4 ms·
There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the nee
by jl6 4mo ago
There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.
Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.
- Hamuko 4mo agoI doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.
- throawayonthe 4mo agothis used to be a thing right? social media apps used to have a 'lite' edition, facebook, tiktok, something else and when android go was thing there were (are?) lighter apps targeting that like google maps go even
- krieger_857 4mo agothey still exists, although google is phasing out some of the Go line of apps
- steve1977 4mo agoIt's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- alt227 4mo agoStill dont see the point of using electron for mobile apps. Just make a webapp and be done with it without having to jump through the app store hoops.
- frollogaston 4mo agoI feel like the market of apps and websites has usually been irrational about bloat because developers tend to have beefy machines. It required a beefy machine just to use Twitter without lag, and now X is the same. In the 2000s it was excessive Flash instead, or Java for apps. Some sites like Google were able to measure the user-engagement cost of slowness and chose to optimize, but they're exceptional. I doubt most businesses know the cost.
- mrweasel 4mo agoSame for phone. I don't think anyone tests their websites on older devices anymore. Many sites have become useless, because it assumes that you have a massive screen, a modern GPU and plenty of memory. There's no point in having a video as a background, or load an excessive amount of Javascript, just to show me a news feed. No one cares anymore, and I doubt that any hardware supply bottlenecks will improve that. It's not something that anyone care to measure.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- frollogaston 4mo agoThey might be finding that there's more engagement on phone apps than phone website. That could just be because the phone website sucks, but idk, maybe people are really used to downloading apps. Someone on HN mentioned they went all-in on a PWA then realized nobody wanted it.
- cosmic_cheese 4mo agoI don’t think it’d be the worst idea to require devs to regularly test against something like a late era Core 2 Duo or i5-2500 machine with 4-8GB of RAM on the equivalent of a 3G connection. A lot of improvement could be netted from that alone.
- frollogaston 4mo agoIt'd help, but leadership would have to commit to actually caring about those metrics, which would only work if dev envs are portable enough to run on the slow test machines before it's launch day. Otherwise the only real way is to give devs slow machines.