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I'm shocked how much the Appstore sucks in 2024 (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Im not usually someone who posts negative stuff, but my god has the Appstore gone down the shitter.

For context, for the last ~3,5 years I wasn't really actively using any iOS devices. I had an iPad but used it rarely and only really as a Video machine. But now I’m setting up a XS I got for a killer price used (<60€) and of course I looked into the Appstore what the hot new Apps are. And my god nearly everything either constantly asks you for a subscription to use basic shit, is slow af or full of ads.

For example the „Favorite of the week“ an App called iScanner in my case took 4 seconds (!) to show me anything, which an is abysmal launch time, then shows me the Google ad tracking dialog followed by a clicking the „next“ button 5 times to show me nonsense company propaganda, followed by dialog to subscribe for 4,99€ a month. For a fucking document scanning app. And Apple has the gull to put this garbage in their weekly curated recommendations! And this isn’t the only example. 80% of Apps I downloaded today were removed within 5 minutes.

I’m honestley smitten by how bad things seem to have gotten. Really the only saving grace is that Apples own built-in Apps have gotten really good, in most cases to the point where downloading something else seems unnecessary. But still things seem to have taken a nose dive over the last 3 years.

Also to more active Apple users whats your way to find high quality Apps?

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (1 children)

One of the things you're seeing these days are apps made with bloated frameworks, so they're cross-platform and easy to develop. In theory it's great that anyone can make an app for any device with little-to-no code required, but it results in apps with absurd load times, ad bloat, and usability problems. And that's across the board (though FOSS seems to buck that trend a bit still).

As an example, my kid's school uses an app called Seesaw. It's straight-up garbage. It takes several seconds to open, the back button doesn't work, etc. At least it's not littered with ads, but it's a small mercy.

The web is experiencing the same thing. 60MB of ad services being loaded with every click, ads taking up 90% of screen real estate, slow everything, etc. I use some older hardware, but even websites that are mostly text are unusable without a strict adblocker. Not just annoying to use, but completely unusable.

These big frameworks were developed for large, high-traffic sites like Facebook. In theory, they'll work for your AI-generated blog, but they'll suck to load if you host them with a $5/month hosting plan and load 300 ad-related things on each page.

The solution is to create native apps and websites, or at least use frameworks appropriate to the task. But that would require people to give a shit, so I don't see that happening often outside of FOSS projects (which are often a labor of love).

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

This is a large reason why I dreaded Apple making iOS apps a priority for the Mac. Everything wrong about the mobile model becomes a first class citizen.