Grumpy Website

igoradamenko: Well, that is definitely not you're expecting to see when the app says that it works “offline”.

Every weekday I spend an hour in a tram going through the forest because this is a way to my swimming pool. I live in the XXI century, and here we still don't have proper mobile service if we take a step out of a city. That's why we need to be prepared. And I was!

The day before I opened the reading app (MyBook), found some books there and downloaded them to the device. The app said “Available offline”, so in my world, it meant “I can open it whenever you want to because I don't need an internet connection for this”. Sounds reasonable, right?

Alright. I was on my way to the forest, watching the video on YouTube called “Software Disenchantment” when the video stopped on the slide titled “Everything barely works”. I wasn't surprised, because the browser hadn't cached the video, so it was expected. But I was prepared!

I opened my reading app, found the book (it was “Ward No. 6” by Chekhov; this detail makes the story much colorful, I'm sure), clicked on it and the app started to load something. I was waiting, but nothing was going to change. It was broken. App reload didn't help, the result was the same.

I didn't understand the reason. The book was completely free, it was “available offline”, but for some reason, the app wanted to download something from the server.

Well, I'm a tough guy, I'm ready for the shit like that. That's why I had a course on Coursera which I had downloaded a week before that day. You should always be ready to meet a broken app! And I was!

I opened Coursera, found the course, found a right week and exact video that I wanted to watch, clicked on it and... got the login screen. Because, you know, of course, you can watch the video offline, but first please let us check your name, subscription, sex, blood type, favourite meal and Moon phase, just to be sure that you're allowed to watch the content that you downloaded a week ago to your own smartphone.

But as I said, I'm a tough guy, and I'm always ready. That's why I had Yandex.Music app with a bunch of songs in the offline storage. It had never let me down. I opened it and saw that I couldn't pick any song because all of them are unavailable. Why? Because my subscription period starts from the 14th day of the month, and it was September 16, and I hadn't opened the app since September 10. So it didn't know that my subscription had been automatically prolonged (as it always did more than 20 times before that moment), and, of course, it wanted to be sure that I was allowed to listen to the music. So it needed to connect to the server just to check it. But, again, of course, there was no sign of it. Just one more broken app.

One more app that promised to work offline but it couldn't.

September 19, 2019 // Hyperlink Edit

freetonik: This is iOS fitness activity app, where you can invite other people to share activity with. Enter their email and then tap... well, plus button seems logical, I want to add this person, right?

WRONG.

Plus button opens your contacts. Well, fine, just cancel. Oops! The text you entered is lost.

You should've pressed "Send", you fool!

Years go by, designed and developers keep making the mistake of losing people's data. If user typed in something, you DON'T EVER LOSE IT unless the user specifically asked for it.

September 18, 2019 // Hyperlink Edit

nikitonsky: Not everything has a name. E.g. slides, like pages in the book, are usually nameless. So don’t expect that if you let your users give them names they will do it.

September 18, 2019 // Hyperlink Edit

nikitonsky: Apparently YouTube app has a built-in browser that opens YouTube web page for pretty normal tasks like checking out a playlist. Of course it doesn’t carry through your authentication

September 17, 2019 // Hyperlink Edit

dmitriid: Unfortunately, today I had to use Apple Photos somewhat extensively. I needed to share a bunch of photos in several shared albums with a friend.

Here are my findings around sharing *only*. The amount of WTFs per second with regards to all other functionality is simply staggering.

- Create a new Shared album. It will appear in the list of shared albums within an unknown period of time, up to 5 minutes.

- Appe already has all my photos. That's exactly why when you mark which photos you want to share, Photos will re-upload them.

- Until all photos are re-uploaded, the album will remain empty even on your computer.

- If you share 10 photos to album X, you get "Sharing 10 photos to album X". 30 seconds later share 10 more, and you will get two "Sharing 10 photos to album X" statuses.

- Of course, if you share 10 photos, then 20 photos, then 10 again, then 300, they will all get 4 different queues even if you shared all to one album. All those queues will be processed at the same time, starving each other of upload speed.

- The person you shared your album with will be notified about the new album within an unspecified period of time. Up two several hours for some albums, it seems.

- The recipient of the album (when or if they get the album) will be immediately subscribed to "Shared album X" and "Timeline X" with no difference between the two.

- On the recipient's device both "Shared album X" and "Timeline X" will be empty for an unspecified period of time with zero indication whether or not there's any sync process going on.

Note: this is a first party app. It's also, arguably, one of the most important apps in Apple's ecosystem. It's been around for 4 years. And this is its current state.

September 16, 2019 // Hyperlink Edit