I intend to use of my own volition, and am inclined to argue against using if I have a say.
Drag and drop, text inputs, selections, UI elements, keyboard shortcuts, state preservation – none of those worked as they should. I would accept a divergence for a legitimate improvement, but it's just system-wide basic functionality missing.
All of that works correctly in Telegram. There is great value in adhering to the system conventions, design, and using native elements – it's fairly clear what is supposed to be what, a good chunk of the time, and there is minimal context switching as I use other native apps.
> If Instagram or Airbnb used native iOS/Android design they'd lose users pretty quickly IMO.
Those are services.. where would people go to replace Instagram? Twitter? Airbnb, what other big service has brand mindshare that people know about for fly-by-night unregulated sleeping accomodations?
I don't think iOS/Android design would cause them to lose or gain users.
Uber and Slack look nice but they're rather slow. After a week, the "looks nice" part ceases to matter and all that's left is the annoyance of waiting 200ms-1000ms between every action.
I agree with that, but also 99% sure the latency in those apps have nothing to do with their graphic design and more to do with these apps waiting for an API roundtrip response before updating the UI, and possibly lots of analytics bloat.
I think an argument can be construed that (one of) Apple's interests is to control what and how users can do on Apple devices. iOS-like lockdown seems entirely in line with that.
> Going Mac App Store only would drive tons of developers off the platform and do absolutely nothing to increase sales on the Store anyway.
And others would fill in the gap. The Store sales would inevitably have to go up – it would become the only way to get software on the device. Not like every user would immediately drop the Mac. I can imagine a non-trivial fraction of users wouldn't even notice that something has changed.
It wouldn't happen right next year, or in one go, but the more I think, the more I am growing convinced that it's sneaking up.
> It would be widely panned as a ham-fisted move.
If it doesn't affect the bottom line, it doesn't really matter. They got away with 4 years of perhaps the worst laptop keyboard of the decade; are getting away with inflicting the TouchBar price tag on tens of thousands of users(1), making devices unserviceable, and even with the matter in question.
Given Apple's size and user base, I'm afraid that outside of straight-up illegal activity, there's little Apple can't get away with. Especially if the janky move is factored into small, cruddy steps.
(1) I realize it's a lame point, but it annoys me personally
Safari 14 has resolved an inconsistent, tedious bug I kept experiencing (most often on reddit): changing the URL query parameters in the address bar and hitting return immediately resulted in the page merely being reloaded. Had to wait a solid second or so before hitting return to have a decent chance of getting the correct page.
But I've grown much, much too fond of this "No Javascript unless I say so, etc etc" experience to give it up without a substantial other benefit.
> Safari 14 has resolved an inconsistent, tedious bug I kept experiencing (most often on reddit): changing the URL query parameters in the address bar and hitting return immediately resulted in the page merely being reloaded. Had to wait a solid second or so before hitting return to have a decent chance of getting the correct page.
I've experienced something similar before Safari 14: when opening Safari for the first time and quickly pasting the URL to the address bar and hitting Enter, the URL would just disappear and I'd hear a bell sound. Had to wait a second to paste the URL and have it actually go to that page. These little things contribute to a general feeling that the browser is not polished enough for everyday use.
Ah, shucks. I never managed to find a conclusive "acknowledgment" of my issue, so once Safari 14 rolled around, I only checked whether I can make my issue reoccur and shrugged it off as resolved. Guess I was wrong, because your description feels eerily familiar. Maybe we're using it too fast.
Agreed about the user experience. Really unpleasant to work around some indiscernible and apparently unfixable problems. I feel like in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario with Apple software, but I suppose that is a topic unto itself.
With Firefox I sometimes notice oddities with how fonts are rendered, and it generally feels "less native", but at least I don't run into miscellaneous issues like that anymore.
> The people who complain about the touchbar functionality must not be putting any effort at all into it.
I would say that people who complain about uselessness of F-keys must not have put any at all effort into using them.
Upon getting my MBP 2016, I spent numerous months trying to make the TouchBar useful; from customizing the contents where apps allowed it, to BTT.
What it came down to is that things worthy a keyboard shortcut are things I want to be able to do fast, reliably, and instinctively. I don't want to search for the button on the TouchBar – I'm using the keyboard, it needs to be as natural as typing, without the need to look down at it. I have a screen already, I don't need another one on my keyboard.
I firmly believe TouchBar can't even come close to the same realm of usefulness as F-keys, much less being worth the price hike it imposes. Function keys are twelve, tactile, solid, free, reliable(1) buttons for keyboard shortcuts; TouchBar is a touchscreen that sometimes(2) works.
> a button to "toggle mic in zoom" actually solves a real problem
I haven't used Zoom, but if it's a decent-ish Mac app, it either already has a keyboard shortcut to toggle microphone, or you can set one in Keyboard Shortcuts, in System Preferences.
(1) as far as anything is reliable on the butterfly keyboards.
(2) same story as butterfly keyboard – if it's even slightly sporadic, it is a shitty input device.
That's fair. Personally, I used the tactile function keys for exactly six things (brightness up/down, volume up/down, mute, play/pause). Those six functions are now available on my touchbar. They're no longer tactile, which, yes, is a minor inconvenience. I wouldn't use a touchscreen for touch-typing code, of course. But for a handful of buttons way off the home row, it doesn't affect me much.
In exchange, I get to add other buttons which can also display customizable state. Yes, zoom has a global shortcut to toggle the mic. The problem is, the mic state is not visible on your screen unless the zoom window is visible. This is a frustrating design flaw IMO, which really should be addressed in some consistent way across every phone/video app. But, it's not, and so I need to pay attention to my mic state. My touchbar button toggles the mic, and displays the current mic status. I would imagine that every phone/video chat app is similar.
1: mismanagement of bug bounty program, declining software quality, ham fisted CSAM efforts, endless series of App Store fiascos... off the top of my head right now.
2: their push notifications pushing [to me] useless services, noise in the Settings.app, parading Apple Music all over iTunes Store, Maps.app editor's picks seem like glorified ads, App Store search is both useless and has ads. It's already bad.