In the early 1990s, Richard P. Gabriel posited that “Worse Is Better” but could never quite decide if he meant it. In his essay, he contrasted what he called the MIT style of software development and the New Jersey style. He argued that the NJ style produced useful but incomplete, even flawed, tools like UNIX and C which grew incrementally — and perhaps sloppily — over time but by getting something into users’ hands early, the NJ style had a chance to develop a loyal following while the MIT crowd was still polishing their first release. Or at least that’s how I interpret it.

I was reminded of this recently in the context of another great divide of the software world. My wife and I have different tablets with different performance problems that I think illustrate a similar difference in design or market philosophy (or maybe an artifact of the Apple uniculture vs. the splintered Android market).

From time to time, I’ve been frustrated with the performance of my Asus tablet and, on inspection, find that there are simply too many applications trying to retrieve data and process it to tell me things my phone tells me perfectly well. (For example, there’s no good reason to have the mail or social media apps on my tablet poll for new data when my phone will alert me and I can manually download to the tablet.) When I uninstall these resource hungry apps or configure them to not poll, my tablet’s performance is restored and I go merrily on my way for a few more months when I need to disable or uninstall a new set of apps.

Whereas Google can’t seem to get its licensees to update devices, Apple seems to almost force users to update; my wife’s iPad is on its third version of iOS. Each new version comes with new software features; some support new hardware in new devices (fingerprint readers, force touch, etc.), but some are purely software, more complex algorithms accomplishing more complex tasks for the user. The problem is that they can’t do that on old hardware with limited resources without being unacceptably slow. This is great for Apple which will sell new hardware to loyal users, but not so good for more conservative users who’d rather get another year or two out of their hardware purchase.

I can see the benefit of having coordinated versions of iOS on your phone and tablet (and your computer, if you go that far), but I’m OK with Lollipop on my phone and Jellybean on my tablet. When a software update makes your device slow down — whether that update comes from Apple or a responsive Android developer — better is worse.

Update, Fall 2017: Android Oreo was purported to have improved performance vs. Nougat on the same hardware and my upgrade experience showed just that.  In a strange coincidence, iOS 11 seems to be doing the same thing for Apple devices in the field. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong!