Ankit Singh

Every piece of software I use which used to be originally produced with a lot of care has gotten shitty. Just to make a list from top of my head... 1. Starting with this site. I used to give an example of how the Twitter mobile app was epitome of saving list scroll state across app lifecycle and even app death, all the way back in 2016 when teaching mobile development to my students. Today, most tweets > 2 day old if I open, the replies do not load, I don't get notifications for DMs, and random parts of it don't work at random times. 2. MacOS which was once more polished than Windows on the UI and as hackable as Linux from inside out - now randomly freezes, has kernel panics, needs disabling needless safety features all they way from safe mode to get basics working or toning down the horrible glass UIs. 3. Spotify used to be one of my favourite products, having great offline-first experiences, seamless sync across devices, handover of songs midway between phone, desktop, car, etc. Now the app can't even load offline downloaded playlists properly when internet is down, sync almost never works, UI glitches, watch app can't figure out how to play on headphone, or when to sync from phone to watch. 4. Whatsapp - one of the most performant apps, with solid delivery rates even with as slow as 2G/EDGE internet, now actually has dead-end UI flows (when sending photos, trying to edit it can lead to an unknown state), message deliveries often don't work even on solid internet, and media uploads frequently need retries. 5. Microsoft's entire office suite which used to be a workhorse product - something so reliable, that non-tech people would never touch Google Sheets with a 10-foot pole and threaten to resign if they didn't have a proper desktop app license of MS Office. Now they push you towards the cloud versions which work way worse than Google Workspace, and have add tons of React UI elements in the Desktop apps that makes then visibly slow and janky and large Excel sheets even crash sometimes. Most of these were on the trajectory of enshittification before wide-scale agentic coding or Claude-driven development was even all that common. The entire industry is in a phase where everyone is just building things because it is their job, and the era of care, and sincere craftsmanship of products has mostly come to an end.