> Todo app 15 years ago was a simple CRUD app. Today todo app has to do CRUD, sync, offline mode, public API, integrations with popular services, collaborative projects and support 6 platforms.
Sync was done in many ways, thanks to the app using actual files to store information. It wasn't a concern of the app itself - nor it should be. Off-line mode was the default. Public API wasn't needed. Collaborative projects is something nobody asks for in a Todo app, and of course, portability gets much easier when you have much less code to port.
Still, I could imagine apps back then having all those online and multiplayer features[0]. But even then, this doesn't add up to modern bloat. APIs, collaborative editing, sync, integrations - these aren't compute-heavy or real-time features, they shouldn't cause a big performance impact. That is, unless you're doing something stupid, like blocking on network requests, keeping state on a server, or just constantly parsing and serializing JSON (or XML).
> Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?
Yes. WinAMP reigns supreme. Spotify app is hot, bloated garbage and has only a small fraction of features WinAMP offered. The entire value of Spotify is in their service part - but music streaming existed in 2000. You probably could make WinAMP stream from Spotify if you tried hard enough. I hope someone does and uses this to demonstrate what should be obvious: there's no technial justification for Spotify being so heavy, so feature-less and so bad UI/UX-wise.
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[0] - They didn't have them, because most of those features only became useful once smartphones and mobile connectivity took off in the earnest.
Back in the day a large number of us likely had huge (exceptionally legally questionable) MP3 libraries that we managed. And while, yea having 100GB of music with just about everything was nice, it is also a major pain in the ass. So much so that Winamp pretty much died after streaming (long with legal issues in MP3s) took over the market.
Now, if the music market wasn't legally locked down, would there be better streaming apps? I believe so. So it appears we may be asking the wrong questions. Not why apps are getting slower, but why it seems the market has fewer competing apps at all levels.
> So it appears we may be asking the wrong questions. Not why apps are getting slower, but why it seems the market has fewer competing apps at all levels.
This is exactly the phenomenon I recently started describing on HN with the phrase "software is resisting commoditization". It's rare these days to see an app you could use for a while and then replace with an equivalent alternative.
I think SaaS is a big driver of this - by keeping important functionality (and user data) server-side, the user ends up being locked into your software. No need to rely on IP protections - there's just no way for them to pirate the bits running on your infrastructure. And even if someone reverse-engineered your APIs and built a better frontend, the users of that alternative would still be tied to your backend, and thus your service.
This means there's no business in making alternative frontends. Instead, it's better to start your own SaaS and go after a different market slice. Even seemingly equivalent products quickly drift apart, each optimizing strongly for slightly different audience. It's easier than to fight another company over their users directly.
A tailored set of features is a good "unique value proposition" for a while, but it may be too easy for someone to eventually replicate. Taking user data hostage is better, but users don't like it very much. The best UVPs seem to have nothing to do with software.
Spotify is a stellar example here: the real value they own isn't software or infrastructure, it's all the relationships and contracts they've established in the music industry. This moat is impervious to nearly all competition - unless you're insider on the music label side, or plugged into Softbank's infinite money hose, you're not going to replicate it. Spotify, in turn, doesn't have to give a shit about its music player anymore.
How to fix this? I'm not sure if it can be. We'd need to destroy the ability for businesses to prop their software with some unique propositions that can't be easily copied by competitors. I can't see it happening without a total overhaul of intellectual property and computer crime laws. Things like Data Portability section of GDPR help a little, but ultimately there's just too many ways to create those tiny moats that make applications non-substitutable.
"Feature" phones from 20 years ago (most Nokia and Ericsson even into the android era) could sync personal data such as phone book and calendar over the internet [0]. The libraries doing this were originally written in C and their compiled versions took up maybe tens of kb running on constrained hardware. The functionality is not remarkable.
That's true. But I think the critical mass wasn't there yet, those features weren't used much outside of business circles.
> The UX of those phones was pretty poor though.
That... really depends. Having physical buttons was nice. I could write on those numeric keypads about as fast as I do on full touchscreen keyboard today, except I'd make less errors and could do it without looking at my fingers.
Which brings me to one piece of feature phone UX I strongly miss to this day: fixed latency. The firmware/OS was pretty much (or maybe even de facto) a real-time OS. With few rare exceptions, every interaction had consistent, fixed latency. Because of that (and physical buttons), I quickly learned to operate my phone without looking at it, or even pulling it out of my pocket. Unlock, menu, down, down, OK, [wait 1 second], down, OK, start typing... - these kind of sequences quickly became muscle memory.
All that was lost with switch to smartphones, as both Android and iOS have randomly changing and unpredictable UI latency, and the UI itself isn't fixed in space either.
Sync was done in many ways, thanks to the app using actual files to store information. It wasn't a concern of the app itself - nor it should be. Off-line mode was the default. Public API wasn't needed. Collaborative projects is something nobody asks for in a Todo app, and of course, portability gets much easier when you have much less code to port.
Still, I could imagine apps back then having all those online and multiplayer features[0]. But even then, this doesn't add up to modern bloat. APIs, collaborative editing, sync, integrations - these aren't compute-heavy or real-time features, they shouldn't cause a big performance impact. That is, unless you're doing something stupid, like blocking on network requests, keeping state on a server, or just constantly parsing and serializing JSON (or XML).
> Are 2000 winamp and 2022 spotify app comparable?
Yes. WinAMP reigns supreme. Spotify app is hot, bloated garbage and has only a small fraction of features WinAMP offered. The entire value of Spotify is in their service part - but music streaming existed in 2000. You probably could make WinAMP stream from Spotify if you tried hard enough. I hope someone does and uses this to demonstrate what should be obvious: there's no technial justification for Spotify being so heavy, so feature-less and so bad UI/UX-wise.
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[0] - They didn't have them, because most of those features only became useful once smartphones and mobile connectivity took off in the earnest.