AI Is Becoming a Band-Aid over Bad, Broken Tech Industry Design Choices
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
scientificamerican.com
After decades of messy, thoughtless design choices, corporations are using artificial intelligence to sell basic usability back to consumers
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It’s about time someone pointed this out. Look at all the things phones got rid of in their UI:
(It also gives up a lot of context-based right-clicking, but I personally consider the right-click a bad UI design choice.)
Some things, like folders, are only barely implemented, with a host of features that we’ve had for decades removed. Ever tried to sort a phone group by creation date?
I’m writing this on an iPad, which I would love to use as my daily driver, but because it runs iPad OS, there are so many productivity and organizational features missing relative to Mac OS that I do most important things on the laptop.
Hate to break it to you, but these concerns are pretty specifically about iOS. Pretty much all of them have been addressed since the beginning and continue to be addressed today adequately on Android
File management is still horrendous on android.
Not with the right file manager. That's the whole point: on iOS, you don't have any options. On Android, the file system is available, and you can use non-default tools for it.
The problem is people utterly refusing to think outside the defaults.
Is there anything even wrong with the default Google file manager? It works pretty well from my experience
Lack of support for SMB is about the only thing missing that I care about from it. There is an add-on app Google released years back for it, but they haven’t updated it in years and it was broken the last time I tried to use it.
Not really. The biggest problem I have with file management on android is from crossplatform apps that assume the user is on iOS. E.g. The patreon app saves every image as "patreon image.png" in the downloads folder rather than keeping the uploader's filename or letting me specify where I want it, and the bluesky app saves everything to my "photo reel" (i.e the DCIM folder). Both things that don't happen if I open them from a browser.
ES File Manager had it figured out 10 years ago. Then it died without a good alternative, but the old version still works pretty well.
There are usable file managers, that's not really the issue. But no two pieces of software seem to agree as to where data ought to be.
Finding anything in that shitty maze of directories is a nightmare. And lots of crap accumulates in downloads for no obvious reason.
New versions of Android are effectively breaking file managers, "for security"
How so? I've just upgraded, so want to know what I'm now missing out on.
You just have to grant some extra permissions now.
"Material Files"
As well as the complete mess made by having updates handled by manufacturers. So if they can't be arsed, you get no updates. Wonderful.
And I've no idea why each of them needs to fuck with the settings menus so much. Google "how to change such-and-such on Android", and unless you bought a really popular flagship model you'll be there all day trying to find if it's even in your version or not.
I can do every single one of those things in my pixel (or just about any Android phone) if these things actually mattered you would have switched ages ago.
You paid for an Apple product. This is the ecosystem you choose to locked yourself into.
"Locked" is a pretty strong word. I'm running a home lab with Home Assistant, and I'm running Macs, PCs, Android devices, and lots of Linux virtual machines. The reason I use an Apple product instead of an Android product is that Apple products are a lot more polished.