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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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You see, stuff like this is why I never understood the wave of "Android Go" and "Lite/Go" apps a couple of years ago.
On my old low end phone, the native Twitter app ran infinitely better than the Web based "Twitter Lite". This applied to almost every "Lite" app compared to their regular versions.
I feel like whoever started that "Webapps are great for low end" concept never actually tried to run a modern Webapp on a slow phone.
Edit: My comment is focused mostly on the push of Webapps on low end phones. I'm sure there are great, proper "Lite Apps", and I quite like the idea of Android Go, I just think the implementation missed the mark and that a lot of companies pushed out a crappy, poorly thought out webview just to cash in the "Lite" trend without caring about the end user.
I only ever used the lite version of FB Messenger. Shit was much better than the full version, especially without all the bloated "features" that I didn't use at best and being annoying/battery drains at worst. Was noticeably snappier on both my old and new phones. Fortunately most of my friends started using Discord and/or Signal with better features (and one less Meta app to have running).
I think that the idea of having smaller and less demanding versions of lots of apps is a good idea. As so many apps are just not optimized and bloated. Just being coded to rely on higher specs to make up for said lack of effort in cleaning up stuff. The ads on ads on ads being part of the issue as well. Which is only getting worse with the close buttons not loading unless shit has been however many seconds. Seems that the "hit box" for the close buttons is getting smaller and smaller to guaranty the ads are clicked on and then open another app or a browser. Though optimizations and better coding won't fix dirty underhanded grifts.
I think that too!
I'm just not sure Webapps are the way to go about this over native, smaller, leaner apps.
The lite apps also take up less user storage. Which was a big issue for lower end phones at that time. Once you ran out of storage people struggled to install new apps. Even with external SD cards, as it wasn't an easy concept for some people to get over.
Of course an app that is compiled ahead of time to run natively on the cpu would run faster than a web app that compiles it bloated JavaScript code on the fly.
The web app versions was to avoid having to download large apps, not to be faster. They are slow because the companies tried to have feature parity with the native app and also stuffed it with tracker software. Web apps are supposed to barebones.
Every justification made for webapps are transparent lies to get access to more user data.
I am so fucking tired of corporations lying with no consequences to the detriment of their customers.