Is software just going to get worse from now on? Was the level of quality and feature improvement we've come to expect an artifact of high levels of investment based on expectations of growth that are no longer seen a valid?

We've built stacks so high we're afraid to jump off.

Nobody is really competing because nobody can build a complete product. So there's less pressure to fix the little irritations. Users are mostly satisfied, and problems get worse slowly enough that for the average user they don't notice right away how bad it's getting. So they stay because it's too hard or completely impossible to leave.

Incentives Rule Everything Around Me. What incentive does Apple have not to be shit? People aren't going to switch to anything else, they'll just suck it up and shove it in their enormous sack of learned helplessness.

Yup, it's time to let go. The forces that eat away at quality software are running an indoctrination campaign with budgets in the billions of dollars to ensure that people don't remember what quality software is. You can do right in your own work and with your own people but most peoples' experiences are going to suck for the foreseeable future.

There have been bugs and regressions since forever. It’s easy to look back with rose colored glasses, but I don’t think software has actually gotten worse.

Just look back at the Snow Leopard release of OS X. It was specifically marketed at having no new features and just being a fix and optimization release because Leopard was such a mess. And people were happy about this.

I suspect that people not really paying for certain things has had an impact. Remember when there were a lot of high quality, paid keyboards for Android?

I doubt those were particularly profitable, but there was a lot of innovation back then.

I fully expect Apple to "AI" correct your typing in the future without allowing you to change anything because they know better.

It will be designed by the same idiot who decided Safari should auto login you to everything without asking.

As long as the monopolies are going strong, yes, software will get worse and worse.

Improving quality (or degrading, for that matter) of existing features doesn’t figure into career promotions anymore. Only new features count. Or changing the visual design.

> Is software just going to get worse from now on?

I mean, yes? I think, as a pretty universal rule, you can expect commercial software to (on average) get worse every time it is changed. Companies spend little or no time fixing bugs and spend most of their time cramming (wanted or unwanted) features. Of course software is just going to get worse and worse over time.

I mean look at Mac OS 26...

The features were the ugliest icons I've ever seen and notification summaries that may be wrong.

Great.