It’s about profiteering, feature bloat, regressions and bad updates. Let me explain:
I love software and apps that do a small set of things really well, especially if they’re free. There are lots of examples, like FileZilla, among other programs with “zilla” in their names, reflecting a legacy of basing their code on Mozilla, the forerunner of the Netscape browser of the 1990s. FileZilla manages FTP, the File-Transfer Protocol used by geeks to upload content to websites. I use it every month to upload a newsletter to a site I manage, and it’s a breeze to use. FileZilla’s open-source developers don’t have aspirations to make it do anything besides being a great server-level file manager. They don’t require payment to use the full capability of the software, and updates don’t break its basic functions.
On the other extreme, look at Facebook, which originated as a browser-based application to keep track of people you know and send messages to them. It still does that, but it’s bloated into a huge Swiss-army knife of a “platform” that wants to be where you go to publish, advertise, promote events, share photos, link to other “content creators”, get unvetted “news” from any and everyone and present your online identity to anyone looking for you. Its page-creation feature and linkages to co-owned “properties” Instagram and SnapChat, along with user-tracking and monetization for businesses, has produced a horrible Pandora’s box of features that challenge anyone to figure out how to use them for benefit without giving away their personal lives to hungry online information vampires.
Facebook is only one example of mega-platforms that try to do everything for everyone – poorly and confusingly – instead of doing just one or a few things really well. Google (Chrome, Android, Drive, PlayStore), Apple (MacOS, iOS, iPhone, iPad, Music, iCloud, AppStore), Microsoft (Windows, Office 365, Edge, OneDrive, Windows Store), Amazon (Alexa, Store, Cloud) and even ByteDance (TikTok), all vie for your eyeballs and tracking data by trying to keep you from going anywhere else in cyberspace.
There are two kinds of “software bloat” I’ve been familiar with over my decades of working with computers. The first refers to the way a new computer would come stuffed with all sorts of unessential, barely-useful programs from either the manufacturer themselves (like HP) or software companies that paid the manufacturer to “get their foot in the door” with the user who would then be bombarded
But what prompted me to write this diatribe is the mess created by what was once the premier smart-home music system, SONOS (reads the same upside down and backwards.) Sonos users are lamenting the biggest software-update snafu of the year: The company forced an update to a completely-rewritten mobile app, essential to the function of all Sonos systems, in order to accommodate a new wireless headphone they introduced that didn’t work with the existing app. In the process, they broke many of the features users relied upon: wake-up alarms, local music playing, custom room EQ, speaker grouping, source logos, even playing the correct streaming channel. That happened in May 2024, and now in August Sonos is still apologizing and telling users all will be well by the end of the year!
It’s not opposed to industry rules to extensively rewrite software and offer it to willing users to test out and report on problems; that’s called alpha and beta testing, and can lead to better and more-reliable software. But it’s always supposed to be optional, and able to be reverted back to the prior working version in case of problems. It’s completely unacceptable to force users to be your testers, especially when you KNOW that the new software is so broken. Sonos may never recover from this, which is a pity, because they really did have a good product with great acoustic design that filled a niche in the market with aplomb. Many users are abandoning Sonos, some after spending thousands or tens of thousands on hardware that can’t be used any other way (well, almost, as someone has written an alternate app that provides basic functionality for some Sonos speakers.)