This equation might change a bit as more software users learn how bloated apps affect their hardware upgrade frequency & costs over time. The RAM drought brings new incentive to teach and act on that knowledge.
Management might be a bit easier to convince when made to realize that efficiency translates to more customers, while bloat translates to fewer. In some cases, developing a native app might even mean gaining traction in a new market.
I’m not too optimistic on that one. Bloated software has been an issue for the last 20 or so years at least.
At the same time upgrade cycles have become much slower. In the 90s you’d upgrade your PC every two years and each upgrade would bring whole entire use cases that just weren’t possible before. Similar story with smartphones until the mid-2010s.
Nowadays people use their PCs for upwards of 10 years and their smartphones until they drop them and crack the screen.
Devices have so much performance nowadays that you can really just run some electron apps and not worry about it. It might lag a little at times, but nobody buys a new device just because the loyalty app of your local supermarket is laggy.
I don’t like Electron either, but tbh, most apps running on Electon are so light-weight that it doesn’t matter much that they waste 10x the performance. If your device can handle a browser with 100 tabs, there’s no issue running an Electron app either.
Lastly, most Electron/Webview apps aren’t really a matter of choice. If your company uses Teams you will use teams, no matter how shit it runs on your device. If you need to use your public transport, you will use their app, no matter if it’s Electron or not. Same with your bank, your mobile phone carrier or any other service.
We have an enormous problem with software optimization both in cycles and memory costs. I would love for that to change but the vast majority of customers don’t care. It’s painful to think about but most don’t care as long as it works “good enough” which is a nebulous measure that management can use to lie to shareholders.
Even mentioning that we’ve wiped out roughly a decade in hardware gains with how bloated and slow our software is doesn’t move the needle. All of the younger devs in our teams truly see no issue. They consider nextjs apps to be instant. Their term, not me putting words in their mouths. VSCode is blazingly fast in their eyes.
We’ve let the problem slide so long that we have a whole generation of upcoming devs that don’t even see a problem let alone care about it. Anyone who mentors devs should really hammer this home and maybe together we can all start shifting that apathy.
This equation might change a bit as more software users learn how bloated apps affect their hardware upgrade frequency & costs over time. The RAM drought brings new incentive to teach and act on that knowledge.
Management might be a bit easier to convince when made to realize that efficiency translates to more customers, while bloat translates to fewer. In some cases, developing a native app might even mean gaining traction in a new market.
I’m not too optimistic on that one. Bloated software has been an issue for the last 20 or so years at least.
At the same time upgrade cycles have become much slower. In the 90s you’d upgrade your PC every two years and each upgrade would bring whole entire use cases that just weren’t possible before. Similar story with smartphones until the mid-2010s.
Nowadays people use their PCs for upwards of 10 years and their smartphones until they drop them and crack the screen.
Devices have so much performance nowadays that you can really just run some electron apps and not worry about it. It might lag a little at times, but nobody buys a new device just because the loyalty app of your local supermarket is laggy.
I don’t like Electron either, but tbh, most apps running on Electon are so light-weight that it doesn’t matter much that they waste 10x the performance. If your device can handle a browser with 100 tabs, there’s no issue running an Electron app either.
Lastly, most Electron/Webview apps aren’t really a matter of choice. If your company uses Teams you will use teams, no matter how shit it runs on your device. If you need to use your public transport, you will use their app, no matter if it’s Electron or not. Same with your bank, your mobile phone carrier or any other service.
We have an enormous problem with software optimization both in cycles and memory costs. I would love for that to change but the vast majority of customers don’t care. It’s painful to think about but most don’t care as long as it works “good enough” which is a nebulous measure that management can use to lie to shareholders.
Even mentioning that we’ve wiped out roughly a decade in hardware gains with how bloated and slow our software is doesn’t move the needle. All of the younger devs in our teams truly see no issue. They consider nextjs apps to be instant. Their term, not me putting words in their mouths. VSCode is blazingly fast in their eyes.
We’ve let the problem slide so long that we have a whole generation of upcoming devs that don’t even see a problem let alone care about it. Anyone who mentors devs should really hammer this home and maybe together we can all start shifting that apathy.