Tell HN: Please dont brick the app
His only contact with the others in world in recent months has been WhatsApp which I setup when I visited him earlier in the year. He had expected to live several months but things took a turn for the worse and rapidly deteriorated over a few days. WhatsApp the buggers put an arbitrary time limit on the app between updates so he was locked out - confused and desperate (coupled with the morphine), I guess he had enough mentally.
I presume his phone was never updating due to storage being near limit - tbf his phone was a mess and he was a technophobe, and since he never saved contacts just sent off the number I guess there was no record of his contacts in his main phone. I have in phone in my possession now, but my new number was not there for example, he had tried to call my old number via non Internet on the 8th. I've managed to sort out the hospital, the death certificates, family wishes, and temple send off, but I'm sure he would not of wanted to leave things in this way.
App devs - We're not all in 1st world countries surrounded by friends and family, with techies to troubleshoot. Please don't brick your communication apps on a time limit, maybe disable emoji or video calls or some non core functionality, but lets not go nuts and block the whole app for the sake of adding telemetry, ads, or more politically correct emojis. This wasn't a protocol change or anything else afaik which makes me quite angry. end of rant
6 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 25.1 ms ] threadWhile I understand how frustrating it was to lose use of the app in a delicate situation like that, I can see why developers would do that. A business has to pay for maintaining compatibility over many versions (engineering time, complexity, ...), and with free consumer apps like WhatsApp, it makes business sense to bug users to update or disable altogether.
As a consumer, I hope such empathy for users catches on though. The emergence of UX designers and now accessibility experts has made software more empathetic, so who knows, maybe there will be pressure to stop forced updates.
I was recently helping local veterinarians to clean their computers. It was so bad that they were switching between two machines when one of them was freezing.
Yes, their computers are old but they don't have a budget to buy new ones. Memory and CPU aren't cheap when you are not a middle-class citizen of a rich country. Bloated and bugged software with poor UX design seriously affects people's lives, prevents them from doing their important jobs.
Please, strive for quality. We are engineers – others depend on our creations.
Want to use something offline? Nope! Online only! Want an app to stay stable and fast? Nope, here's some new useless features and a 20% reduc in speed for all phones on the market.
Seriously. How do we go backwards, whilst going forwards.
There were Symbian phones which kept running WhatsApp till very recently.