Hello, ex-employee of Inventry here. We often checked this forum from time to time and I thought I would shed some light on a few things.
There is some newer hardware now being shipped which can be identified easily as it has 2 webcams - one above the screen and another below it. This is actually lower spec than what used to be shipped as it was notably cheaper to buy, though I doubt that cost saving was passed onto the customer.
Over the past 4 years the company clearly pushed to become 'bigger' and more corporate. They began hiring a lot of staff (mostly management) from another company that has over 100,000 employees. Our guess is they are trying to make the company look better for prospective buyers, or are just squeezing as much as they can from the business whilst they can. Make hay while the sun shines and all that.
About 2 years ago is when things took a turn for the worst with changes in management.
You've hit the nail on the head. It was a simple system that repeatedly had more bloated features added over time without any thought to longevity of the software. There is a mountain of technical debt and quite often when adding something new it was impossible to do it the 'right' way (as that would require lots of work due to the technical debt) so developers were told to do things in the fastest way possible whilst delivering the minimum requirements. The plan was always to fix things or improve the features in a later version, but that obviously never happened. That scenario occurred for essentially every project.
With regards to UI and things not ever working as you'd expect or in a convenient manner... we knew. Many members of the team genuinely wanted to improve this, but no resources were ever allocated to this as it was not considered a valuable use of time. Developer resources were spent on adding a new feature for the sales team to use to bring in another customer, or to fix critical issues that the loudest customers were complaining about. I have heard from employees that haven't jumped ship yet (more on that later) that with the latest manager of the development team there is one of these issues every single week that has been 'escalated' and become a top priority to fix, likely because development work is being rushed out to meet arbitrary deadlines.
There is no technical reason the backend (the API and SQL database) cannot be moved to a server. In fact I believe this has been done for customers in the past. It wouldn't surprise me if that is no longer offered as it would require one of the few members of the support team to spend a significant portion of their day working on it, which the business considers to be a cost. Work was always being done to reduce the support cost.
You needn't be concerned by the disk space as the SQL express database is limited to 10GB.
If anyone has noticed significant deterioration in the software over the past 18 months, that is because almost the entirety of the development team quit in a short period of time after changes in management and the company outsourced the work to the Philippines (or as Inventry put it in their full accounts 2022 on Companies House, "highly skilled oversees team members" ).
