These updates are particularly maddening, as they usually involve slick and chirpy new design accompanied by the maddening confusion of trying to figure out if the features you liked are dead or just obfuscated, and the feeling of disempowerment as your previously reliable software starts coercing you into all sorts of stuff you never asked for. It's a rather Orwellian feeling.
I'm not looking forward to trying to figure out what agenda this Gmail overhaul is going to try to push on me.
The average person has totally different needs and usage patterns than power users. If you want to avoid this phenomena, where the services you use slowly degrade and lose features, favor products that specifically target power users. Products for the general population, like Android, Youtube, and Windows, will over time degrade more and more towards some lowest common denominators.
There's a problem with this theory though, that the utility of some of these programs is in how many users (and thus content, etc) they have
So we can't really "favor products that specifically target power users" as YouTube or Google Maps alternatives -- or, rather, we could, but they'd be weaker in the polish, content, user base department (e.g. Vimeo or some advanced Maps platform)
There is no average person. Different person have different use cases and preferences. No person wants known liked things to be removed or made less good.
Apple devices are meant for Apple power users. I use Windows and Linux (KDE) and I am uncomfortable and constraint on Mac OS.
There is a reason why people spend (or spent) hours to discover and learn even their phone or TV software.
Have you missed dozes of HN posts and threads about git being overcomplicated and overengineered? A lot of software engineers would love for git to remove a lot of features they don't use because they find it too complex. (For the record, I personally don't agree with them at all, but it is a very popular opinion).
Hell, many routinely rebase and squash commits for the sake of simplicity, throwing out a truthful development history.
Even so, most people are more alike than different.
It annoys the fuck out of me when someone says that a phone that still doesn't exist and isn't available for purchase is mentioned as an "alternative".
It will become an alternative once it's out. Until such time comes, stop mentioning it when discussing alternatives.
And what’s the point if the baseband is not open?
Gmail: any email service
Android: root it, use a custom launcher and utility apps.
GMaps: Waze (lets you provide your own speech samples, even)
You don't have to secede from these whole platforms - just extend around them and reach into them.
You’re examples:
Google.
Your examples are all fucking google.
OP's question was about how power users can keep UX control while services degrade their features to cater to average users. That's what I care about, not ideological purity in my software stack.
People like you are the tech equivalents of the militant vegan.
Because that means more money and effort spend by the vendor to maintain 2 sets of interfaces (and extra flags and features they could just cut entirely),
and that for the benefit of a tiny sliver of its user base, and the worst and most picky at that.
I realize it's axiomatic that 'to serve the customer is self-evidently the best thing for the service provider, because capitalism', but by now I think that is obviously marketing spin to cover actions in self-interest… no matter who claims it. Starkly, obviously false.
Gmail users are clearly not customers, they are not paying anything for it. Your cynicism against capitalism is unwarranted in this case.
I think this is the "excuse" but to me it seems like it's as much about "locking down" as "dumbing down".
History moves in cycles [0] and I'm seeing something like how we transitioned from Home Computers to game consoles in the mid 90s.
Hackers are experts at getting value out of equipment that the manufacturers never expected, and this is what you want with a nascent technology, to help build a market. But as things mature, as a business you want to lock down more and more of this creative potential for yourself and lock in the revenue.
We've seen it with music like this: Vinyl (locked down) -> tapes (hackable) -> CDs (locked down) -> CD Writers -> MP3s (hackable) -> Streaming (locked down) -> ... (tapes? [1])
We've seen it with home computing like this: Pong & Atari -> Commodore, Spectrum, Apple II -> NES, Master System -> Amiga, Atari ST -> SNES, Genesis -> PC -> Playstation -> The Apple Renaissance -> The Ripened Apple
Even on a smaller scale I can see Apple's pivot from "Rip, Mix, Burn" [2] to doing away with personal music altogether over the course of 10 years [3]
Or my PS4 where I'm more and more likely to just download a game now than go out to the shops and buy a disc.
At each stage there is a trade-off. You get a slightly more polished product, but you lose a certain degree of agency over it. I guess it's cyclical because the "locking down" goes a little too far and then people loses interest and then you need to bring in the hackers again to jump start the community once more. I'm sure there's some tie in with the innovators dilemma [4]
I think the only popular industry I can think of that has resisted broad-scale hacking is the movie industry. I can only speculate that the scale, and political importance meant they had to always stay ahead of the curve.
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/06/cassette-tapes-are-back-ki...
[2] https://www.macworld.com/article/2934175/think-retro-rip-rip...
[3] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/06/apple-shutting-i...
I think that's a symptom that the person you're getting your updates from doesn't share your interests.
I like updates to libre software, because the makers share my interest in having the best tool. Updates to Android, not so much.
Or maybe you just want a stabler release channel — Debian stable instead of Rawhide — which, of course, web apps don't have.
*cough*systemd*cough*
*cough*gnome3*cough*
*cough*git*cough*
For mail, Apple's Mail.app can't be beat: nothing else works as fast with my E-mail archive dating back to 1994. For programming, I still haven't found anything that beats Emacs.
Using apps instead of letting Google read my mail solves at least part of the problem. The other part remains, however — I dread new Apple hardware updates, as recently their "pro" laptops took a huge dive for the worse. I'm stuck on a 2015 model, waiting for them to regain their sanity and produce actual "pro" laptops with decent keyboards and ports that I can actually use.
Uhm, I think there are some great 3rd party apps out there that are much more powerful. But I concur that an actual email client is the way to go, especially as soon as you have more than one address.
My #2 is Spark, which I actually use on iOS, but on Mac it's a bit too slow, plus it actually failed to send an E-mail without notifying me or returning the E-mail (I did report this as a bug), which I consider a showstopper. So Mail.app it is.
Calling it "the less updated software in the world" shows why companies do even more frequent updates, even when they aren't needed. To avoid appearing stale.
They have understood something other tech companies are yet to learn: Noone uses your product because you're so modern or progressive or slick. Your product is a tool, not design porn to wank off to. Apple fanboys are overwhelmingly fanboys because Apple produces reliable tools they use to create stuff themselves, not because they dream of glossy icons at night.
We can see what happens when a company decides to degrade a "useable, reliable tool for creation" with stupid design/UX decisions in the Thinkpads, which had a fanboy group that is currently diminishing because anything post-T520 is just a sad excuse to the "reliable tool"
We usually bite the bullet just because the pros outweigh the cons -- they do indeed ship a lot of great stuff -- but a lot of problems come with that, too. We still jump when we can (so long as the cons != 75% worse performance on all UIs)! ;)
Moreover, Google developers, just like all developers, work on things they don't believe in, or sometimes find useless. It's just work like any other. Criticizing developers for changes in how Gmail works is not really fair.
If this is actually the way that google wants to introduce new features ie. with a thorough, long term, and importantly separate process of testing and vetting. I think that is a pretty good way to go about it.
New products are exciting.
Updates are what product managers do when they don't have any idea for a new product and want to justify their existence. It's like "reforms" in politics.
Successful products should be left alone.
Of course they never will, and we suffer. I understand that complaining about it is like complaining about the weather... yet I can't help myself.
I guess by "new product" I mean something addressing a new problem in a new way. A new function, not a new skin, which all these updates seem to be.
If you define success by the numbers of users, i guess tweaking the UI makes sense to try to get even more users.
It comes with age.