Do I trust this computer?

This happened while out getting a burrito recently. Waiting in line, my watch asked out of the blue: “Trust This Computer?”

And it didn’t just ask, it rattled my wrist.

My first thought was “Why are you bother me. I’m getting a burrito.” But then it hit me. “What computer!?” Did it mean my computer... back on my desk... miles away? Or did it mean that laptop, over on that corner table of the restaurant, with the guy looking like he could be typing commands in his Terminal to hack a watch?

It was a little unnerving.

The thing is, after all these years, our trusted devices often don’t behave very... trustworthy. I’m not talking about security or privacy here. I’m hoping my watch was being extra cautious, asking to trust the phone it was linked to in my pocket (although I’m still not quite sure why it had to ask me at that moment). The trust I’m talking about is more about how our devices behave, and how they can often frustrate and make us feel dumb.

I mean, I’m a software developer (or so I tell people) and I struggle finding certain settings on my phone… or even using it sometimes. Why, for example, are the camera controls always moving and changing? Is that really necessary?

I find the Apple TV, in its current form (circa 2017), another example. Is it the future of TV? There are a lot of things to like about it. Except why is it often telling me it “couldn’t find the web page” when I try to watch the latest episode of Late Night? A web page? Or why does it keep wanting me to install the Bravo app every time I try to watch the latest episode of Comedy Central’s Daily Show? Even though I watch it, every single day, in the Hulu app that I already have installed. Even more troublesome, I sometimes have to force-quit things like Hulu, Showtime, or even Apple’s own Movies app, to get them to work again. Should anyone need to know they have to force-quit an app… on their TV? I’m not sure I could explain something like that to my dad, for example, who until not that long ago still had the same cathode-ray wooden console TV he bought the family when I was a kid. (Now that was some trustworthy technology!)

My guess is that we software developers need to start respecting our edge cases again—those things that can cause our users real pain and mistrust in our apps, but we keep telling ourselves they won’t be bothering enough people that we should take time away from building new features (with their own new edge cases causing even more pain and mistrust).

Maybe, instead of putting ourselves through our endless, self-imposed, two-week release cycles of new features, we focus again on some of that tech debt that keeps piling up around things like handling network delays and errors better for our users, fixing those pesky concurrency issues, and really giving designers, developers, and QA the time they need to test and solidify the features that are already there.

So do I trust this computer? That’s hard to say. I do know we could be doing a lot more to make the software on our trusted devices behave in ways that are more worthy of our trust—or at least not having them ask us scary questions while out buying a burrito.