[rurp]

I'm not surprised since I think most UI overhauls replace one system with another that is roughly equally good, except that nobody is familiar with the new system so everyone burns a bunch of time and attention learning the new one just to get back to par. The new UI often isn't worse in any objective sense, it's just not better and the whole exercise is a giant waste of everyone's time.

Some subset of users like re-learning how to do the same basic things in a new way, such as switching browser tabs, but most people want to spend ~0 time on that stuff and get justified annoyed when it's pushed on them.

Of course over time people will get used to the new design, but even if the new one is materially worse what are people going to do? It's not like Apple cares that much about random user opinion and the joy of a monopoly or duopoly is that the companies controlling one don't have all that much incentive to keep people happy.

[array_key_first]

I think a lot of the time the UI is objectively worse. Less functionality, more clicks/swipes to do the same actions, less legibility, etc.

It's just that people get used to bad software.

[marcosdumay]

> It's just that people get used to bad software.

Or that it improves silently between several versions. Or that it just keeps getting worse, and people are justified every time.

I don't know a lot about Apple. Android seems to be partially at each of those camps.

[int_19h]

It rarely improves above and beyond the level from which it had plummeted, though. More often you get tweaks to reduce the major annoyances to tolerable level. Which users then tolerate because, well, what other choice do they have when literally everyone is doing it?

What's really bad about this is that we (as in the software industry) have managed to teach people to hate updates, and a significant part of that is all the gratuitous changes to established UI flows. Many casual users dread updates now because they just want their shit to keep working like it always did. And this is how you end up with unpatched security issues.