This 25-minute segment on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (video or audio, segment starts at 40:21) is from November 2024, and is a nice counterpart to the post about favourite well-made apps and sites from a few months back.

The original theme is “what is an app that you use all the time, and like to use, but is actually a bad app?” but it quickly moves to a more general conversation about good and bad mobile apps.

It’s always interesting to me to see what themes emerge and what other people think is important. Here’s the list where I linked to relevant apps as long as I could find them:

Bad apps:

• Google Messages – dinged for unreliable spam and lack of organization/​filtering
• Notion (on mobile) – hard to orient yourself and some direct manipulation is wonky
• many smart home accessory apps – bad and redundant with Google Home, but have to keep for emergencies
• Netgear Orbi (network router) – specific functionality and bad password recovery
• Hatch (white noise machine for babies) – simple things are hard to discover
• Nest app/Nest Yale Smart Lock – bad integration
• Goodreads – stale

Good apps:

• ButterflyMX (smart building lock app) – reliable
• UDisc (score keeper for disc golf) – good functionality, great in a free version
• New York City ferry
• New York City ticket payment – reliable and has many payment options
• Greenwich, CT and San Francisco parking apps – live activities
• The StoryGraph – cool graphs and stats about your book reading patterns