From Bad UIs to Ink Scams: The 100 Most Annoying Tech Problems

New iPhones record videos in HDR by default now, which means you get so much social media content that’s just excessively bright. It wastes your battery while blinding you with no tangible benefit.

Then there’s the PS5. Its disc drive faces the opposite way to what you might expect. As soon as you realize it, you start to second-guess your second guess, gaslighting yourself into getting it wrong every single time until the end of time.

And “Sent from my iPhone” being added by default to every single email sent from an Apple device? It was tacky in 2008, and it’s definitely tacky today.

The Daily Digital Annoyances

Smartphone predictive text is now so insistent it’s correct that even when you type something, it replaces it, and then you retype that same thing, it’ll just replace it again.

Streaming services were originally meant to be the easier, cheaper alternative to cable TV. Now you have to pay for so many different ones that it’s literally just as bad.

Speaking of TVs, though, how poor and laggy are TV interfaces usually? It’s especially puzzling considering how good the smartphones made by these exact same companies are. The baked-in TV picture modes ruin everything. Movies are designed to look a certain way and run at a certain frame rate. Putting a weird filter over them and adding in extra frames to make them ultra-fluid doesn’t make them feel more like “Cinema Mode” it just makes them look incorrect.

What is with all these TV remotes where the OK button is also a scroll wheel that unavoidably scrolls as you’re trying to press it? You have literally 30 other pretty much useless buttons you could have replaced, but no, let’s strap together the two things you use the most in a way that doesn’t allow you to use either properly.

What’s with the names of TVs? They’re all practically indistinguishable gobbledygook. Anytime I’m trying to cast to one, I’m very concerned that I’m actually going to cast to someone else’s TV especially in a hotel room when there’s like 50 different ones you could be connecting to.

To finish it off, flat-screen TV speakers are particularly bad at projecting quiet audio. Dialogue is practically inaudible to start with, so you turn the volume up, and then you proceed to get deafened when it switches over to an action scene.

Security, Passwords, and Hidden Traps

Websites now have five-step CAPTCHAs because apparently uncovering indecipherable hieroglyphs or continuously spotting the traffic light in an image like I’m on some sort of disciplinary road safety course is a requirement to prove that I’m human. And then what do you do when the traffic light just spills over onto the next box? What kind of psychopath decided to not just realign the image so you don’t have an existential crisis about what it means for something to be in something?

How do almost all laptops, no matter the price, seem to have terrible webcams, and gaming headsets have terrible microphones?

When you’re struggling to remember your password, you’re forced to click “forgot my password,” but then the system tells you that your new password can’t be the same as any of your old passwords. At that exact point, you remember what your old password actually was, but now you have to set a new one that you’re inevitably going to forget the next time you’re asked for it.

Actually, just passwords in general are a pain. We’re constantly being told to set a different password for every single website and, at the same time, to make every single one of those passwords the most complicated alphabet spaghetti that we possibly can. It is such a fiddly thing to keep track of in a world where 3D face scanners and fingerprint scanners have been around for ages. Why can’t a creator secure their account with the actual face that they use for their platform?

North Korean Smartphones: Inside the Hidden Tech of Smuggled Devices

Why does the iPhone have seemingly no ability to display a comma without going into a separate submenu? Does Apple want me to forget punctuation exists?

Why does every Amazon service have like the worst UI known to man? Take Prime video: why do they bury the option to continue watching the show you’re watching, as if it’s not the first thing you’d want to click? On the Amazon storefront itself, there is so much sponsored content that even with the whole rating system, it’s really hard to find what’s actually good and what’s not.

Scroll-jacking web pages are another one. You know the ones where when you scroll down, instead of moving down the page, it actually just scrolls through an animation? It never looks as good as I assume these companies think it does, and you just feel like you’re being prohibited from navigating in the way that you’ve been taught to.

Everyone thought the Nintendo switch was going to get themes at some point, and they’d be forgiven for thinking so given that there is an entire menu dedicated to them. To this day, that menu contains exactly two themes: Basic White and Basic Black. The PSP from 2005 had themes. What are you doing, Nintendo?

Hardware Scams and Design Flaws

Printers are a specific nightmare. Why do I need to buy a colored ink cartridge if I want to print in black and white especially since my black ink cartridge is completely full? It’s an obvious scam that no one’s ever fixed. It’s so misleading how the printers themselves are sold for basically cost price to lock you in, and only once you’re locked in and have no other choice do they sell you the ink cartridges for about three times that price. Every single year, each ink cartridge contains about five drops of the stuff. If you so much as dare to try a third-party ink cartridge just to save some cash, many printers are designed to detect them and shut down in protest.

Why do I get excited about new phone colors when I know that I’m just going to slap a case on it anyway?

Applications asking for a suspicious number of permissions is another issue. Why does my wallpaper app need to make and receive phone calls? The worst part of it is because you never get shown exactly what those apps are using each permission for, you either have to decide, “Screw it, I’m downloading nothing,” or just accept the fact that you’re okay with giving the app everything.

Look at how Ticketmaster has become basically the sole supplier of so many concert tickets, allowing them to charge whatever they feel like and removing the incentive for them to make their website anything better than the anxiety-inducing, countdown-filled, unstable mess that it is.

Modern phones are just really hard to look after. It’s frustrating how you can spend so much money on something and take the best possible care you can of it, and it will still likely end up with dust finding its way under the pre-applied screen protector. When I use flip phones, I’m constantly missing photo opportunities due to fiddling to get them open in time.

Anytime I decide I like the idea of doing a bit of work outside, the brightness of my laptop screen steps in to disagree. And when you’re not ready for the webcam to start recording, suddenly everyone on the call gets a front-row seat to your double chins.

Carrier Disasters and Data Traps

Mobile phone carriers try to screw customers at every possible turn. For starters, how they bundle together the price of the phone and the SIM in a monthly fee is absolutely silly. You pay something like $100 a month, knowing full well that many people will reach the end of their contract, completely forget to upgrade phones, and just keep paying ten times what they should for what’s effectively a SIM-only deal. It’s just a scummy way to make money.

Worse still are the data roaming fees abroad. They’re so excessive they should be illegal. I was in a situation where I was traveling last year and I was being charged $1 per megabyte of roaming data I used. Let’s say I wanted to watch an original quality tech video. Do you know how much I would have been charged? Around $5,500. What a joke.

There needs to be a better way to transfer files between iPhone, Android, Mac, and Windows without using third-party software. If you’ve tried to use Bluetooth recently, you’ll know it’s an absolute travesty.

Apps constantly spam you with promotional notifications which you’re pretty sure you never asked for and you have no idea how to get rid of. Even worse is when those annoying notifications are bundled in with the ones you actually need to see, so you either decide you have to put up with all of them or lose half the functionality of your app.

Then there’s the classic moment when you can’t get your full-size USB connector in on the first try. You turn it around and try to squeeze it in, only to realize you were right the first time and you may have actually damaged your connector. I’m so glad USB-C exists now, but that makes it all the more jarring when companies decide, “Hey, even though this completely universal charging standard that supports ultra-fast charging, is fully reversible, and that people already have at home exists… yeah, let’s use a proprietary DC port on this device.”

The weather on the Windows 11 hotbar seems to be always wrong for some reason, and it’s obsessed with saying that something is a record low or a record high temperature.

The Death of Gaming Preservation

Nintendo has an absolute gold mine of historic, classic video games, but why are they tying people’s ability to play them to having a continuous Nintendo Online subscription? What do those two things even have to do with each other?

This brings me to how older video games aren’t being preserved the way that all other media is. Being able to play a game is reliant on either you having the original hardware it was designed for, or the game company specifically deciding that it wants to remake it for a new piece of hardware. We’re in a market now where 87% of classic video games are completely unavailable, and that scares me.

On top of that, Switch Joy-Cons still have pretty unacceptable connectivity issues, let alone the almost inescapable stick drift that makes your joysticks move even if you’re not touching them. It does not bring joy.

Everyday Tech Gripes

That automated text-to-speech voice on social media videos makes me physically convulse.

Have you ever taken your phone out of your pocket only to find your flashlight has been on the whole time? Personally, I love it when Face ID decides that I just look too rough to unlock my own phone.

Then there are devices that only seem to wirelessly charge when you place them in the exact right spot. You find yourself surgically planting them like you’re in some sort of operating theater, and even then, half the time you find they start charging and just stop, even though they haven’t moved.

People playing their music out loud on speakers on a packed bus or train—do they just not care, or are they genuinely unaware that people don’t want to hear their favorite SoundCloud rapper?

Sony’s naming schemes will forever baffle me. This company decided that the best name for their flagship headphones was the WH-1000XM5 instead of just the Sony XM5. For their phones, they decided to call the bigger flagship the Sony Xperia 1 Mark 5, and then the smaller phone the Sony Xperia 5 Mark 5, assuming that the average user is going to be able to look at the name of this phone and just inherently understand the branding. Honestly, tech naming schemes could be their own separate piece.

Why is Eggman able to run just as fast as Sonic?

Products tack “AI” or “smart” onto themselves just because they have more than one feature. Besides, do you really need a smart fridge?

Windows requires a restart for every single update, even for the most minuscule bug fixes that are going to affect literally four people around the world. Also, the “Update and shut down” button half the time seems to self-decide to update and restart instead.

Google Drive’s ability to download big files is completely broken. It’ll try and zip them up into something more manageable, but then I guess it realizes what it’s undertaking and just decides that’s too much work. You had one job.

Smart assistants, even today, refuse to support alternative search engines like a child that decides it wants to be best friends with only one person, even if that person is obviously a mistake.

How do so many high-end laptops make you feel like you’ve got a superpower because of their blinding performance so long as you’re plugged in, but the second you unplug them, they shrivel up into a wet towel?

Autosave features decide not to autosave right when you need them the most.

More video games really need to start adding a “Have you played one of these before?” option to avoid the long-winded tutorial that every beginner needs but is a total chore for veterans of the series. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been taught how to catch a Pokémon. It’s not like it’s changed in the last 25 years.

Those mobile game ads for games that don’t actually exist—why don’t they just make the games that they know people would rather play?

The music sync setting on smart bulbs never seems to work properly. Uneven bezels—that’s literally it. That’s the tweet.

Netflix doesn’t just let you read the blurb of your movie in peace; it insists on auto-playing it anyway.

Quick-Time Events during cutscenes are deeply annoying. I don’t mind mashing buttons so that a superhero stops a runaway car, but if I’ve been watching a bunch of people talk for 10 minutes straight, I don’t want to have to suddenly panic to pick up my controller with my snack-encrusted fingers. I thought by playing a mini-movie, you’re communicating to me that it’s the perfect time for a little break.

The “Always-Online” Dystopia

Things that don’t need to be online all the time—like single-player games or your entire home’s smart lighting system—force you to stay online just so they’re ready to sell you something or keep track of your monthly subscription.

Every time I turn on my console, there seems to be yet another software update. All I want to do is play an offline co-op game made 15 years ago, which definitely doesn’t need updates, but the system insists. Whether I like it or not, I have to verify my accounts, download the update, and install the update all while trying to type on a highly unintuitive controller keyboard.

While modern consoles in theory have the ability to resume games immediately even days after they’ve been suspended the game devs themselves basically lock you out of using that feature by making everything always-online. There is some sort of server that I seem to get kicked from every single time I try it.

The trend of removing ports on laptops is ridiculous. Surely the fact that USB dongles have now become Amazon bestsellers is a sign that removing them is not helping anyone.

GPS only seems to face the right way half the time, so you actually just have to start walking one way to work out if it’s the correct direction.

Different audio devices have different audio balancing, so if you’re not careful when you switch between them with your headphones, you may well not be hearing properly for three days.

The renaming of Twitter to X is one of the stupidest branding decisions of all time. Twitter was one of the most recognizable brands on Earth, to the point where their name was actually a functional verb. Very few companies ever achieve this—only really Google comes to mind. To throw it all away because “X is the coolest letter” is baffling. Not to mention that typing that domain into your browser window looks incredibly suspicious.

“Wi-Fi Connected, Internet Not Available.” Need I say more?

The way console UIs whine at you when you turn them off at the plug really guilts you hardcore about not using the designated power button.

Games consoles are more powerful than they’ve ever been, and yet less able than ever to actually let you play local split-screen multiplayer with someone on the same device.

Video game download sizes are enormous now—so big that when you buy a physical game, you’re not actually buying the physical disk contents, you’re just buying a physical license portal to be able to download it. This also means a lot of the time when you buy a game now, you no longer permanently own it like you used to with old consoles. Your ability to play that game in the future is entirely dependent on the health of corporate servers.

In-app purchases on games that you’ve already purchased upfront hurt. What hurts even more is that those transactions are specifically designed to gouge as much cash out of you as possible—like forcing you to buy an in-game premium currency to make purchases, but then making sure that the bundles of currency you can buy don’t exactly match the actual cost of the items.

Online forms that you can’t save progress on partway through are awful. You’re just about to finish, you try to swipe sideways, and you accidentally swipe all the way back to the beginning. Or on your phone, you spend 25 minutes getting immersed in an article only to accidentally tap something near the top of your screen and inadvertently scroll all the way back to the top.

Websites constantly rename and edit articles solely for SEO purposes. This is especially misleading for tech news because you could well be reading something that was actually written two years ago, but because one word on the web page has been updated, it now shows up in Google as if it’s brand new.

Searching for ages for the solution to a niche tech problem only to stumble across a 7-year-old Reddit thread where the original poster just suddenly says, “Oh, it’s fixed!” without ever saying how.

The unbelievable new tide of AI-generated spam emails is reaching a level of sophistication where they are basically indistinguishable from human emails.

Every single thing needs to be a subscription now to a stupid degree—even for things you already own, like a piece of software that you’ve already paid a one-off fee to purchase, or car manufacturers trying to charge a monthly fee just to use the heated seats already built into your vehicle.

What makes it worse is deliberately misleading website UI design (dark patterns) that specifically obstructs key options like being able to cancel your membership or unsubscribe from a mailing list. They make it so annoying to unsubscribe that some people might just give up and stay subscribed.

Broken Ecosystems

Getting a menu at a restaurant where there are no physical options left, and the QR code is completely broken anyway… guess I’ll just take a tap water.

The total lack of clear standards when it comes to USB cables is wild. While some can literally only transfer data at a sluggish 12 Mbps, others can do 10 Gbps, and for an average consumer, it is not clear at all which cable is which just by looking at it.

Going abroad on holiday and suddenly every single one of your accounts thinks you’re an imposter.

How all the best flagship phones nowadays are too big to reach the whole screen with your thumb? I just don’t call people whose names start with letters on the right-hand side of my contact sheet anymore.

Companies say they don’t give you a charging brick with your smartphone “for the environment,” but then they proceed to sell you those exact same contents separately in an extra cardboard box.

When sites try to redirect you to their dedicated app—which you already have installed—but instead, for some reason, the link decides to either take you to the App Store page or the desktop web version. Why does this happen so much?

The Final Countdown

Those incredibly annoying, “Don’t skip this ad, or you’re going to miss out” YouTube ads that you are absolutely going to skip anyway.

How the “Do you like our app?” pop-up comes in about 12 seconds after booting it up for the very first time. Let me use it first!

Spotify only lets you use offline features seamlessly if you manually toggle “Offline Mode.” If I’ve explicitly downloaded a podcast, why does it refuse to show up unless I tell the app that I have no signal?

Why does the controller’s microphone default to being switched on? Surely it would make more sense for the default to be off, with the LED light indicating when it is recording, as opposed to the other way around. That way, while you’re trying to line up the perfect long-range shot in a game, you wouldn’t have to hear the incessant background noise of someone else’s household chores or family conversations.

Seeing a notification badge number on an app telling you that something needs to be actioned, but having absolutely no idea where that notification is hidden or how to clear it.

How you can’t use biometric features like Face ID or Touch ID immediately after your device has been restarted.

Your phone automatically backing up all of your photos to cloud storage even if you have tons of spare internal storage left, and you only realize it’s done that when you’re out somewhere trying to show someone a memory and realize you can’t download it without a stable connection.

How you never get anywhere close to your advertised home Wi-Fi speeds.

Finally, 5G is so poor in so many regions that when that little icon pops up in the corner of your phone, it’s often more of a warning sign or a concern than it is a modern convenience.

You’re definitely not alone in your tech frustrations. It seems like the smarter our devices get, the more creative they become at driving us completely insane.

This article was adapted from content by BMathz. Let us know your worst tech frustrations in the comments below!