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Scroll

Remember there were scrollbars in applications? On desktops and in browsers they're still almost everywhere, but in mobile they're on the verge of extinction.

I bet looking at the list of applications on your phone, you can hardly say whether there's any visual scrolling indicator or not. It's random. Even within one application from screen to screen - it's random.

If in applications with infinite feed down (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram) this can be explained by keeping user attention in the application (I condemn), then in others it's just not there at all. It's funny that even applications where the scrollbar has been one of the main functions all their life (Twitter on iPad, for example) you may no longer see it. What can we say about some banking applications and food ordering applications.

In Android it all started with ScrollView and ListView, where scrollbars were shown by default, and therefore were basically everywhere. Why would you turn them off on purpose. In iOS with basic components it's the same story, still, by the way. Then RecyclerView appeared, which doesn't show scrollbars by default, but you could enable them. Naturally, changing the defaults didn't change the behavior of developers prone to doing nothing, so scrollbars started disappearing. And today I learned that LazyColumn simply doesn't have a scrollbar, and you can't enable it, you need to make your own scrollbar.

So we've already reached the point where the frameworks we use to write applications don't even give us the ability to show the scroll bar out of the box. They might add it in the future, but this whole story is clearly moving towards simplifying the interface, losing important details along the way.

Is this progress or degradation - I don't know. On one hand, we seem to have taught users that everything under their fingers scrolls (well, almost). On the other hand, it's become more difficult. Now you can't tell at a glance what can be scrolled and what can't. Not every user will guess that there's anything hidden behind the scroll. If they started scrolling, there's no way to understand how much more to scroll to the end.

PS. I was writing this post in Telegram on Mac, which should have a scrollbar in the message list, but it's not there. Due to a bug that's five years old.