Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier, or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?
I think its because you need feature parity with smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity, otherwise it becomes too hard to use with just your fingers, compared to a desktop website where you have a keyboard and mouse to use outside the screen.
> smartphones where you can't have too much UI complexity
this is a good hypothesis, except smartphone apps have much less UI feature complexity than is possible on a smartphone, i.e. it still seems to be a conscious choice to dumb down smart phone apps beyond what the UI and users can handle. A familiar example is banking apps, I have accounts at a number of large US banks, and in every case the phone apps leave out swaths of capabilities that their websites have, things like letting me see what Zelles I've sent to a particular person, "contact the bank" messaging, etc.
image editing apps are another example, 100's of them in the app stores, but they're less feature rich than Windows Paint from 30 years ago. when they do something fancy, it's frequently because they are an app for doing that one thing.
IMHO it's both. There will always be the possiblity of gaining more users by dumbing down the app, but the more things dumb down in general the dumber people get. It's a positive feedback loop.
> Are products becoming less sophisticated because users are getting dumber/lazier,
> or are users getting dumber/lazier because products are becoming less sophisticated?
or, in search of increased customer growth, is deeper product penetration into the bottom half of the sophistication bell-curve continually sieving ideas through fewer synaptic connections/simpler semantic nets
Companies dumb down their products to appeal to the masses, who then get dumber because they have nothing nudging them to get better. It's a vicious cycle imo.
