> The person I responded to specifically said waste. As in the part they find morally unacceptable is that if a developer had spent more of their time optimisin

> The person I responded to specifically said waste. As in the part they find morally unacceptable is that if a developer had spent more of their time optimising their product they could have got the data use down from 20mb/hour to something less but chose not to. Scale matters. Let's suppose they reduce the data use down to 19mb/hour, saving just one little megabyte. Let's assume the average user's data plan cost about 1$ per gigabyte. Apparently, users spend about 5 hours per week on this app, let's say 20 hours per month. So we're saving 20mb/month, or 0.02 (two cents). Let's assume there are a million such users. Total, this would save 20.000 dollars per month. Okay, now let's suppose a developer's time is worth about 100$ per hour. It would take 200 hours worth of development for the development cost to exceed the savings, or about 5 weeks. One little megabyte for a month is worth more than a month of developer effort. And of course this is just one megabyte. If the sibling threads are any indication, a proper caching mechanism would likely save over 15Mb. 15Mb means the users are losing over 3 million dollars per year.