TestFlight Sort Order

Good luck with that. Apple can't even make the desktop Music app not suck in 1,000 different ways. How is it that software is getting worse when we have CPU and RAM out the wazoo these days? Everything is worse than 15 years ago. Microsoft products are worse, Adobe products are worse, Apple products are worse... buggy, slow, missing features that used to exist... not conforming to any UI standards at all... despite these companies having tens of billions to throw at software development, everything is objectively worse than when these companies were smaller, had a lot less money, and were working on more constrained hardware.

@Ben Music is so bad. I was recently trying to search for a few albums, buy them, and add certain songs from them to playlists, and I ran into probably two dozen bugs/design issues in just a few minutes. I was thinking I want Audion back, but that wouldn’t really help because I still need access to the store and syncing to my iPhone.

Everything is Crap - TV's don't work as they should it takes ages from Turing on to get to what you want to watch. Not to mention the tracking and system-wide ads.

I was delivering stuff for a local community thing the other day and forgot the note pad to list those delivered and I thought no problem I'll use Apple Notes and dictate after typing in the first delivery next to the numeral 1.
When I dictated the send line speaking "2-dot- space" and names - all went well until I said new line at which point the previous line indented and the number 2 changed to a 1 ! WTF!

Also my Mac can't see my phone for Airdrop until I pick up the phone and turn airdrop off and on again.

My Ring doorbell used to show who is currently at the door when it rang - now, after hundreds of software updates - it shows an image of the previous time the doorbell was pressed until I tap on the video area and then tap "go live" I think I missed a lot of people until I noticed this new 'advance.'

My car will stay open all night if I leave it and go indoors with the key - but if I leave the key in the ignition for a minute or two the doors will lock with me outside. (Full disclosure this is not a new car just newer to me - after 20 years of owning 2 Smart Cars (literally) that were great and never locked me out)

I recently subscribed to a SKY Sports package via Now TV and every night since I get it cutting out and message stating 'Our Tech Geniuses are working to solve the problem. Muppets - more like.

I was thinking of buying an E-Ink picture frame for a friend's birthday but noticed none of those on the UK version of the company's site mentioned E-Ink so I clicked on the AI assistant and typed "Are E-Ink frames available in the UK / Ireland?" To get the response, 'That's a great question!" And then offered a link to a web page where I found out the answer NO, myself.

The modern world of tech is truly shit. The problem is there are no reliable alternatives so none of the companies really give a feck.

@Niall Speaking of TVs…my Apple TV had two days last week where it would only play a handful of manually purchased videos; everything else (across 5 different streaming apps) would crash(?) back to the menu. I spent over an hour troubleshooting it to no avail, and it eventually spontaneously stated working again by itself. Now it’s back to just the long-term bug where, after playing certain ads, it resumes a previous episode of the same TV show.

@Michael I wonder why are at this point given that many of the companies providing this buggy mess have virtually unlimited resources. Are systems so complex now that there are too many siloed teams to be able to test things fully. Is it because everything is on a continuous update cycle so what's the point perfecting anything?

I strongly disagree with Gruber: Sorting by recency makes no sense at all. They do not even show that it is sorted by update date (I complained about that before because I could not figure out what the seemingly random sort order was).

Who knows if app x was updated before or after any other random app in the list? Sorted by recent makes sense for the most recently updated apps only. (A good Testfligh app might have a recently updated section that shows the last 10 apps or last week or so.)

Sorting by name makes a lot of sense: No matter where in a list of even a million of apps you are, you can always tell if the app you are looking for is before or after (unless you do not know the name of the app but that it was updated on November 15th 2024).

PS: On my iPhone/Mac (both pre-26), the lastest TestFlight app sadly still sorts by most recently updated, not by App name.

@Niall It’s a mystery to me. I thought the promise of these locked down platforms was that I’m running the same HBO app as everyone else, on the same checksummed OS, no haxies, on one of only a handful of hardware configurations, so it shouldn’t be onerous to test. Yet I get the feeling that some sort of hacked together piracy system would work better.

> Sorting by recency makes no sense at all.

Almost always when I launch TestFlight, what I want to get to is apps that have recently had new betas — either to update them (if not auto-updated), or to see release notes.

So, to me, recency is what I want. Is it intuitive that a list of apps is sorted by recency? Not usually, no. But is it a useful default for an app for beta testing? Yeah, I think so.

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> Also, if I consider the broader view, this really speaks to how much we’ve lost in terms of UI vocabulary. For decades, any list of items with names and dates could be sorted by name or date, ascending or descending, through the standard use of clickable headers at the top of every list. This was true for almost any such list in any app, on any platform — Mac, Windows, Unix, Amiga, whatever. This was just basic GUI stuff.

Yep!

Windows's UI to uninstall app is a good demonstration of that. https://www.minitool.com/news/how-to-find-and-view-installed-apps-programs-on-windows-10-11.html has screenshots of both the old and the new (Windows 10, but Windows 11 isn't dramatically different in this regard) UI.

The "Way 4: Use Control Panel" section shows what it has looked like since Vista. You have a table view, you can click a column header to sort by that column, click again to sort descending, there's additional features such as grouping and filtering (e.g., "show me all apps from Adobe", or "only show me apps that are >= 1 GB"), and a drop-down to switch to icon view.

Now, contrast the "Way 2: From the Settings App" section. Because there's no visible column headers and everything's squished together (which is a fair decision to make on a phone — but they make this decision no matter how wide you make the window, even though the Settings app _does_ have responsive layout), there's now a "Sort by:" drop-down menu, which adds a level of indirection (there's no immediate intuitive connection to "this is a column header; clicking it will interact with it"), and offers fewer sort options. There's a "Filter by:" drop-down, but it just lets you pick a drive. Grouping is gone, filtering by e.g. publisher is gone.

That's, roughly speaking, 20 years' worth of UI design evolution in Windows.

Now, that's Microsoft, not Apple, but I think it shows a broader industry trend that does _include_ Apple.

> Yet I get the feeling that some sort of hacked together piracy system would work better.

I don't pirate media really, I buy everything, but I use a lot of the software that is more or less designed for it... and yes, it is much much better than the streaming service apps. Plex is getting worse as they try to squeeze more money out of people, but it is still better than Apple, Prime, etc. and Jellyfin is a truly open source option that is getting better. Not streaming, but Channels DVR is fantastic and I also self host that.