Desktop and phone apps both in the running. And I mean mainstream apps. No small piece of crap ones and no games.
I think by far is Spotify. Until recently they did not store if you wanted a playlist on shuffle or series play. Even today it doesn’t store what song you are on in a playlist so if you go to another list then back you need to pick what song you were at and if on shuffle play the randomizer resets. And that really hurts because the random shuffle uses the Pareto algorithm - no matter where you start it will play the same 20% 80% of the time.
And now the big one. It grays out my songs making them unplayable. And I’m not talking songs that RIAA remove from the Spotify catalog. It regularly grays out songs I downloaded onto my phone - songs that are not part of the catalog like when I put Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and Tonight, Tonight together because I think together they make one great song. Maybe this means that Spotify caught me pirating songs and makes them unable to play. Except the songs are not pirated but shifted to digital format (completely legal since I own the original) or original songs who Spotify has no clue who owns the copyright. Some people say it’s because the song is corrupted. Well one song has never been not-gray and it’s fine. In fact if I click on a few grays it will play fine, but as a gray the randomizer refuses to see it as part of the playlist.
And now when playing a playlist, Spotify will randomly and without your OK make it enhanced meaning they pick songs they think you want to hear and make them part of your playlist. I don’t trust them to wipe my ass so why do I want the same company that thinks I want to hear Shiny Happy People on every mix no matter how many times I skip it pick songs for my playlist?
Call notes automatically come up after every phone call.
Answering a call is dubious, sometimes I have to swipe other times I have to tap.
Screen disappears while I’m on the damn phone.
Getting back to the phone call in progress to hang up is oftentimes confusing and awkward bc you already said goodbye to the guy on the phone. So now you sit there in awkward silence until you can figure it out
Amazon prime music. It’s a holy hell of misfunctionality. It downloads then loses it’s content. It downloads over cellular if you tell it not to download except over wifi, but will often then refuse to download over both. It crashes, hangs up, stops, or otherwise glitches at least once an hour.
Oh, and it pushes you to upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited every time you open it.
Venmo. I use it because people do. Besides the nonsense of the social aspect (which you can and should turn off) it is a buggy mess, and updates sometimes make it worse. Things like arbitrarily setting a “top 3 payees” list including people you paid once 3 years ago, removing the math functions (since restored at least), weird glitchy typing, etc.
But most egregious is that it’s been sending double payments lately. And it’s not a case of tapping it twice (it theoretically catches that) but I saw it happen when I was standing right next to the payee, carefully inputting, and they informed me they got two.
I don’t mind Spotify, but rarely I’ll select one song from an album or artist, and it instead goes immediately into the “similar songs” playlist instead of the next song in the list, which it would otherwise do 99% of the time.
I have no idea why but it routinely keeps food you already purchased in your cart, so the next time you start the app to order new food, you now have to get rid of that already successfully order item by item. And there’s no method to actually delete all items, you have to delete every single item individually so if you ordered a full meal for several people you will be deleting for an entire minute.
This isn’t the worst app but I don’t use a lot of apps and this is a poor design I’ve noticed.
There’s a boardgame Concordia which has an official app you can get from the company to figure out the final scores. Which is a tedious process to do by hand because it involves counting up a lot of cards and tokens on the board.
Without getting into all of the details, there are two broad categories on things you need to figure out; some pieces that are randomly placed on the board at the beginning of the game and other stuff which the players acquire and place during the game.
The final score keeping would go a lot quicker if the app let you enter all of the information about the random pieces set at the beginning of the game during the game. These pieces don’t change once they’re placed. So you could enter this information during down times of the game.
But the app doesn’t let you do this. It requires you to enter the starting pieces along with the final player pieces. So all of the information has to be entered at the end of the game when half of it could have already been completed earlier.
I’ve never noticed this issue with McDonald’s but I have a different issue. When first started using it, I’d place my order, drive over to the restaurant and park in one of their numbered spots. Then I would tap a button that said, “I’m Here”. I’d wait a few minutes and my meal would be brought out to my car. A few months ago I did it like I always do, but instead of going directly to the restaurant, I first made a quick stop to Menards (home improvement store). Menards’ and McDonald’s parking lots are right next to each other. I parked and let them know I was there. My food appeared immediately. As per usual, I took out a sample French fry. It was ice cold! I took my bag of food inside and told them that the food I just received was cold. The girl pointed to a sign that said that their new improved app will now start your order when it detects that you are within 3 miles away so there is minimal waiting. So apparently, they started my order when I was roaming the aisles at Menards! They gave me a whole new meal. So I no longer try to fit in a quick stop anywhere!
The McDonald’s app used to be much worse but has improved. However, I don’t use it the same way you do so I don’t run in to the issue with the cart. That seems maddening!
I roll up and just use the app to present a code at the drive through to get points, and sometimes redeem points or use rewards. It used to always log me out and had a terrible time re-connecting so if the line was short (or non-existant) I’d have to pull off to the side and log in, wait for everything to load, and then get my code so I could get my points, and then get back in line. Now it’s all better where I can glide into the drive-thru and get my code in one fell swoop.
My vote for a bad app is Apple Podcasts. They don’t have a way to create a playlist. You can select stuff to play “next” but not a way to “add after the thing I had chosen to play next.” Basically you can listen to one podcast episode then queue up another one. Technically you can queue up a bunch of episodes but you can’t put them in order or manage your list of upcoming episodes. There is just no way to “set it and forget it” with Apple Podcasts.
I finally after many years just switched to Pocket Casts, at the suggestion of many Redditors. It doesn’t seem to be that much better/different than Apple Podcasts but at least you can tell it “play this episode after the episode that is next in the queue.”
Agreed. My daughter, who is not blocked, cannot call me. My son, who also is not blocked, cannot text me. The physical therapy place also can’t text me. Fun!
Huh. We play a lot of Concordia, and I didn’t know there was an app, and I might’ve download it had I heard of it otherwhere. But I guess I’m going to pass.
In the similar spirit of non-PC/phone apps, I hate the Paramount+ app more than any other. Want to watch a sporting event? Even though it might be on the banner screen, it will take you four clicks to get to it. And when you make that fourth click, sometimes it will take you to the wrong game, or it will revert back to the origin screen. I’m not the only one experiencing this, a casual scroll of Twitter during UEFA competitions makes me feel less lonely.
The way it works is you pick out which board you’re using and then select if you’re using one of the expansions like fish or salt.
It then gives you a list of the cities and for each city, you tell it what resource is there and which players have houses there. Then you go through a list of the cards and tell it how many each player has and then how many pieces each player has on the board. The app will then figure out everyone’s scores.
It’s good if you don’t like doing all the math. Plus you don’t have to worry about missing a piece or making a simple math error. And it keeps a record of the scores if you like that.
What I feel would improve it would be if you could go through the list of cities during the game and tell the app all the resources. Then at the end of the game you’d only have to tell it the houses and cards. This would make the end game stuff go quicker.
Perhaps not the worst, but irritating nonetheless. Other than the call screen disappearing somehow while I’m speaking, the voicemail part irritates the hell out of me.
Leaving voicemails, easy. Going to retrieve one is a formulaic mess; one that any way of changing settings is not possible:
Dial *86 to call voice mail. Voice narrator tells you how many new voicemails and saved ones you have. Slowly. As if she was issuing instructions to a young and not very bright child.
“First voice message” ( as well as subsequent ones ) are preceded by the Gettysburg Address whereby the narrator reads “sent by”, followed by the phone number, again read in that slow instructional tone, and then reads the duration of said message. GRRRR! Why all this time-wasting prefacing!!??
Why not just let me hear a message NOW and then fill in the GD details later? Why should it take 3 or 4 minutes to pull up a 30 second message?
If they could figure out a way to hybridize that with optical recognition, even just taking a picture of each person’s cards at the end and inputting the rest, I would pay some money for that app.
I figure the app is probably quicker than one person doing everyone’s scores. But if you’re playing with a group of experienced players and everyone adds up their own scores, that’s probably quicker than the app.
I want to congratulate the majority of US citizens because I believe it is unlikely that they will ever install and use the Lufthansa app on their phones. Lufthansa is Germany’s biggest airline. Holy shit what a piece of crap! It is difficult to log in, it is impossible to download your boarding passes or the boarding QR codes, it requires the input of your e-mail adress, your password (which must be long and have numbers and special characters), and your flight code (which it does not memorize, you have to enter it for each security check for each flight: six random numbers and letters) every single time you have to show the boarding pass. Try that while queing for boarding or security with some hand luggage. Bonus points if you travel with children. And then it crashes. Start again. Gate changes, flight cancellations? Why did you not check the monitors? They are all over the airport. What, notifying that on the app itself? No way, that would be magic. Can’t do. It’s a software thing, no chance.
McDonald’s itself is such a confusing experience. I don’t particularly like the place or go there enough to know how it works, but sometimes kids get it. You can wait in line like every other restaurant, get a receipt with your order number, and pick it up when they call the number. Or you can use the display, try to get the app to open to put in your account but it doesn’t half the time, then order and it gives you a receipt with an order number. OR you can pick up a table tag which has a completely different order number. OR the tables have metal plates with a THIRD number, I’m not sure if they ever use that. And every time I tried the computer, I always have to ask for the drink cups. The employees always act like you have a third head for asking, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work. But the entire experience seems like solutions in search of problems.