I’ve always chosen Apple because there’s always been very little friction, thus very little frustration. However, the past year or two has been very frustrating.
Taps on my iPhone 11 Pro sometimes don’t register because it’s in the middle of an animation or it’s just unresponsive. Moving apps around has become the biggest pain. Apps are killed in the background after about 5 minutes. Typing has become a huge pain to deal with autocorrect and swiping. Sometimes holding the space bar doesn’t move the cursor and when it does there’s almost a full second until it returns to normal typing mode from “cursor mode”. Sometimes the lock screen is completely unresponsive to touch. Sometimes the screen doesn’t even come on until 30 seconds after hitting the power button leaving me to wonder why I’m staring at a disabled screen. Sometimes the phone will lock and require the pin instead of FaceID for no discernible reason. Some of the stock apps have become the buggiest apps I use.
Finally, I woke up this morning with my phone completely off despite it being on charger and with a full battery, which means my alarms didn’t go off and I was late for work. My guess is it tried to auto update in the middle of the night and wouldn’t turn itself back on. I’m basing that on the fact that I had a notification saying the update failed and I had to start the install again manually once I did finally get to work.
That’s just iOS. macOS is becoming equally frustrating. I’m seriously considering moving to Android, but I don’t know how much better (or worse) that would be considering I haven’t had an Android phone since a couple of years before the iPhone 4 released (had a Windows Phone in between Android and the iPhone 4).
I moved to Android a couple of years ago as I was so frustrated with all the issues I was having (after being an iPhone user since the first iPhone) only to realise Android is the same mess of bugs and issues. It made me come to the conclusion that tech in general has just lost its path now, and the constant push for higher specs and more features has led to devices that suck at their basic use cases (but look at those pixel-level photo comparison!1one!).
I ended up switching back to an iPhone 8 this year, as it’s the last iPhone I found to actually “just work”.
I think this is the important takeaway for founders and product owners. People will eventually take "just works" for granted. If you make that your value prop (and you should) it is critical to continuously invest in ensuring your product always "just works". It doesn't matter if the alternatives don't. Your users will eventually turn on you.
I think it's an important take away for product owners - if people chose your product because it 'just works', they aren't going to be happy when you change it so it doesn't 'just work' -- i.e. introducing reliability bugs, changing useful features, etc.
They may not leave immediately, but at some point a competitor will come up with a 'just work', and it will be very hard to get them back.
Taps on my iPhone 11 Pro sometimes don’t register because it’s in the middle of an animation or it’s just unresponsive. Moving apps around has become the biggest pain. Apps are killed in the background after about 5 minutes. Typing has become a huge pain to deal with autocorrect and swiping. Sometimes holding the space bar doesn’t move the cursor and when it does there’s almost a full second until it returns to normal typing mode from “cursor mode”. Sometimes the lock screen is completely unresponsive to touch. Sometimes the screen doesn’t even come on until 30 seconds after hitting the power button leaving me to wonder why I’m staring at a disabled screen. Sometimes the phone will lock and require the pin instead of FaceID for no discernible reason. Some of the stock apps have become the buggiest apps I use.
Finally, I woke up this morning with my phone completely off despite it being on charger and with a full battery, which means my alarms didn’t go off and I was late for work. My guess is it tried to auto update in the middle of the night and wouldn’t turn itself back on. I’m basing that on the fact that I had a notification saying the update failed and I had to start the install again manually once I did finally get to work.
That’s just iOS. macOS is becoming equally frustrating. I’m seriously considering moving to Android, but I don’t know how much better (or worse) that would be considering I haven’t had an Android phone since a couple of years before the iPhone 4 released (had a Windows Phone in between Android and the iPhone 4).