4 ms·

You know, I hear this argument a lot for e.g. why Slack is a dog slow electron beast. The thing is, slack has not been short of time OR money for at least the

by pydry 5y ago

You know, I hear this argument a lot for e.g. why Slack is a dog slow electron beast. The thing is, slack has not been short of time OR money for at least the last 5 years. They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. This "ivory tower" stuff smacks of just world/just market fallacy. I suspect there are deeper issues here. For example, vendor lock-in inhibiting competition paired with the "electron app team" being a powerful fiefdom within the company. IME the concealed undercurrent of politics tends to provide a better explanation for many hard to understand decisions at large companies than unexpected technical prudence. Why does Uber's app require 150 developers? Why is Facebook's app such a beast? Why did they create a whole new "lite" app rather than slimming it? Why does Google have 13 messengers? Reaching for a calm, rational engineering decision to explain each case is tempting, but wrong.

jack_pp 5y ago
So once you have an app up and running, with millions of satisfied users you would hire another team of more expensive developers to build a native app.. for each platform? so make that 2 more teams or rather 4 more teams? (iOS, Mac, Android, Windows)
- pydry 5y ago
  They're a $24 billion company. Hiring 4 small teams probably shouldnt be too much for them.
  - tanseydavid 5y ago
    ...and one PM to manage all 4 teams and ensure that there is no feature-drift between the various OS-target versions. </sarc> I am really just trying to emphasize that there are tradeoffs lurking everywhere and they are often hidden by assumptions.
    - Siira 5y ago
      Telegram already does this with a rather small team. Hell, there are even third-party Telegram clients that, while a bit behind the features, eventually catch up with every single one.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    You don't get to be a billion dollar company by spending money unnecessarily. The question is never the total size of the company the cost relative to other options.
moonchrome 5y ago
>They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. Example of such apps ? There should be plenty since it easily built.
- pydry 5y ago
  Telegram? They have decent native messenging apps, I believe. Or did you mean good desktop apps in general in which case where do I start...? There are thousands.

by pydry 5y ago

jack_pp 5y ago

So once you have an app up and running, with millions of satisfied users you would hire another team of more expensive developers to build a native app.. for each platform? so make that 2 more teams or rather 4 more teams? (iOS, Mac, Android, Windows)

pydry 5y ago
They're a $24 billion company. Hiring 4 small teams probably shouldnt be too much for them.
- tanseydavid 5y ago
  ...and one PM to manage all 4 teams and ensure that there is no feature-drift between the various OS-target versions. </sarc> I am really just trying to emphasize that there are tradeoffs lurking everywhere and they are often hidden by assumptions.
  - Siira 5y ago
    Telegram already does this with a rather small team. Hell, there are even third-party Telegram clients that, while a bit behind the features, eventually catch up with every single one.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  You don't get to be a billion dollar company by spending money unnecessarily. The question is never the total size of the company the cost relative to other options.

moonchrome 5y ago

>They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. Example of such apps ? There should be plenty since it easily built.

pydry 5y ago
Telegram? They have decent native messenging apps, I believe. Or did you mean good desktop apps in general in which case where do I start...? There are thousands.