Mainstream apps are bad at UX

19 Jul, 2025

It's mildly annoying that there's a set of apps on our phone that collectively, as a society, everyone needs to use and everyone knows everyone else can't really avoid unless they try really hard to. This include major browser apps, office suite apps and social media platforms, among others.

The issue is, we all know that these apps can be unbearably annoying at times -- lack of handling of edge cases, lack of support for obvious needs in customizability, and all those other things we call "glitches" -- yet there's nothing we can do about it than complain to each other on the shared experience and accept it as part of all other annoyances in our daily lives.

But these issues aren't hard to fix. Not for the teams of engineers behind the apps in question. Are you telling me that a software mega-corp like Meta can't make a single "follow" button the correct height on an Instagram profile page? Or make the row of email navigation controls with merely three buttons not take up the entire width of my monitor screen on its own? It's almost embarrassing in cases where my non-technical friends spot obvious mistakes in the engineering or design of these apps.

I was looking at a website this morning that happened to have links to sites on internet protocols other than HTTP(S), such as Gopher or Gemini. These non-web links were clearly marked which protocol they are hosted on, but I still ended up clicking on one accidentally, without noticing the protocol labelled next to it.

Nothing happened after I clicked the link. No errors, no dialog modals, no spinning loading icon. I thought I didn't click the link, and so I tried again. This time I noticed that the moment I clicked, my browser behaved as though I clicked on a normal web link and spins the loading icon on the address bar for a few seconds, before giving up and resuming to pretend as if nothing happened. Eventually, I looked closer at the link displayed on the web page and realizes it's a Gopher link.

Look, it makes a lot of sense for major web browsers to not support alternative protocols, but surely there ought to be some friendly popup letting the user know that something went wrong? To provide a kind of feedback that says "yes, you clicked on the link, but I can't show it to you?"

The primary mode of casual messaging happens on Instagram for a lot of my friends. There, it's common knowledge that Instagram is riddled with glitches and features that are blatantly working in an unexpected way. Now you might think I'm a nerd or paranoid and want end-to-end encryption to do what is intended or something¹; alas, no, the features I'm referring to are ones that form the basis of social media interactions and are relatively significant contributors to Instagram's data analysis and improving their revenue-serving algorithms.

When you want to react to a message with an emoji that isn't part of the five presets², you'll either try selecting from long list of emoji in the emoji picker or use its search bar. When clicking on the search bar, your keyboard pops up, but the caret does not show up in the search bar. If you try to type in your search anyway, you'll notice that the search bar remains empty. The text you type ends up in the message box of your DM instead.

If you didn't know this and thought the characters are simply not showing up in the search bar and hit enter to try your luck on that emoji search, sorry, your emoji search is sent as a message in your DMs!

Now for extra entertainment effect, let's say you're not operating under fast internet conditions but you wish to quickly unsend that embarrassing DM of your emoji search. Your message is still "sending" though. When you try to press and hold that message to tell it to "stop trying to send that message", the popup menu will only show "copy." Guess you can't unsend a message that isn't sent yet. Your only choice is to sit still and wait until your message is finally sent, then quickly select "Unsend" in the new press-and-hold menu.

Coming back to that emoji search, the correct way to use the search bar as of writing is to first click the search bar as usual after opening the picker, ignore the fact that your keyboard is already open and click on the search bar a second time for the caret to show up, then type in your search.

Hopefully, the emoji you have in mind shows up, but when you click on it (which, intuitively, should react to that message with the emoji you searched) the emoji picker closes and nothing happens. That message is not reacted. Frustrated, you decide to give it another chance and try again. You can go through the whole fiasco of clicking the search bar twice to look for that emoji again, but if you're smart, that emoji is now in the "recently used" list and you can simply select it there. Half the times the emoji will still not be correctly used to react on the message. In any case, throw it on a few more tries and perhaps it will stick.

Let's not even begin to talk about that ghostly, sporadic "JOIN CALL" button next to group chats where there isn't at all a call going on. I have not yet figured out in which circumstances they show up but perhaps Instagram simply wants to give us a topic to talk about when conversation in the group chat subsides.

You can probably list more examples.

Ultimately, these bugs are annoying to workaround with every day as we rely on these apps so much, fun to complain and joke about, but sometimes I like to try figure out the why, and the how. Do these issues really serve the best interests of the company behind the app? Is it true that engineering efforts were just redistributed to more profitable parts of an app or is it just that hard for multi-billion dollar companies to get these petty issues resolved?

By the way, that website I mentioned earlier I was looking at on my browser was the homepage of Old Computer Challenge. It's an event that takes place every July where participants try and use old hardware and old software for a week. Among other things, it helps participants "challenge their beliefs and perhaps even shed their dependency on things they consider vital."³

Ironic, isn't it?

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