Ask HN: How do you deal with “too many apps”?

[topliceanu]

I know that the obvious answer is: stop using so many apps! I'm interested in solutions for when you _have to_ use multiple apps.

We are a small-to-medium-sized company (~60 employees). We're organised in small teams with a large degree of freedom when it comes to the tools and processes we use to do our job.

We use dozens of services, all very good for their individual purpose. All these tools are collaborative, they capture conversation and decisions. We have no mechanism to keep track of all this information!

Say we are trying to evaluate a recently completed project: who contributed what? what were the key phases in the project? when/where were the key decisions made? were we missing information known elsewhere in the company? etc.

Do you have a mechanism to organise the information across various apps so that it's easy to associate? How do you work around information siloing?

[ehacke]

If it's just keeping track of the users and who has access, I built https://roleup.io to solve that problem. And I'd be super interested to know which 60 services you use.

Beyond shilling my service, I'm not sure that there is a good way to coordinate data between these services. I know from building it that even something as relatively homogeneous as user data can have an enormous variability between services. Going to the next level and trying to sync application data seems like it would be basically impossible.

On top of that, most of these services explicitly forbid the syncing of application data out of their service in their TOS. Facebook is a great example, they want to trap your data.

Data freedom is becoming a large issue in SaaS services of all kinds. See Adversarial Interoperability for more info: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

[topliceanu]

> I built https://roleup.io roleup.io

This looks dope! thanks for sharing (and building it)

> And I'd be super interested to know which 60 services you use.

Apologies, I didn't make this clear enough. The company has 60 employees. How many apps/services do we use? Honestly, I don't know, but it's at least a couple of dozens. Here are some I interact with on a daily basis, with support for collaboration: Slack, Dropbox Paper, Google Docs/Sheets/Diagrams/Forms, Salesforce, LeanKit, Figma, Jira, Trello, Asana, Zendesk, etc.

> Going to the next level and trying to sync application data seems like it would be basically impossible.

I'm not sure I want to sync the data between the apps, it seems the duplication would make things worse! But it's interesting you propose that.

[ehacke]

> Slack, Dropbox Paper, Google Docs/Sheets/Diagrams/Forms, Salesforce, LeanKit, Figma, Jira, Trello, Asana, Zendesk

RoleUp handles most of those, but some don't offer user APIs.

What type of data are you looking to coordinate between the applications?

One hack that I've seen people do, though it takes a lot of work, is to push all kinds of data out of each respective service using stuff like Zapier, and into a shared Google Sheet for coordination. Then the Google Sheet itself has macros that push everything back into the sources via Zapier or others.

It's kind of a hack, but can work for specific use cases.