Ostensible Improvements

A recent article on this frustration:

"Never before has a phone update felt more like a blatant act of hostility....I woke up yesterday to find them decimated to a smoldering rubble. Nothing was in its right place, many podcasts had just plain vanished, and worst of all, the damage wasn’t even the result of a glitch, but rather an ostensible improvement." 

Things are becoming over-refreshed and over-featured. Even if you feel that you understand how a certain interface or OS works, the next day you might not—either because something was changed, added, or removed--or because something remained poorly designed.

The whole idea of out-with-the-old means we’re zombies for the future regardless of what it destroys. We’re updating for the sake of updating.

What I would do is simply stop the non-essential updating or make it less frequent: Update once a month or even once a year.

Even if operating systems still looked like Windows 98, yet performed like a Windows 11, few would be restless for aesthetic changes. After all the system and structural problems have been solved, interface tweaks--and now the monetization of them--simply becomes a frustration. (An example is Evernote--software I've used for over a decade, and is now a victim of this over-design OCD).

Improvements (with scare quotes) are more ostensible than ever before.

This is a good argument for stability over disruption.