• Stovetop@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    It’s just that we have to make space for our 5,358 partners and the telemetry data they need.

  • cylon@programming.dev
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    22 days ago

    Memory is cheap and data sells enough to many parties. Most apps are just store front for Ads and data collection.

    No wonder why open source apps are quite light.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
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      24 days ago

      And analytics. And offloading as much computation to the client, because servers are expensive and inefficiency is not an issue if your users are the ones paying for it.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
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      24 days ago

      Web “Apps” are also quite bad. Lots of and lots of stuff we’re downloading and it feels clunky.

      Sometimes that’s bad coding, poor optimization, third party libraries, or sometimes just including trackers/ads on the page.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    24 days ago

    Fucking Chrome/Electron is why.

    I honestly wouldn’t mind that if they could all use the exact same runtime so the apps could be a few MB each, but nooooo.

  • count_dongulus@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.

    • zenpocalypse@lemm.ee
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      24 days ago

      Yeah, though the joke is funny, this is the real answer.

      Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.

      • UnityDevice@lemmy.zip
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        23 days ago

        Storage is cheap on a PC, it’s not cheap on mobile where it’s fixed and used as a model differentiator. They overcharge you so much. Oh, and they removed SD card slots from nearly all phones.

        • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
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          23 days ago

          Nah it’s fine. Clean up used apps every once in a while. Base phones have more than enough space.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      Yep. Apps are 20x bigger with no new features…that you are using.

      Let’s not forget that the graphics for applications has scaled with display resolution, and people generally demand a smooth modern look for their apps.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        18 days ago

        In the case of normal apps like PayPal graphics shouldn’t be a huge factor since it should be vectorized and there is pretty much no graphics in apps like PayPal.

        The issue comes from frameworks.

  • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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    23 days ago

    isn’t it a combination of younger developers not learning to programme under the restrictions of limited memory and cpu speed, on top of employers demanding code as soon as possible rather than code that is elegant or resource efficient or even slightly planned out

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      Mostly the latter. We don’t do any optimizations on our product whatsoever. Most important thing is to say yes to all the customers and add every single feature they want. Every sprint is spent adding and adding and adding to the code as much as we can and as quickly as we can. Not a single second is allotted to any discussion about performance or efficiency. Maybe when something breaks, but otherwise we keep piling on more crap at full speed non-stop. I have repeatedly been told “the fast way is the right way” followed by laughter. I was told to “merge this now” on multiple occasions even when I knew that the code was shit, and told the team as much. I am expected to write code now and think about it later.

      As you can expect, the codebase is a bloated nightmare. Slow as shit, bugs galore, ugly inconsistent UI, ENORMOUS memory use, waaaaaay too frequent DB access with a shit ton of duplicate requests that are each rather inefficient themselves. It is a rather complex piece of lab management software, but not so complex that it should be struggling to run on dedicated servers with 8 gigs of RAM. Yet it does.

  • enemenemu@lemm.ee
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    24 days ago

    Paypal has 500 mb and just shows a number and you can press a button to send a number to their server.

    It’s insane

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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      24 days ago

      Check out the apps Hermit and Native Alpha. They make web pages run like an app. I’ve only run into a couple sites where they don’t work right.

  • kamen@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    I’d argue that deploying from one codebase to 3+ different platforms is new functionality, although not for the end user per se.

    I wish though that more of the web apps would come as no batteries included (by default or at least as a selectable option), i.e. use whatever webview is available on the system instead of shipping another one regardless of if you want it or not.

  • Gxost@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    It’s all because of Electron, unnecessary libraries, and just bad coders. Asus Armoury Crate weighs a lot and is so slow, but it’s basically a simple app. Total Commander has much more features, but it’s fast, lightweight, and consumes 9 MB of RAM.

    • SirQuack@feddit.nl
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      23 days ago

      I’ve said this on reddit before, but once for a joke I tried to make a windows program to play doot.wav during October at random, and tried programming it on Linux.

      Sinds playing audio and working with the system tray was tricky, I ended up with electron.

      So yeah, an atrocious 120 mb application to play a 6kb wav file with a Math.random(). I don’t remember the memory consumption, but it was probably just as gross.

      • Gxost@lemmy.world
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        23 days ago

        Once I wrote an annoying program adding acceleration to the mouse cursor, so it was difficult to click any UI item. It was written in Object Pascal with Win API and weighted 16 KB. And I think in C it would be even smaller.

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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    23 days ago

    Because companies give zero fucks. They will tell you they need tons of IT people, when in reality they want tons of underpaid programmers. They want stuff as fast and cheap as possible. What doesn’t cause immediate trouble is usually good enough. What can be patched up somehow is kept running, even when it only leads you further up the cliff you will fall off eventually.

    Management is sometimes completely clueless. They rather hire twice as many people to keep some poorly developed app running, than to invest in a new, better developed app, that requires less maintenance and provides a better user experience. Zero risk tolerance and zero foresight.

    It still generates money, you keep it running. Any means are fine.

  • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
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    22 days ago

    Oh, they have new functionality. It’s all in the back end, detailing everything you do and sending it to the parent company so they can monetize your life.

  • Realitätsverlust@lemmy.zip
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    24 days ago

    Simple reason - dependencies.

    Modern devs dump any dependency and sub-dependency under the sun into their project and don’t bother about optimizing it. That’s how you end up with absurdly large applications. Especially electron is a problem in this regard.

    You can still write optimized and small software. However, for most businesses, it’s just not worth their time. Rather using an additional couple hundred megabytes of dependencies on the client system.