[another_kel]

> with comparable functions (not always, but quite often).

Is that really the case? Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?

Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms.

People whine about bloated web tech in app, and how good it was with native while forgetting that availability and feature parity on all platforms is a feature too.

I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.

[TeMPOraL]

> Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms.

Sync was done in many ways, thanks to the app using actual files to store information. It wasn't a concern of the app itself - nor it should be. Off-line mode was the default. Public API wasn't needed. Collaborative projects is something nobody asks for in a Todo app, and of course, portability gets much easier when you have much less code to port.

Still, I could imagine apps back then having all those online and multiplayer features[0]. But even then, this doesn't add up to modern bloat. APIs, collaborative editing, sync, integrations - these aren't compute-heavy or real-time features, they shouldn't cause a big performance impact. That is, unless you're doing something stupid, like blocking on network requests, keeping state on a server, or just constantly parsing and serializing JSON (or XML).

> Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?

Yes. WinAMP reigns supreme. Spotify app is hot, bloated garbage and has only a small fraction of features WinAMP offered. The entire value of Spotify is in their service part - but music streaming existed in 2000. You probably could make WinAMP stream from Spotify if you tried hard enough. I hope someone does and uses this to demonstrate what should be obvious: there's no technial justification for Spotify being so heavy, so feature-less and so bad UI/UX-wise.

--

[0] - They didn't have them, because most of those features only became useful once smartphones and mobile connectivity took off in the earnest.

[pixl97]

>WinAMP reigns supreme.

I mean, kinda but not really.

Back in the day a large number of us likely had huge (exceptionally legally questionable) MP3 libraries that we managed. And while, yea having 100GB of music with just about everything was nice, it is also a major pain in the ass. So much so that Winamp pretty much died after streaming (long with legal issues in MP3s) took over the market.

Now, if the music market wasn't legally locked down, would there be better streaming apps? I believe so. So it appears we may be asking the wrong questions. Not why apps are getting slower, but why it seems the market has fewer competing apps at all levels.

[TeMPOraL]

> So it appears we may be asking the wrong questions. Not why apps are getting slower, but why it seems the market has fewer competing apps at all levels.

This is exactly the phenomenon I recently started describing on HN with the phrase "software is resisting commoditization". It's rare these days to see an app you could use for a while and then replace with an equivalent alternative.

I think SaaS is a big driver of this - by keeping important functionality (and user data) server-side, the user ends up being locked into your software. No need to rely on IP protections - there's just no way for them to pirate the bits running on your infrastructure. And even if someone reverse-engineered your APIs and built a better frontend, the users of that alternative would still be tied to your backend, and thus your service.

This means there's no business in making alternative frontends. Instead, it's better to start your own SaaS and go after a different market slice. Even seemingly equivalent products quickly drift apart, each optimizing strongly for slightly different audience. It's easier than to fight another company over their users directly.

A tailored set of features is a good "unique value proposition" for a while, but it may be too easy for someone to eventually replicate. Taking user data hostage is better, but users don't like it very much. The best UVPs seem to have nothing to do with software.

Spotify is a stellar example here: the real value they own isn't software or infrastructure, it's all the relationships and contracts they've established in the music industry. This moat is impervious to nearly all competition - unless you're insider on the music label side, or plugged into Softbank's infinite money hose, you're not going to replicate it. Spotify, in turn, doesn't have to give a shit about its music player anymore.

How to fix this? I'm not sure if it can be. We'd need to destroy the ability for businesses to prop their software with some unique propositions that can't be easily copied by competitors. I can't see it happening without a total overhaul of intellectual property and computer crime laws. Things like Data Portability section of GDPR help a little, but ultimately there's just too many ways to create those tiny moats that make applications non-substitutable.

[yobbo]

"Feature" phones from 20 years ago (most Nokia and Ericsson even into the android era) could sync personal data such as phone book and calendar over the internet [0]. The libraries doing this were originally written in C and their compiled versions took up maybe tens of kb running on constrained hardware. The functionality is not remarkable.

The UX of those phones was pretty poor though.

[0] - SyncML.

[TeMPOraL]

That's true. But I think the critical mass wasn't there yet, those features weren't used much outside of business circles.

> The UX of those phones was pretty poor though.

That... really depends. Having physical buttons was nice. I could write on those numeric keypads about as fast as I do on full touchscreen keyboard today, except I'd make less errors and could do it without looking at my fingers.

Which brings me to one piece of feature phone UX I strongly miss to this day: fixed latency. The firmware/OS was pretty much (or maybe even de facto) a real-time OS. With few rare exceptions, every interaction had consistent, fixed latency. Because of that (and physical buttons), I quickly learned to operate my phone without looking at it, or even pulling it out of my pocket. Unlock, menu, down, down, OK, [wait 1 second], down, OK, start typing... - these kind of sequences quickly became muscle memory.

All that was lost with switch to smartphones, as both Android and iOS have randomly changing and unpredictable UI latency, and the UI itself isn't fixed in space either.

[yobbo]

Yes, they are all equivalent. There are variations in specific features but it should be obvious how irrelevant that is.

The present day "apps" you describe are bloated because they bundle an entire web browser and more, maybe the equivalent of a container, to run the little sliver of JS/html that presents the UI to the user.

The reason they are bundled like this is to enable web developers to work on them.

[citrin_ru]

Newer software in most cases has more features but do we all really need all this features? All features I use in the newest MS Office where already present in Office 2000. Sure there are people who use features added recently, but if only a small fraction users uses a feature it can be implemented in a plugin (given an architecture which allows independent extensions). This way all these new feature would not increase startup time and would not send OS to swapping if you don't have enough RAM.

[citrin_ru]

> I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.

My experience was very different, may be because I don't care much about how an app looks but care is it allows me to do what I need to do fast. Before electron most apps followed Microsoft UI guidelines, had consistent look and feel, hot keys for most functions with basic hot keys (like save/open/help e. t. c.) consistent in different apps, low UI latency (unless the system is swapping but electron made this problem worse by using more RAM).

[dmitriid]

> Are 2010 skype and 2022 discord comparable in terms of functionality? Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?

The increase in resources available since 200s is measured in orders of magnitude. Are there similar increases in software features that warrant the increased bloat?

> I still remember how bad it was before electron as a windows user. Half the apps that seemed cool(omnifocus, bear notes) had mac only desktop version, other(1password, evernote) had a native windows version that felt ugly and unpolished.

Now all apps are ugly and unpolished

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Frankly, I don't see much difference in functionality between 1996 ICQ and 2023 Whatsapp or Telegram. Why people keep reinventing the wheel?

[citrin_ru]

> Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?

In my opinion - yes. Most of what Spotify provides implemented in the cloud (on server side). Client is a UI to select and stream music. Winamp supported music streaming to but didn't have an advanced UI to select what to stream. I see no fundamental reasons why a desktop app for Spotify should use much more resources. Given open API it should be possible to make a Spotify plugin for Winamp.

I haven't used Spotify desktop app but can guess it is written using electron or something like that and this is the main reason it uses much more RAM/CPU than Winamp, not because it does more work.

[funcDropShadow]

So now it is bad everywhere. Good user facing software integrates itself into the platform so that the user can combine multiple tools. That got completely lost through the "app"-ification of all desktop software. They only integration that is done nowadays is done through cloud APIs. Half of the time they are done to sell tje users data and not to fulfill the need of a user.

Why else do I have to upload my fitness/health data to see it on my smartphone in addition to Garmin watch?

[anthk]

Discord? Kopete p0wns Discord using 1/16 of the resources.