I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand why any company would push an update as bad as this one. It’s easy to blame the product & dev teams or lousy management but this team has been around and can’t be that dumb. They knew what was coming and did it anyway.
So if you were running this company what would make you piss off millions of customers to this extent? The only thing I can think of is a contractual obligation.
If they had signed a deal with some third party to share customer data and had to rearchitect the app since the old app probably didn’t log everything we did, and you had a deadline or the deal went away, then you would do something this bad to your customers.
My guess, totally speculative, is that they offered the customer data to some third party about a year earlier, it was for a lot of money (this could be really valuable in this new world of AI where every piece of training data can give one vendor a leg up) and they had to rebuild the app to make sure every click hit their servers so they could track and sell it.
Their dev team would have said “no problem”, we can do this easily in half that time. Then reality set in and everything takes 10x longer than expected and they were up against the wall. The deadline was probably June 30, explaining the mid May release.
This would also explain how laggy new new app is, everything is going to the cloud now, not staying local to your wifi network. The old app, built 10 years ago, would have been optimized for local performance since logging everything to the cloud wasn’t valuable back then.
They knew this app was this bad - they have the resources to test and gather feedback
The launched anyway - months before it was even close to being ready for a beta test
They aren’t idiots - testing new software isn’t rocket science, they would have access to the tools they needed to understand the performance of what they had
There had to be another reason this can’t just be incompetence.