Having left the platform for 5 years and migrated to Android, been considering migrating back due to Android not showing a promising future.
Playing with iOS again to see if I can tolerate it, it feels like everything is giant font giant icon Duplo Brick UI. Which could very well be why they're so terrible at space management. Do they realize some people have eyesight? That widget has a terrible amount of wasted space, but then so does most of the OS.
"Please do Apple's UX work for them, unpaid, of course."
It may have always been. There are mineral rights on land around me that date back to the 1850s when the railroad tycoons were given carte blanch to take over land while building the intercontinental railroad. How does some rich person/group/consortium/bank/railroad own the land under me 175 years later?
Smartwatches are a really interestingly sad storyarc.
I got into smartwatches early on with Pebble. It was the correct balance of battery life to functionality. Then Big Tech accelerated to, "let's run a phone OS on a watch" - which came with terrible battery life and sluggishness. Still, the OG Moto 360 was actually "not bad". The LG Watch Sport added a SIM card slot and a cellular modem. Now we're cooking with gas! I'd trade off bad battery life to have a parasite phone on my wrist. Also Google acquired and killed Pebble, because of course they did.
At the time of the LG Watch Sport, T-Mobile also released DIGITS, which made it so I could cobble together a parasite SIM card that receives my calls and texts on the watch and build out what "modern smartphones + smartwatches" do without the high bill and vendor lock-in. It also had cellular antennas built into the strap, so you couldn't replace the strap, but you at least had decent RF.
Apple's watch came out, and showed promise, but to this day suffers from a few critical bugs that they've never completely fixed.
Bugs, namely:
Then they all started throwing health features into the smartwatches. Likely to try and vendor-lock you into a platform. I tried some Withings watches for a while, and their hybrid (what I always call "dumb-smartwatch") was a refreshing take back to the Pebble days with a bit of style. Unfortunately, Withings saw the sweet sweet candy of medical industry money, and their smartwatch line has really stagnated while the app rots on the vine.
I've been maintaining periodic cross-links to maintain health sync so I'm not vendor locked in to one set of data, like Samsung->Withings or Garmin->HealthSync->Somewhere else or the most convoluted at one point was like Samsung->Withings, Withings->Fitbit (with a donor old Fitbit used just to get the app up but then not carried) then Fitbit -> whatever health app I was using at the time. So that whole thing is a topic itself, that getting your health data around is a complex chore that nobody should have do deal with. Yet the vendors make that health data so constantly in your face! Time to sit, time to stand, time to breathe, time to drink water, DANCE PUPPET DANCE! On Apple's platform, their health app does make cross-sync easier-ish, but also in a lot of smartwatch forums, there are many posts of duplicate data or data from the wrong user cross-syncing, so something is funky there too.
Samsung had one good smartwatch as far as I'm concerned and it was the OG 46mm Galaxy Watch with cellular, running Tizen. It had great multiday battery life, cellular capability, enough storage to put a few playlists in it, the physical rotating bezel to select UI items with a click where each click meant one menu (throwback to the old BB 8700g what what!), all the notes of being a device on your wrist that lasts a few units of time and works on its core function. It even had a barometric pressure sensor on-watch so you could see if a storm was coming without Internet.
It seems, especially with Big Tech all having AI hardons now, that they don't know what to do with the watch lines now. The chipsets really haven't accelerated like they should. Qualcomm took entirely too long to get their watch chipset power requirements down. The 3GPP spec for 5G IOT is mostly finished but that doesn't mean chips exist, there will be many years until the chips start showing up in watches. They also also really haven't nailed down thermal issues. I was once at cell edge on GW 5 Pro, and 10 seconds into placing a voice call, the modem became too hot and the watch went into thermal throttle mode where it sleeps everything until it cools. How could that ever be depended upon?? (That was actually the line for me giving up on caring about a watch with a modem. If you can't call 911 for more than 5 seconds, what's the point?)
Then, since carriers have always forced vendor-lock for pairing of smartwatches now, and smartwatches no longer have SIM card slots, you can only use Verizon post-paid or AT&T post-paid to pair a watch, forcing expensive post-paid plans (except the weird outliers like Visible + Apple Watch, or Fi with Samsung watch) and now they're raising the rates to $15-20/month for a watch that might use 20KB of data a month!
Now Google's watch can't even be repaired? These companies want this tech to die.
Instead they could have been looking at/heading towards wrist cuffs like something out of Death Stranding that fully replaces the need to carry a pocket computer. Which they would hate, of course, because then you're not buying 5 devices, you're buying one.
Garmin might be the only company doing smartwatches right these days. They focus on their core functionality and iterate. They tried LTE, realized it stunk, and gave up. They have solar charging to boost battery life, low-power tech like memory-in-pixel transreflective displays, and great multi-day battery life. They don't have all the bells and whistles of other brands, but, they seem to actually want the product line to succeed...and they're not trying to nickel-and-dime users with monthly fees.
I think the fatalism comes from a place of helplessness. Who is going to survive? The rich. How does a normal person survive or help stave off the worst? They can't. They're busy trying to figure out rent and food for next week, while trying to ignore the chronic condition their healthcare system won't let them fix.
Now, if we all rise up and eat the rich, we might have something. Not sure how one inspires such a necessary movement these days. Especially planet-wide. Plus, it would likely lead to violence, which many are not a fan of, I'd prefer not, myself.
Good theory, I like it.
But, if they don't keep yelling at people at the bottom, the people at the bottom will then realize the people at the top are the cause and get angry. Same thing with that 1970s commercial with the "Native American" (who was actually Italian) crying on the side of the road over trash. It was a corpo smear campaign to cover up the fact that the lobbying corps that were running the ad were the real polluters.
I've wondered for quite a while if there was ever any truth to the rumors that Meta apps "listen" to people. It doesn't make logical sense, as the OS should expose they are doing it. Unless they had API access to allow microphone access without triggering the microphone icon. These companies have had API access in the past, like when Uber had full screen display capture access, and Meta definitely has some agreements with the fruit company to access some kinds of data. Or, when iOS first introduced the location tracking symbol in the status bar, I was able to write a program that allowed gathering of location access without actually triggering the icon.
Most of the time, the events can be explained away by knowing how adtech works, like, I was drinking a beverage, a friend asked what it was, the next day I started getting ads for it.
In that case:
Some stories I've heard are more strange.
It does make me wonder if it was true the whole time, but they now have to ask for permission.
Don't use the platforms myself or I'd try and set up a test experiment.
Sally was her name, IIRC. That show was a pretty dark thing for kids to watch Saturday mornings.
Hey! Xennials/Millennials got to breath lead too, at least the earlier ones.
American here: What's a transportation company? (I jest, but seriously, probably hundreds of thousands of transportation companies.)
They're made very aware of things on social media, they internally have tools that scrape social media to surface hot issues. They should be leveraging them. They likewise have instrumentation to see how users use every element of the operating system. If they see that widget being installed->deleted, they should have the metrics to drive "something is fundamentally wrong with this thingy."
The poor cartoon duplo UX is a fundamental design problem. You're just buying into the whole corpo "hey we do a beta so you get a voice (but actually we're just lazy and laid off a bunch of QA to crowd-source their job for the lulz)" experience. It should not be the job of the end user to (unpaid) tell the corporation how to do their job.
Posts like OPs are just surfacing an, "I'm annoyed at this dumb thing" user experience. Venting to others is cathartic, corpo should be smart enough to gather this intel. Filing a bug report that could lead to 60 follow-up questions from the corp that they expect you to keep submitting more information and will likely not lead to any meaningful change is just pointless (because it's unpaid) work that their engineers should be doing.
Although if a person likes to donate their time to the company they already spend thousands of dollars at to improve the product that shouldn't have been shipped broken, that person should go ahead and do it.