[mato]

Err, nope.

As I commented on TFA, and will gladly repeat here:

Wow. Well put. The scariest thing is, this translates even to domain-specific apps such as Navionics Boating. I use it every time I go out, because, somehow, they've not yet managed to touch the charts and rendering and it just works, better than any of the competitors. But, the rest of the interface is like a Fisher Price toy. You want to add a waypoint based on a specific lat/long you got out of a pilot book? There is no such thing as "Add waypoint" in the UI, nooo, you enter the lat/long in "Search" and then tap on something or other to add it as a waypoint.

This attitude manifests itself throughout the application's UI, as if, indeed, the application is optimized for "Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero.".

[sanderjd]

I'm struggling to see how this is responsive to my comment. Was it meant for someone else?

[mato]

I was responding to your comment, but should have used less cut and paste. You wrote:

> This is why I like to pay for things. This dynamic only really exists for things that are given away for free.

Navionics Boating is a paid application, and it's not cheap. There is no free tier, just a 14-day trial period.

Despite that, it seems to have gone down the same route of Marl-ifying the interface as a free app would have done.

So, my point is, that this dynamic exists even for things that you pay money for.

[sanderjd]

Ok yeah I get it now! Thanks for clarifying.

So, I guess it would require a lot more research to make a real argument about this, but to me, this just sounds like an application that isn't very good, but I don't think is the same phenomenon described by the article. I definitely don't think charging money is any kind of guarantee of quality. Software is hard to make and lots of software sucks just because it sucks.

But the difference I see is that I think Navionics Boating has an incentive to make that app better. That if they make improvements for users like you, that will likely impact their bottom line positively, because they'll attract and retain more users like you.

But free mass-market consumer apps have the opposite incentive. They are incentivized to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, because there will always be > 1 user that they attract with that approach for every 1 user like you that they alienate.

Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.

[mato]

> Basically: I think free business models can ignore retention, whereas for-pay subscription models can't, and that's why I prefer them.

I think that only holds if you have enough competition that it starts making a real dent in your profit margin.

I don't have any proper data, but pretty much everyone I've met in the sailing community just uses Navionics. Fair enough; the company has been in the ECDIS business for many many years before smartphones even existed, and their electronic charts are good.

Their competitors, based on my subjective use of some of them, more or less fall into two groups:

(1) Similarly big players. Basically just C-MAP (parent is Navico, also in ECDIS for many years).

(2) Startups: savvy navvy and Orca.

I've only really used (1) enough to form a proper opinion. I originally picked it because it was way cheaper (50 EUR/year for global charts), but gave up since Navionics, despite being Fisher Price, at the end of the day just works, is fast, offline, and does not crash. OTOH C-MAP feels like a neglected side-line of the parent company designed to steer you into buying their expensive chart plotter brands (B&G mainly).

To be fair, I also tried a FOSS alternative (OpenCPN), but the app suffers from such a lack of UI design of any kind that I don't even want to go there, so I don't count it as a real competitor. And there's also Imray Navigator which is surprisingly good, but a different product category (raster charts).

TL;DR: Boating is making good money for Navionics, there's not really an alternative, so they don't care.