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> sometimes, software really is finished.

That's never the case for any consumer app, the potential for improvement in UI is practically infinite. But also, just use the old version if it's finished, you don't need to upgrade?

(this app has plenty of bugs / missing issues just like everything else, for example, blurry text on some platforms)

> That's never the case for any consumer app, the potential for improvement in UI is practically infinite.

If that's true, how do you explain the observable pattern of many consumer applications degrading in UI functionality and coherence after a certain point?

> But also, just use the old version if it's finished, you don't need to upgrade?

Exactly. I reverted to 0.12.

> If that's true, how do you explain the observable pattern of many consumer applications degrading in UI functionality and coherence after a certain point?

Most consumer software in developed under the assumption that features only have a cost when being built. Their maintenance cost, and the combinatorial complexity each new feature adds, is barely considered. As a result, software teams add complexity at a speed that exceeds the rate at which the team's size, and the volume of work it can handle, grows. Eventually this reaches a critical threshold and the quality of the software starts to decline. But this doesn't mean the software couldn't still be improved, just that there isn't the resource available to do so.

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> If that's true, how do you explain the observable pattern of many consumer applications degrading in UI functionality and coherence after a certain point?

Well, that's easy: Bad choices. The better something is, the easier it is to change it in a way, that makes it worse.

I agree with GP, everything can be improved, but that doesn't mean that you will succeed, or that you should try, for various, separate reasons.

I don't think we're disagreeing.

The point at which new changes are more likely to degrade an application that's already excellent for its established use cases than they are to improve it further is the point at which we should consider the software "finished".

There may be lots of theoretically plausible improvements that could be made, but if the constraints of actual practice make pursuing those ideas a net detriment, that's probably a good place to stop.

I think AI may actually make this simultaneously better and worse: it will eventually be really easy to hit all of the functional and performance targets early on, so "finished" software will at some point be much better and closer to true completion, but the mentality that drives people to keep fiddling with it instead of moving on to a new project will be just as prevalent, and the post-"finished" releases will likely be even worse.

>pattern of many consumer applications degrading in UI functionality and coherence after a certain point?

Sadly they think they are making it better. Most of the time chasing fads.

Sometimes introducing dark patterns, for reasons.

I mean, Apple (and MS) had been dumbing down their OS in the name of usability and security for a while now.