once in a while i try to engage with microsoft's 2010s initiatives and they're all such trash fires, i'm continuously staggered by how this company is wasting their vast resources and skilled people on shit that anyone could tell you is awful
i learned that windows ostensibly has an android interop system now where you can text through your phone using an app on your desktop PC. this interests me - there's other apps that do this but I find them hokey.
there's a control panel in windows to set this up - pretty slick, except it has a big, ugly advertisement for microsoft's dead horse they won't stop beating. why are there huge empty grey areas? what's with this text alignment? why is there a dot? 
it asks me for my number to install the app, but the link it texts me is to a Microsoft launcher replacement. I have no idea why. There's no logical connection between "let me text from my desktop" and "install a new homescreen launcher on my phone"
I did that, and the resulting app is a hideous mess that feels visibly foreign to android. it also doesn't appear to do anything. i have no idea why, at this point, i have a launcher installed on my phone or what it's supposed to do or do I need to have it running to text or
From my desktop, there's no next step. Like, there's nothing, I'm not told to do anything, I have no phone app installed if that's what I need, there's no links to the next step from the control panel.
So I google it, knowing already this is a lost cause, and yes, there is an app I have to install from the windows store that doesn't come with Windows. Microsoft installed the Twitter app from the Windows Store on my PC without consent months ago, but not this.
it's just called "your phone". cool. let's go to the store and look that up.
ah, nothing. shovelware. garbage. books!!!
ah, nothing. shovelware. garbage. books!!!
here it is. i had to scroll like a full page to find it. why wasn't this first? it's a fulltext match! it's a literal fucking 1:1 match for what i typed! this should have been weighted and scored a full fucking 1.0 in the sort algorithm! incompetents!
by the way let's not at all miss that this app, like EVERY SINGLE FIRST PARTY APP IN THE WINDOWS STORE, has a piss-poor review. everyone hates them. this is because they don't fucking work.
quick, petty reminder that no windows store app that i'm aware of supports drag and drop. drag, and fucking, drop. not implemented.
this is microsoft's own store. their devs all have access to the internal testing environment. they could deploy internally before public release and find out "oh, the linebreaks in our app description don't work." But they didn't, or the Store team didn't care.
this is what the reviews on every microsoft app in the store look like. this makes me wonder if microsoft didn't code this to artificiall bubble higher-rated reviews to the top (like most stores), or if there weren't any to bubble up
Of course, the app itself doesn't work. There's nothing to show - it does nothing. It says my phone needs to run "the newest version" of the app. It absolutely is; the actual problem (you can see in the reviews screenshot) is that it only works on wifi.
Now, I'm fine with this. It probably shouldn't work "automatically" over the internet. But this isn't mentioned anywhere.
check out what happens if you click on the 'more' under a review. look at this. look at this. just look at this.
what the *fuck* is this. what is this? i hate bosses, but if i was your boss and you showed me this I'd pink-slip your ass. "i'm sorry, you clearly have no idea what the requirements of this job are, i wish you the best of luck in some other endeavor. not computers,"
what is this? no, literally what is this? i could pick it apart but just. what IS this? what is this? what the fuck is this? what? what IS THIS?
how did this get produced? there is a multi billion dollar corporation behind this with infinite budgets for all teams. they get 64 pizzas delivered and throw away 30, I've seen it in person. The cost of those 30 pizzas would pay for software that works better than this.
at the average price of a high-end large pizza, times 30 pizzas, we get about $650. if we didn't order 30 unneeded pizzas, we could pay someone $650 for 8 hours of work. that's $80/hr. and would produce something monumentally better than this.
if you pop up any of the filter / sort fields you get one of these hideous menus; if you select something or click outside the box, it snaps the scroll position back to the top of the page.
when you change the sort or filter criteria, you get 4 flashes of intermediate UI. one of them looks like this. it looks like a fucking beginner visual basic app.
