Dear Medium: Please Make The Mobile App Stop Sucking
By: Roger Nixon Ailes Bird
Tags: Elon Musk, Mobile, Goals, Médium, Donald Trump

Dear Medium: Please Make The Mobile App Stop Sucking

We’ve been told mobile is the future for something like a decade and a half now. I don’t mean in the adoption sense, that’s clearly come and gone (and only makes this plea all the more belated) but with mobile replacing everything else in existence. The tipping point was supposed to be the iPad: big enough for a more comfortable viewing experience, it was supposed to be the final nail in both the laptop’s and TV’s shared coffin.

Surprisingly little of it has come to pass — or it has just not quite as single-device dominating as the hype bought into. Laptops are still around as people still value keyboards and actual desktop-grade processors, but laptops and tablets are ever merging. Same with gaming consoles: mobile was supposed to completely kill off XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo but while dedicated consoles remain only stronger than ever, the Switch may be the tipping point where gaming consoles merge optimum true home-based gaming utilization with multi-functionality and true mobility in a way that clearly makes Nintendo’s own 3DS seem charmingly anachronistic. And TVs gained a Renaissance with the rise of on-demand subscriber services, but Netflix and Hulu still clearly, overwhelming benefit from mobile screens.

So — while I risk biting the hand that feeds me-why, dear Medium, must your own mobile app be such garbage?

This actually reflects a disturbing trend across the industry. Even on platforms where mobile is the clear popularity winner or even the cause d’existence- Reddit, Twitter, Craigslist- mobile users take a back-of-the-van seat to their desktop counterparts. Why? I don’t know. But it’s stupid.

Take Medium, right here. I can make really tall, bold text for what passes as a title, not-as-bold, not-as-tall text for what passes as a subheading, and dump pictures somewhere in the text body-and that’s it. Oh wait it also allows for line breaks. How revolutionary and useful. And completely randomizes the formatting of dashes.

I can barely implement custom hashtags. I hear that’s kind of important.

This is complete and total garbage, and utterly inexcusable. I prefer mobile writing because, quite frankly, I’m stuck with a lot of dead time (traveling, etc.) where I can afford to write. Writing on the fly, on my phone, is convenient.

I know for a fact that implementing full desktop functionality on the mobile app is entirely possible.

There might be an excuse offered — it’s too time-consuming, it’s too difficult. I can also tell you for a fact, whatever excuse is offered, it’s automatically lame. So what if it’s hard or difficult? It’s called Doing Your Damned Job.

Let’s say you’re, oh I don’t know, Elon Musk. Now Elon here has a reputation for being quite the do-anything tech master. Launch a freakin’ car somewhere at the vicinity of Mars? Check. Build a super-huge rocket to carry people to there instead? Well, it’s being worked on. So there’s every reason to think this man doesn’t know the meaning of the word “excuse.”

And yet, he’s one of the biggest whiners on the planet. Whahh, fair labor practices and workplace safety’s too hard! Whahh, not making a joke of investors on Instagram’s too hard! Whahh, offering Tesla’s in yellow is too icky!

Yeah that didn’t bowl over well with investors.

Or hell even our President, Donald “Make My Ego Great Again” Trump. He’s trying to make whining (and bragging about walls) on Twitter a national pastime. Great, I suppose if you’re one of the anchors on FOX News who think he can literally do no wrong to the point you’ve staked the remainder of your professional career on it. Not so great if you’re the rest of us.

And yes I’m aware of the hypocrisy of whining about whining. That’s not my point though: my point is, neither of the two men mentioned above have any right to complain about why they should be entitled to lousy, cheesy compromises as a way of getting out of not even hard parts of their job but fundamental, basic aspects that small businesses and local government alcoves manage to get right as part of daily and hourly functions.

This isn’t Elon trying to build a Mars-shot rocket. This is Elon trying to make sure hazard warnings actually meet OSHA code.

Fix the damn mobile app, Medium.