Slightly related but unpopular opinion I have: I think software, broadly, today is the highest quality its ever been. People love to hate on some specific issues concerning how the Windows file explorer takes 900ms to open instead of 150ms, or how sometimes an iOS 26 liquid glass animation is a bit janky... we're complaining about so much minutia instead of seeing the whole forest.

I trust my phone to work so much that it is now the single, non-redundant source for keys to my apartment, keys to my car, and payment method. Phones could only even hope to do all of these things as of like ~4 years ago, and only as of ~this year do I feel confident enough to not even carry redundancies. My phone has never breached that trust so critically that I feel I need to.

Of course, this article talks about new software projects. And I think the truth and reason of the matter lies in this asymmetry: Android/iOS are not new. Giving an engineering team agency and a well-defined mandate that spans a long period of time oftentimes produces fantastic software. If that mandate often changes; or if it is unclear in the first place; or if there are middlemen stakeholders involved; you run the risk of things turning sideways. The failure of large software systems is, rarely, an engineering problem.

But, of course, it sometimes is. It took us ~30-40 years of abstraction/foundation building to get to the pretty darn good software we have today. It'll take another 30-40 years to add one or two more nines of reliability. And that's ok; I think we're trending in the right direction, and we're learning. Unless we start getting AI involved; then it might take 50-60 years :)