Shitty corporate software

From what I've seen, corporate bureaucracy generally makes software worse.

Even companies such as Apple (who are supposed to have the best UI/UX) have committed outrageous sins.

For example, in the macOS Apple Music app, I've noticed a bug where you can't use the search box. It frequently stops working many times a day, where it unfocuses the input with every character you type. And then pressing enter still doesn't search. You have to restart the app, only for the same problem to occur again soon afterwards. This bug has occurred on multiple Mac devices for me with multiple macOS versions, so I must not be the only person this is affecting.

Recently with the latest release of macOS Sonoma, I thought they'd have fixed this because they updated Apple Music. But nope, the bug is still there, even though it should've been ticketed and flagged as high priority. What they did do, however, was make some trivial updates to the UI.

This sort of behaviour completely baffles me. What's even crazier is how common it is. With such a large company, you'd think many of their own employees would use Apple Music, have encountered the same bug, reported it, and made sure it was prioritised and fixed. That's what employees who take claim to take "initiative" (and all the other buzzwords discussed during interviews) would've done, right?

Or what about the fact Apple doesn't even have a calculator app on iPad, so you have to download a paid one instead (or one that has ads). You'd think many people in the company would've stumbled across the same problem many times and raised the issue, yet nothing has been done yet.

I've also seen a trend of companies pointlessly updating their designs for no reason, when their software was seriously buggy and needed fixing. In some cases, they even made their design worse.

For example, Patreon's new logo looks like a 💩. They updated their design too, but as far as I'm aware haven't fixed many of the serious issues with their platform. I don't know what they were smoking, and neither do other people:

Another example is Todoist. I've been using this app regularly for about 7 years. Overall it works great and is a smooth experience. What I've noticed is they've unnecessarily updated their design many times, even though it was already fine.

Most of the changes they've made have been trivial and haven't actually made the app any better. It's pretty much exactly the same, just slightly different.

But what it did do was introduce some pretty severe bugs that stuck around for too long. This occurred several times over the years. Again, you'd think their own employees would've probably stumbled across the same bugs (and reported it), because they would've used a very similar environment to me.

It seems like some companies pointlessly update their designs for the sake of creating work for their employees, and not because it actually needs improving.

Conclusion

Obviously bugs happen sometimes, but with how rigorous the hiring and code submission process of corporate companies is, you'd think their outcomes would be of higher quality.

But from what I've seen from many different apps and corporate companies, it doesn't. Although they have brutal hiring and development processes, their software isn't very good.

In fact, I'd argue this actually makes their products worse. The best software I've seen often comes from companies who aren't like this. This degree of bureaucracy stifles software development to the point the company's own employees aren't even reporting bugs in their software and fixing it (or if they are reporting it, nothing is being done).