Sometimes I’ll run into a baffling issue with a tech product — be it headphones, Google apps like maps or its search features, Apple products, Spotify, other apps, and so on — and when I look for solutions online I sometimes discover this has been an issue for years. Sometimes for many many years.

These tech companies are sometimes ENORMOUS. How is it that these issues persist? Why do some things end up being so inefficient, unintuitive, or clunky? Why do I catch myself saying “oh my dear fucking lord” under my breath so often when I use tech?

Are there no employees who check forums? Does the architecture become so huge and messy that something seemingly simple is actually super hard to fix? Do these companies not have teams that test this stuff?

Why is it so pervasive? And why does some of it seem to be ignored for literal years? Sometimes even a decade!

Is it all due to enshittification? Do they trap us in as users and then stop giving a shit? Or is there more to it than that?

  • penquin@lemm.ee
    ·
    2 months ago

    Have you tried Google keyboard (gboard) lately? It made me want to break my phone and just not have one at all. It corrects proper words to other words that make the sentences don't make sense. It corrects words that are already correct and it ignores the misspelled words. It wants to speak for me. They think they're making us type faster with their predictive text, but I was re-reading every thing I put on the internet. I became slower. Thankfully I found a worse keyboard, but it doesn't autocorrects as much and I'm ok with that. Fuck Google.

      • penquin@lemm.ee
        ·
        2 months ago

        I didn't know about this keyboard actually. Just installed it and it's great. Only issue with it that it only supports English. I guess I'll use it for English only. Thank you so much.

        EDIT: never mind. It does support other languages. All set now.

          • penquin@lemm.ee
            ·
            2 months ago

            How do you enable swiping in this keyboard. I can't, for the life of me, find it in the settings.

            • geoma@lemmy.ml
              ·
              1 month ago

              To enable gesture typing, download Google's gesture typing library at https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard/tree/master/app/src/main/jniLibs/arm64-v8a and then import it by opening the OpenBoard settings app, going to "Advanced", and then choosing "Load gesture typing library". Note: Google's library is proprietary and not open source.