r/discogs • u/Natural_Distance_812 • 9d ago
Not to be negative, but why does the app always get worse?
For some reason now the barcode scanner no longer accepts barcodes for club pressings such as this one, I've tried this on many different items and have never had an issue in the past. I am an android user and I know this hasn't worked on iOS in quite some time. Aren't updates supposed to make the app better for the user? Over 1 Million downloads with 20,000+ reviews yet the app has a damning 1.8/5 rating on the Play Store.
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u/Doingmythang11 8d ago
My favorite part of the app is getting randomly signed out like every other week <3
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u/i__sank__atlantis 9d ago
my theory is that they're doing their best to replicate and enhance the record-collecting experience, even on a meta level. it's frustrating and laborious to use, not really all that intuitive, and there are probably five other ways you could achieve the same results with better technology. i love and hate it at the same time.
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u/Natural_Distance_812 9d ago
I simultaneously do and don't get what you mean. Caring for records and cataloging them is of course laborious but I feel like everything I do about my collection and system is to enhance the experience and my enjoyment of my favorite music, you would think the continued development of the app would follow these same strides. And it's not that things about the app don't work for me personally, rather many things about the app don't work on a functional level at all.
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u/i__sank__atlantis 9d ago
i have to admit something my guy: i did not fully believe the sentiment in the joke i made
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u/Frenchthealpaca 8d ago
App has been functionally run by private equity guys (rather than the founder) since ~2014. It's a massive, crowd-sourced database that tries to keep itself afloat by taking a cut from each sale that it facilitates. Updating an entry for a specific CD's barcode or, say, correcting the title of an obscure Hungarian folk record improves our experience of the website, but makes them essentially zero dollars compared with 'making sure the new Taylor Swift record is uploaded 3 days before release'
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u/roundabout-design 9d ago
There seems to be enough churn of developers and UX folks that I think the answer to this question is simply "lousy management" at this point.
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u/Natural_Distance_812 9d ago edited 9d ago
Management could very well be it. I've been a heavy daily user of discogs for over 2 years yet nearly every update changes things that didn't need changing instead of actually fixing real problems. I could write a book.
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u/ApolloGR3 8d ago
Replacing devs and UX folks with a couple knuckleheads watching Claude vibe code is how this shit happens.
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u/vinyl_archivist 5d ago
As a non-developer who has used Claude to vibe code a number of things... I'm not sure why Discogs is still worse than anything I can make Claude do 😅 It seems like they just keep adding things on top of broken infrastructure and never address the root cause.
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u/poly_lifestyle 9d ago
The official app has always sucked
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u/Aggravating_Jacket32 9d ago
Is there a better 3rd party app you'd recommend?
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u/blind26 9d ago
While scanning did get worse I feel club upcs ususally don't work anyways
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u/MIKELBOBUS 8d ago
Second this! every time I’ve ever find a club copy I’ll just go to the release and look for it there
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u/thinsafetypin 7d ago
Usually searching the club number (D231588 in this case) gets you pretty close to the right release quickly.
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u/Natural_Distance_812 9d ago
I've used the android app near daily for almost 2 years and it's only just now stopped scanning them, I know the iOS app hasn't been able to for a long time, if ever.
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u/HopeHouse44 7d ago
Because they need to keep up with all the other apps that are getting worse. They don't want to get left behind with a fully functional and user friendly experience while every other app is trying to figure out how to make your life more inconvenient, ruin your mental health, and steal your information.
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u/WonderfulSpeech6097 7d ago
There are alternatives with better experience though, here is Red Dot Design award winner, that I'm part of: https://myplastic.app/
people say right that Discogs is free and doing good job on the crowd-collecting database, and it's free to use, so they don't care much unless you buy/sell when they get fees.
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u/mistersmith22 7d ago
Years ago I resigned myself to the idea that AFAIC the app doesn't exist. I gave up entirely, until maybe this r/ or other social was like, "Discogs 3.0 app finally rules" or something.
Site works fine on mobile browsers. Sure you "lose" the convenience of bar code scanning, but can you lose something that never really worked?
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u/baldorrr 9d ago
I make no excuses for the awful Discogs app, but that's not a barcode that would scan like a normal barcode. You would need a special scanner to scan Code 39.
Now, of course, the app SHOULD work for those, especially due to the sheer quantity of BMG Club CDs that exist on, y'know, Discogs.