Last week I was looking for an app for one specific thing and the problem with that specific thing is that there are many apps that cover it on the App Store but none of them are considered “good”. While perusing the pile of trash that was the apps list for my specific search terms I found an app that I had heard of before I just couldn’t remember where. Usually when I have something flagged in my mind as “remembered” like that it means I remember it for praise I read about it on trusted social platforms like Reddit so I downloaded it to give it a try. After going through a lengthy onboarding wizard giving far too much of my personal information away to this company I reached what looked like the end and pressed the button to finish the onboarding flow and suddenly the app just stopped working; the loading spinner sat indefinitely (okay, maybe 5 minutes but c’mon) so I force quit the app and opened it again thinking perhaps some error had occured after signup but that it would bring me to a screen explaining it or something like that, crappy, but you know that sort of issue is expected nowadays. Upon loading up again it just started over from scratch! Now, my interest had moved from being interested in using the app to being interested in seeing if I could get it to work at all - same thing: filled out the onboarding flow, got to the last step, pressed the button to continue and… nothing. At this point I decided to go ahead and do what I should have done from the start and do a quick search to find out where I had heard of this app before and why. After Google forced it’s search AI in my face telling me nothing useful and 25 links down the results page I found the recommendation I had come across months earlier and found that yes this app was recommended for being good at the specific thing I was trying to do.
Obviously I stopped trying the app, deleted it and moved on but it got me thinking yet again about the state of software in 2026. As a Software Developer myself that’s been around for over a decade now I have spent a lot of time on both sides of that situation and after watching companies rapidly expand QA teams, tighten protocols, move work out - then back in office, etc. for many years I think that problems like these should be nearly gone now, right? We shouldn’t have perfect software for sure but worse? It doesn’t seem right.
Changing gears a bit I’m also an avid gamer and while I won’t link it here I have a Steam account with about 400 games that I play every weekend. Gaming has an interesting problem right now where huge AAA releases like Cyberpunk, Battlefield 2042 and even one of my favorite franchises Borderlands 4 are launching full of issues that are so bad they essentially make the games unplayable for many of their “best” users who spent time waiting for the launch and paid the usually higher price to play right at launch. Over the years I have moved away from pre-ordering games and buying new releases because it’s just impossible to know if the product is going to work or not until it’s already out for a long time with a lot of people playing it.
The interesting thing about the gaming industry though is that I think it highlights the issue at the root of what Cory Doctorow termed “Enshittification”. While I, and many others, have moved away from pre-purchasing or launch day purchasing AAA titles a lot of people including me tend to purchase indie games pretty quickly which just a few years ago was sort of unheard of - and that’s especially interesting because when I think about this I am also more likely to trust software in general be it an app, a desktop program, a website or hell even a terminal utility if it’s made by someone instead of some big company.
I think this lead me to understand the problem that is causing this “enshittification”, at least in my mind, and that’s that when building software was new and exciting but hard to achieve a lot of people put time and effort into passion projects and made really good stuff that they loved and supported. Now we have industry software mills that cram out shitware on a slop budget with offshoring, AI and whatever else to line the pockets of the company executives and investors at the cost of quality products. Unfortunately, like many things the AI epidemic has only fueled this fire dramatically and enabled companies to pass things off as working without doing any real work, any real testing or understanding anything that’s in their own software.
I am wary of the future of software and it’s unfortunate that it’s come to this but I fear it will continue to get worse over time.