Comment by frankus
3 months ago
"and very good reasons for not implementing Apple Wallet"
Judging by the screenshots, it looks like a thin wrapper around a mobile-optimized web site, or at best something like Flutter, so the likelihood that they have in-house developers that are sufficiently versed in the dustier corners of Apple's APIs is slim.
So why can’t they learn? We have Google, we have Stack Overflow, we have LLMs. My cynical take is that there’s just nobody there who gives a shit about the UX, most likely the team that built all of their backend stuff is long gone (quit or laid off) and now there’s a skeleton team of the cheapest possible engineers just keeping it running.
I used to work in the fitness industry, and we built apps for some big players (not PureGym, though they were a customer for other parts of our stuff). Anyway, we'd often sit in meetings with them to discuss new features. One time, we discussed adding notifications. They got hung up on this -- there were about 8 different departments -- and they decided to add a notification to ask how clean the gym was... because it was "safe". These people, in general, are terrified of scaring away members by bothering them about anything.
But yeah, we cared deeply about the UX/UI, but these things are built by committee and the committee is pretty dumb, very political, and non-technical.
The amazing part of that story is that they had the correct concern, but decided to bother people with something stupid anyway. That's like getting a notification asking how the weather is. Things like that are exactly why I said elsewhere a gym app would be a hard no from me.
Your story makes it sound like somehow the meeting was "let's add notifications, but for what?" and landed on that, which is exactly the type of thing that will lead to massively annoying people. If they don't have an obvious customer need for notifications (clearly they don't), why have them?
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Thanks for the insight.
Having engineers specialized in a specific stack learn on the job for the sake of/while working on a project is a great way to end up with really funky code and poor user experiences. I speak as a developer tasked with doing exactly that several times at a previous job, and the long-term is never pretty. The first code you write is immediately legacy code, but if you're learning as you write for a project that is already in motion, you're usually stuck with that legacy code until someone goes out of business or the rapture comes and they have to do a reorg because half the team was hauled to the kingdom of heaven, and now there's an MBA running the department who doesn't like you and wants to leverage AI to do the block chain.
> So why can’t they learn?
Who "they"? The vast majority of companies don't have a staff of programmers. These apps are outsourced to cheap consultancies.
It is a gym app. Realistically as the article says it really doesn't have to change much.
The UX of that app is actually "ok". While it is a wrapper around their mobile site it works well enough.
I’ve used PureGym before, as the author points out the app is terrible, even on a good signal it takes 30s+ to “warm up”, whatever that means. I don’t want the app to “warm up”, I want the QR code right now, I’m left standing outside the gym like an idiot waiting for the bloated app to call a REST endpoint.
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But exactly. The one thing you care about in a gym app is getting into the gym!
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They are likely using cheap labour from India or something.. the deal went to the lowest bidder.
This is it. It's a well-established gym chain, their core business is getting subscriptions and making it hard to unsubscribe - not development. If you're lucky, they have a couple of in-house web developers working on website and database maintenance, who then ask a contractor to just "make it run like an app". If you're unlucky, they outsource all their web operations to a contractor that milks them every time they want to change a title from H2 to H3.
Isn't that the whole problem?
The core business of automobile companies is not software, but they're being kicked down by software companies.
You're not a software company until a software company shuts you down.
How could Puregym make it easier to unsubscribe? I'm sure I managed to do it in the app just a few months ago.
Ya and if they add apple wallet they have to do android wallet and then that’s more code to maintain. But they could make the in house app always show the QR code on launch.
I have the app on my phone (I just used to use the pin key pad). It looks like a wrapper around their website.