The (October or November?) 2021 Medium Android App Update

Critical Review

About a month ago (Shame there is no obvious way of viewing the history of updates, hence my approximate dates from memory), the Medium App, which I had used throughout my time on Medium from sometime in 2017, was updated from something that kind of worked, so something that doesn’t work at all, as far as my usage of it was concerned.

I used to be able to function via the app, given that lately, Medium is my only non-virtual outlet for my creative activities.

But since the update, I’ve found it pretty much non-functional.

It enables nothing which I had previously criticised was missing from the old App, but in addition, many of the capabilities that existed and were taken for granted with the old version are now gone.

I literally can’t provide an exhaustive list of these, since there appears no obvious changelog.

Was an inventory of the functionality of the old app even taken, before it was updated?

Was there any analysis of the likely impact of removing any of the functionality of the old app, before it was removed?

I don’t know the answers to either of those questions, perhaps someone from Medium can enlighten.

But in absence of all of that, here is my list of things noticed, which now make it practically unusable, for my intents and purposes.

• The alarm bell icon, which we click to view the list of responses to our posts, now does nothing to alert us to new responses. It used to change state, as an alert to show new responses waiting. Not the end of the world, but this leads us to some much more fundamental issues when we go to look at responses.
• The links given in the responses list now lead only to each response in isolation. We used to be able to navigate from the response, to whatever source story of ours was being commented on, to remind of context, which is incredibly important for any dialog which might end in reasonable agreement.
• When we create a new story, or response using the app, there is now a real chance of losing the story, as now we don’t know whether we are constructing the story on or offline, until the publish button is pressed, if the story does not publish, it can be discarded, without trace. This has happened to me now more than once, and to be honest, once is enough to completely sicken us of using it, I can sometimes spend hours composing replies and nearly always do, for a story. Discarding our work is a capital offence, in my opinion. The old app updated the story online in our drafts whilst it was being composed, which required a regular internet connection to work, whereas the new app appears to have a capability of continuing to appear to be recording our work, even when offline, but when we try to see where the story went later, it has disappeared.
• When we successfully make a response, in absence of context as described above, it often now appears not as a response to anyone in particular, but to the source story, which might even be our own. So effectively we end up creating a response to our own story, when we were trying to return comment or enter into dialog with someone who responded to our story. The end result is they will receive no alert that we responded at all, the only way they would know we responded, would be for them to search the list of responses to our story to see if there were any new there. But why would anyone do that if it makes no sense at all.
• There is no way of viewing our own responses made previously, again to maintain context of any particular dialog. A list appears for stories we wrote, but none for our replies, those do not appear anywhere.
• {added 14/12/2012} Viewing a response made by another, who we might wish to follow, there is no way in the app to make the connection. We see an icon of the respondee, but no mechanism to find out more about them, view their publications or whatever, no search which finds them, and no other way to follow.

There are a myriad of other things, but the end result of these key things above, by themselves make the app practically unusable for anything but reading articles. We certainly can’t usefully create much useful with it, or even enter into dialog with anyone, it is a very much crippled thing compared with what we had before, which wasn’t perfect, but at least provided some usability.

The impacts of this must be huge.

Many users in poorer places do not have personal computers (Like I do), to go to when all else fails, to try to sort out whatever mess we might have made trying to use the app for convenience, to capture things in our heads, when we first think about them.

Places like India, and Africa, for example, they mostly have mobile phones, invariably Android, but not so many have PCs.

So those users no longer have practical writer access to Medium.

Besides the obviously discriminatory effect of this, that is an awful lot of users to be muzzled.

By Metcalfes law alone, we can see this massively impacts the value of Medium.

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Update 03/07/2023

Some of the issues above have been slowly ironed out with subsequent updates to the app.

However, there are still fundamental limiting issues remaining, relative to the functionality we take for granted when accessing Medium via PC Browser, which still limits what a user with only Android access can do.

These concern link handling:

1. There appears no mechanism to insert links in replies text, so no possibility of referring to easily checked external references.
2. Even if an active link is posted in a reply by someone else using a PC, or even ourselves using PC, others accessing the reply using the Android app, don’t see the link as active, it appears only as plaintext which is difficult to try to copy and paste into an external browser, to try to follow the link.

Further, the way replies are handled by the app, historical hierarchy of reply threads is not clarified in any way when navigating around replies, leading us to often respond in the wrong place, sometimes even to ourselves, with the result that the other party receives no notification we replied at all, ending the discussion with a false impression one or the other of us “Won” the argument.

Another general issue is that Android Access does not give us any access to history of the replies we made.