When mobile apps go bad

A few times a week, one or more apps on my iPad and iPhone are updated, and I duly install the new version; Android users know the routine too. I sometimes regret it, but there’s no way to go back, so I’m stuck with the update. I really wish you could revert to a previous version.

It happened recently when Reuters updated its News Pro app for iPad. What had been a fairly fast-loading, easy-to-read news app now brought molasseslike load times and difficult-to-read articles. Plus, navigating among the stories requires more steps than before. There were no bugs to fix and no compelling flaws in the previous version. Someone simply decided to change the UI, and they did so in a bad way. That app is now gone from my iPad, though fortunately the iPhone version remains unmolested and still usable. Likewise, the update two weeks ago to Fidelity for iPad app ruined what had been an easy-to-use portfolio management tool, larding it with visual gewgaws and unnecessarily adding multiple steps to do the portfolio management the app exists for in the first place. Sigh.

News Pro is not the first app to get a regrettable update. Perhaps the most infamous case is that of the Netflix app for iPad, which last spring removed its ability to add DVDs to your queue and introduced a UI that made it all but impossible to scroll or search for movies and TV shows. Worse, you could hardly avoid starting unwanted video playback, given the lack of space for basic navigation gestures like scrolling. In retrospect, it was the first stage in Netflix’s suicide strategy of 2011. The strategy has worked, with hundreds of thousands of people like myself saying bye.

Bank of America dropped support for multiple accounts in an update earlier this year and made the app slower. It later brought back multiple-account support. I dropped BofA, too, but for reasons related to its unabashed greed rather than its inept update.

A good UI is critical for a successful mobile app, and that means the ability to resize text and other UI elements, especially for people like me, who use mobile devices on the go and often don’t have a pair of reading glasses handy. This is one of the most pervasive flaws in mobile apps. It’s terrible when an app like News Pro goes from good to bad in this regard, given how many apps are subpar from the get-go — such as BBC News (for both iPad and iPhone), Apple fanboy news app TUAW (for iPhone), and American Express (for iPad; the iPhone version is good). It’s not just an iOS issue, of course — I see the same issues in the equivalent Android apps, as well as in built-in messaging apps in Windows Phone.

Another component of a good UI is easy, minimized navigation. Apps are all over the map in this regard. Some, like News Pro, had decent navigation but ruined it by adding too many options and, thus, extra steps for what used to be common activities. This sin is common to desktop apps — ask any user of Adobe software about how much gunk accrues with each upgrade, resulting in both unfathomable clutter and an increasing numbers of steps as the kitchen-sink functionality breaks down to multiple layers to navigate through. I’ve sadly watched Creative Suite become riddled with such barnacleware over the years, and Adobe is methodically complexifying its Omniture SiteCatalyst Web app as well.

A related flaw is offering too many options, as in the case of the San Francisco Chronicle iPad app, which has multiple navigation methods that could easily be simplified. Less is more, as any Apple aficionado can tell you — even as you add features and are tempted to pile on navigation methods in parallel. At least the Chronicle app as a whole is effective in presenting the news stories readably. But even better are the Economist, Le Monde, and New York Times apps.

Sometimes, the clutter is the problem, as the app tries to do too much and resembles Frankenstein’s monster as a result. A great example of this is the Print n Share app, which brought wireless printing to iOS devices. At the time it came out, “air sharing” — using Wi-Fi to send files between iOS devices and computers — was a popular category. Many apps added it, even if it was not core to their purpose. Print n Share was one of those, but it didn’t stop there: It also has email, a browser, address book, camera, and photo allbum. The app is a mess, and using it to print is not easy.

The issue is moot now, however. iOS 5 eliminated the technical loophole that such apps use to access non-AirPrint-compatible printers (there are still few). Print n Share no longer can print anything but emails and Web pages, and only by opening them in its app. It’s all been killed by iOS 5, so its poor UI is now the least of its problems.

Another such kitchen-sink app is GoodReader, which started life as an enhanced version of iOS’s Quick Look document preview facility, then added file sharing and file management within its app (iOS doesn’t have a pan-app file system). Recently, GoodReader added PDF annotation — for which it is really good, by the way. The good news is that the app has slowly been cleaned up; although not the most elegant app available, it’s now usable.

Adobe SiteCatalyst Visualize, an app for monitoring Web traffic, has a confusing array of options, too many components to choose from, and a bizarre default of showing a cloud of keywords — a display style meant to demonstrate the popularity of keywords and how they relate other keywords. It’s bizarre because it’s nearly impossible to select a keyword from that overlapping set of terms, yet that cloud display is the primary selection tool. Yes, you can switch to an interminable list view, but geez! What’s sad is that the iPad is a great visualization tool, as Roambi Vizualizer proves.

As I’ve said, Adobe is notorious for poor UI — but it doesn’t always fail in this regard. Its Adobe Reader app is easy to use, as is its basic Photoshop Express retouching app.

Then there are apps that are poorly designed from a functional point of view. SiteCatalyst — both the original version from Omniture and the visualizer version from Adobe, which acquired Omniture — are good examples of two strains of this illness. The original can hardly show anything, so it’s not useful (similar to how Netflix’s app is too crippled or how Microsoft’s Office apps on Windows Phone 7 are too primitive). The new version goes in the other direction, providing a spasm of options poorly organized and presented; it’s much easier to use the Web app on your iPhone or iPad.

If an app works better in the browser than as a native app, something is very wrong, and it’s not just SiteCatalyst Visualizer that is faulty in this way. Take Concur, a travel management app tied to corporate travel agencies: You can’t select text in it, such as to copy your confirmation code to an airline’s flight-tracking site, you can’t add your itinerary to your calendar, and you can’t book or manage your flights (just hotels — a usage-killing limitation in the Orbitz app as well). I end up skipping the app and using the website directly. Unfortunately, there’s a key flaw in its website, too: Its exported .ics calendar files work only with Microsoft Outlook (Windows or Mac), not with any other .ics-compatible apps. That means you can’t add your itinerary when on the go via your iOS, BlackBerry, or Android device, nor if you use Apple’s Mail for Mac OS X.

A native mobile app should be easier to use than a website from a mobile device, even if it offers a subset of the capabilities. I don’t get why anyone would ship apps that don’t meet this criterion. Fortunately, users expect mobile app updates, and despite the preceding list of failures, some titles get better. Case in point: U.S. Bank‘s original mobile banking app, which was both limited and awkward on an iPad or iPhone. A recent update is well-designed for the iPhone, offering the key functionality in a clean interface. It’s not iPad-optimized, though, so tablet users should continue to go to the bank’s website, which works just fine in a tablet’s browser.

And a native app should offer some valid differentiation from the Web app or a native OS function — unlike Google’s Gmail app for iOS, a totally unnecessary app given the built-in Mail app handles Gmail easily. Likewise, an app that extends a popular app has to do more — unlike TweetDeck for iPhone, for example, which can’t do anything more than the regular Twitter app, dropping such essential TweetDeck functions as scheduling tweets for later. Why bother?

The good news is that there a lot of well-designed and highly functional apps to choose from. Examples from my iPad include Apple’s Keynote presentation app, the Economist news app, the Twitter app, the Zite news-collection app, Apple’s iBooks and Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader apps, the Kayak travel-reservations iPad app, the WaveRecorder audio recorder app, the Fidelity portfolio-management iPad app, the Amazon Mobile shopping app, and a bunch of games (from Angry Birds to Game for Cats, from Crazy Snowboard to Real Solitaire).

This article, “When mobile apps go bad,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.