Android
The Growing Trend of Bloated Apps with ‘Lite’ Alternatives
The Growing Trend of Apps with ‘Lite’ Alternatives
K. Q. Dreger notices a peculiar trend in apps by large companies and writes that a company’s ‘Lite’ app should be their only app:
What part of being fast, data conscious, and reliable is exclusive to old devices or those on poor networks? Why does Twitter Lite feel more like Twitter than anything the company’s done with their main website or app over the past few years? Are Facebook, Twitter, and Google truly so married to ads, analytics, and A/B testing frameworks that their only shot at making a reasonably sized, fast app is to start fresh? Will these lite variants actually stay that way, or will the bloat slowly creep back in?
Being based in India, I have used some of these ‘Lite’ apps over the last few months and in almost all the cases, these lite versions offer a far better user experience than using the official apps. It’s downright ridiculous to experience how bloated the official apps are with unnecessary crap.
It’s also sad to see that there are many apps out there which are severely bloated and do not offer a lite version at all. This issue is becoming more common across not just iOS and Android, but on the Mac as well, thanks to all the “apps” powered by Electron.
iLend — Keep Track of Things You Lend or Borrow
iLend is a gorgeous app that helps you keep track of the things or items that you lend or borrow with your friends, family or colleagues. Available for iPhone and Android devices, iLend lets you quickly add any items in seconds so you don’t just have a ready list of items, but also who it belongs to or who you’ve lent it to. [...]
Assembla Acquires Cornerstone — The Popular Subversion App for Mac
Cornerstone — the popular and possibly the best Subversion (SVN) client for Mac has been acquired by Assembla — known for its Enterprise Version Control solutions. As part of this acquisition, the company will also be acqui-hiring Zennaware, the team behind the Cornerstone app. Paul Lynch, CEO of Assembla, announced their acquisition on [...]
‘RememBear’ is a New Password Manager from the TunnelBear Team
There’s only a couple of VPN services I’ve used extensively in the past. The one I’ve used the most was Cloak — which recently got acquired by StackPath and is now known as Encrypt.me, and TunnelBear — which is what I’m currently using. The latter is what I’ve been using for a year now, largely since it [...]
Squarespace Analytics
Squarespace Analytics
Squarespace has released major updates to its Squarespace Analytics app for iOS and Android. This update introduces new ways to access several key metrics, essential when running a website. The user interface has been tweaked to make it easy to not just get a glimpse of all your metrics, but also easily drill down into specific and granular views. If you run a site powered by Squarespace, the new improvements rolling out to the Analytics app should make your day.
Storm It 2.0 for Android
A little over a year ago, we wrote about Storm It — a simple and clever Android app that allows you to post “tweetstorms” on Twitter. With Storm it, you simply go on typing your thoughts or ideas without worrying about how much characters you’ve used. The app will automatically split your block of text into tweets, prepend [...]