ssiddharthI Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK
What most people dont get:
Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18
For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-)
But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!
Companies are seeing this switch, so they adapt.
Personally, a service which is "only an app" will be not used by me as I prefer to have a larger screen with more information (actually I use my mobile phone only when Im in public transport or similar, at home I have a notebook laying around if I need something)
This. I posted this on my other comment, but there's a meme that "Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [0].
There seems to be a disconnect between some developers and the younger folks.
I can say for certain this is true. People my age look at me like I have 3 heads if I ask them to do anything more complex than open a web browser
(17 yo here), I think that I am eternally grateful to my cousins who convinced my parents to give me a desktop computer which is still working right now (it had a minor hiccup in the processor recently but it works), before that, I was having a 1 gb crt monitor win7 on which I somehow ran Vscode smoothly.
I am very frugal (to save money on webcam, in online classes, I had droidcam /wo-mic setup with one of my parents old phones that were so old that online classes couldn't work or were just too slow) but spending money on a decent personal computer is genuinely one of the best investments personally.
One thing my cousins did which I am sorta grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu so my computer was really nice/smooth in everything but gaming, I still ran some games like portal series , inscryption and many other games like valorant and it was playing valorant when I started realizing its chinese company roots and kernel level access meaning that there was no proper way to guarantee to have piece of mind unless I reinstall it
So I felt like if I was reinstalling, I was watching some the linux experiments video anyway and was fascinated by linux, so I just decided to choose myself to use nobara-linux for the first time which was another one of the best decisions that I made as it opened me up to the terminal.
> grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu
Great sentence! I will apply this to my kids as well, I guess.
I always tell them already: "In the future, you can game as much as you want, IF you learn a good programming language [which will be defined by me]" - let me see how this will work out in 1-2 years :-D
That's not new.
I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block. Those who got it, didn't find it hard. It's just that some people can't get it.
The disconnect is not between some developers, and the younger folks. It is between some developers, and most of the world.
not even the older generations. My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat, and my father is one who bought the first IBM PC when it came out, so someone who has touched these things for decades (tho very superficially).
I think that the software industry, especially operating systems, have completely failed to provide a balanced product between the overly bloated and messed up (Windows), the overly complicated (Linux) and the overly simplified (Android/iOS).
Maybe some Linux distros are now at the right spot, I was positively surprised by PopOS to give an example, but it's too late. With AI this is only going to get worse.
> My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat
That's becoming dangerously true of my wife and I as well, to be honest.
The friction is just so much lower than Google Drive or whatever. As long as I handle it right away. It's just finding something from more than an hour ago that's intolerable.
I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch:
He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything.
(and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case)
My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"
I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.
No. There is a disconnect between domain insiders and those that are not. This is not specific to any one domain. It's also not about age.
Some insiders know about this disconnect and fewer still can bridge it easily.
Those that cannot even sense this disconnect, they're a bit of a pain in certain situations. You know, like talking to project stakeholders or customers.