Why are apps so poor quality?
- Thread starter anon(5518418)
- Start date
cracgor
New member
Just switched from bb10. App situation is way better over here.
Is that poo?
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xandros9
Active member
PretzelLogix
New member
Writing good quality apps is hard.
I should know; I wrote a Windows Phone 7 app back in 2012. It took me approximately 10 weeks from start to finish working on it about 10 - 15 hours per week.
The app was a "calorie watch" app which was primarily just for me, but I decided to release it to the store for kicks. Not surprisingly, a lot of people downloaded it and used it and liked it because it was so simple. (It averaged around 4 stars back in the day.) And I gotta say, when I realized that my app had a fairly significant bug in it 2 months later, I was only vaguely interested in fixing it. Mostly the app would slow down so much as to be unusable after using it everyday for 3 to 4 months (I had made a mistake in my database design. I thought the database could intelligently handle foreign keys, but it was dumb about it and I was running into a O(n^2) issue regarding rows between certain tables.) The funny part is that 99% of people never use a calorie counting app for more than 60 days, so pretty much no one ever ran into the bug (including me.)
Now who's to blame in this? I kind of blame Microsoft because there weren't very many good instructional articles on how to use databases with Windows Phone 7. And most of them were very thin in content and quality. So I'd buy all the books and go to other Windows Phone developer sites and talk with other developers online. It was pretty hard to do solid testing of the app over time with the tools I had at my disposal. So I ended up with a decent app with a somewhat serious bug. And I didn't feel like spending the time to re-jigger the database. (read: lots of testing so that I didn't destroy people's data in the upgrade process...)
If I were to re-write this app today, I'd probably use Xamarin Studio with C# and release it for all 3 platforms (W10M, Android, and iOS). I would probably spend more time figuring out the best way to store and upgrade data structures seemlessly. I haven't checked, but I'm sure the tools and documentation are better these days.
https://xamarin.com/platform
The Xamarin platform needs more attention because it could be a game changer in that one can write 90% of their code to be platform agnostic and only have to write 10% more for each of the 3 major platforms. (Or something like that.)
Unfortunately, most developers probably use the native tools. So they write their iPhone apps in Obj-C and XCode and their Android apps in Java and Android Studio, and then if they have the budget, they contract out to some guy to write a Windows Phone app in less than 8 weeks in C# and Visual Studio. And in each case they have 3 separate code bases. If not enough users come pouring in via the Windows Phone app, it's unlikely to get updates.
Tis a shame, really.
The other game changer is that MS has made it possible to write Universal Windows Programs (UWP) that run on Windows Phone and Windows Desktop. I'm convinced that THIS actually has a real shot at Windows Phone getting the apps it needs. 80+% of PCs run Windows Desktop and most people will take the free Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade. If a company sees an opportunity to get onto the Windows desktop with their app, then they'd be foolish not to also release that app for Windows Phone since the code will be the same.
Here's to hoping.
I should know; I wrote a Windows Phone 7 app back in 2012. It took me approximately 10 weeks from start to finish working on it about 10 - 15 hours per week.
The app was a "calorie watch" app which was primarily just for me, but I decided to release it to the store for kicks. Not surprisingly, a lot of people downloaded it and used it and liked it because it was so simple. (It averaged around 4 stars back in the day.) And I gotta say, when I realized that my app had a fairly significant bug in it 2 months later, I was only vaguely interested in fixing it. Mostly the app would slow down so much as to be unusable after using it everyday for 3 to 4 months (I had made a mistake in my database design. I thought the database could intelligently handle foreign keys, but it was dumb about it and I was running into a O(n^2) issue regarding rows between certain tables.) The funny part is that 99% of people never use a calorie counting app for more than 60 days, so pretty much no one ever ran into the bug (including me.)
Now who's to blame in this? I kind of blame Microsoft because there weren't very many good instructional articles on how to use databases with Windows Phone 7. And most of them were very thin in content and quality. So I'd buy all the books and go to other Windows Phone developer sites and talk with other developers online. It was pretty hard to do solid testing of the app over time with the tools I had at my disposal. So I ended up with a decent app with a somewhat serious bug. And I didn't feel like spending the time to re-jigger the database. (read: lots of testing so that I didn't destroy people's data in the upgrade process...)
If I were to re-write this app today, I'd probably use Xamarin Studio with C# and release it for all 3 platforms (W10M, Android, and iOS). I would probably spend more time figuring out the best way to store and upgrade data structures seemlessly. I haven't checked, but I'm sure the tools and documentation are better these days.
https://xamarin.com/platform
The Xamarin platform needs more attention because it could be a game changer in that one can write 90% of their code to be platform agnostic and only have to write 10% more for each of the 3 major platforms. (Or something like that.)
Unfortunately, most developers probably use the native tools. So they write their iPhone apps in Obj-C and XCode and their Android apps in Java and Android Studio, and then if they have the budget, they contract out to some guy to write a Windows Phone app in less than 8 weeks in C# and Visual Studio. And in each case they have 3 separate code bases. If not enough users come pouring in via the Windows Phone app, it's unlikely to get updates.
Tis a shame, really.
The other game changer is that MS has made it possible to write Universal Windows Programs (UWP) that run on Windows Phone and Windows Desktop. I'm convinced that THIS actually has a real shot at Windows Phone getting the apps it needs. 80+% of PCs run Windows Desktop and most people will take the free Windows 7 to Windows 10 upgrade. If a company sees an opportunity to get onto the Windows desktop with their app, then they'd be foolish not to also release that app for Windows Phone since the code will be the same.
Here's to hoping.
Zeem Frostmaw
New member
Even UWP suffers the same problem to an extent as long as Windows 7 is the majority PC OS. Legacy desktop apps can be used by everyone, so why code apps specifically for Windows 8 and 10 - only 25% of PC users - knowing this?
cracgor
New member
And businesses just updated to windows 7. Won't see any of those upgrade until the service contract runs out on 7.
Posted via the Windows Central App for Android
Daniel Ratcliffe
New member
Actually I've been told it was originally meant to be chocolate ice cream but it looks like a poop so got used as that instead.
xandros9
Active member
Don't know personally, but I did stumble on this interesting article:
The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)
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