Is Software Getting Worse?
My question targets not only desktop software but also mobile apps, web applications and websites. Seems like software is getting worse and it won't be better. And I just have to start my rumble with the worst - mobile apps.
A very good example is Tinder. This thing needs almost 25 seconds to load and takes 50MB of space. The usability of profile page is very bad (oh, you don't need to sort your photos), application sometimes don't want to load profile pictures and transitions between pages are lagy even when the application is fully loaded in the memory. And we are talking about something, what is basically a chat (not even a good one).
You would imagine that with such high earnings, company would be able to easily craft better user experience and improve the performance. But why, when new phones with better hardware are released constantly? We are getting better hardware, but sadly the user experience is still same because the software is getting slower. After few Android updates, I can install only few applications because the internal storage can barely fit updated OS. Even though my phone is far superior than fist version of Samsung Galaxy S, the loading times are somehow slower.
Desktop software isn't better. When I tried to install Visual Studio last time, it took forever to download and install several gigabytes of data. The size of whole package can be for sure explained, but it still surprises me how can a software package take so much space. We aren't talking here about computer game, where executable is several times smaller than resources like textures, sounds, music and 3D models. It also contrasts against exceptions, which often comes from open source territory. These exceptions can offer minimal footprint and rich features packed in single executable file. Visual Studio also install several gigabytes of itself on system drive, even though you selected different hard drive. Not nice, when your system drive is SSD with limited space.
Another concerning trend is rising usage of web technologies in desktop applications. When I saw an Atom text editor for the first time, I was excited to try lightweight alternative to bloated (don't mean it in a bad way) IDEs for coding. The editor is indeed faster comparing to full fledged IDE, but it's hardly lightweight and smooth user experience. When you compare it against C++ based Sublime Text, the difference is noticeable. I'm scared of the day when web technologies will take over the desktop environment. We are slowly getting there. Sooner or later, we will start seeing advertisements in the software we daily use. Heck, Windows 10 is already doing it.
Someone can see a poor performance as a non-issue. You could even say that most desktop apps are pretty fast. But let's take a look at video games. They have to do a lot of things in one second - handle tens or thousands of entities, solve physics, process the AI, calculate object occlusions, do the path finding and many other tasks. All of that not only under one second, but most of the time under 16 milliseconds. If we use this as a standard, performance of almost any application is unacceptable.
And websites? This is where we lost battle already. We are wasting so much resources, time and bandwidth by downloading all those interactive video advertisements and animated banners. Maybe we are used to it but just visit a dev.to and imagine each website has same response times. We dreamed about faster websites when internet was a new thing. We still have same dreams now, when fast internet connection is relatively available.
As you can probably imagine, I'm not very happy with the current state of software, but there are always exceptions. I'm using several development tools with acceptable performance and some of them are even developed for free. That means creating fast and responsive software is achievable under any condition. It's all in our hands.
Author: Luděk Novotný
