The Rise Of User-Hostile Software
We need to talk about the state of modern software. Yes, those pieces of .exe, .dmg or .deb binaries that come with almost every device and service out there (or maybe they even come with or for your phone). I’ve been contemplating writing this for some time, but recent events around the absolute ridiculousness of the scope of the mess we have on our collective hands, coupled with a Twitter thread from 2019 making the rounds prompted me to actually get this all out of my mind and into a blog post.
We are truly living in an era of user-hostile software, and when I say “user-hostile” I mean it as “software that doesn’t really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer.” And this is not a problem that is bound to a specific operating system (or version thereof) or class or computers. It’s literally cross-platform, and it follows customers from home, to office, to their commute.
I am sure there are more examples that I haven’t captured here (there’s a large community for those, I hear), but this paints a pretty clear picture. No, I do not want to create an account to change my keyboard colors, and neither do I want to give some random piece of software root access to my machine on a pinky promise that it only needs it because it’s easier to write some registry key that way.
