@zachleat testing the full spectrum of slow device / slow network to ‘fastest possible’ has been a mainstay in messing from me @calibre
However, there are still a lot of teams out there who intentionally hide worst case scenarios because it’s so bad and represents too much work to improve.
They’re so busy with the best case, that poor experiences don’t get a look in, which is totally counterintuitive because if you make a page fast for a slow phone, it’ll FLY everywhere else.
@zachleat Twitter and WhatsApp both grew quickly early on because they worked on lowend phones. Twitter’s original text-only 140 character limit was strategically intentionally aligned with what SMS could do.
WhatsApp ran as a Java app on non-Android, non-iOS phones.
@markstos@zachleat at least Mastodon has #Brutaldon that can work even in feature phone browsers but I'm not aware of a J2ME app for old feature phones yet (I'm sure it'll be made by someone since Apple II and PalmOS clients exist).
@tchauhan React has shown itself to be pretty slow! That said, there is a spectrum of React tooling. I’d rate Astro > Gatsby > Next.js for fast outputs of React stuff
@zachleat worst-case fast also gets you an unbelievably amazing experience on the best-case stuff.
I love using low end hardware to build things. You find out what hurts your end result FAR earlier, when you're more easily able to fix it. And then the final result absolutely screams on decent machines, and that's an amazing feeling.
@zachleat I love it when people visit us in our wetlands and suddenly can't get more than 10-20 Mbps. This teaches them a lot. They start loving ad/tracker blockers.
@zachleat My experience is very limited as well (n=1), but if I extrapolate from other experiences in the valley that aren't like the Google campus (hotels, coffee shops, etc.), it doesn't bode well for the others 🙂.
@zachleat surely it depends. An app used internally at a large corporation should not have to worry about worse-case fast. Heavy duty apps can do heavy duty lifting on networks created for that purpose.
Any public website absolutely should be worst-case fast though.
I don’t know where webdevs work or why we seem so incapable of this nuance. It can be both. It depends.
@a11yMel@zachleat IDK, I'm suffering through a lot of "apps used internally at large corporations" right now, and they're not OK. Not even on beefy machines, and I know for a fact that many folks in the org have worse/more-taxed machines
@a11yMel@slightlyoff@zachleat one of the ecommerce shops I worked at the past had a glacially slow public-facing set of web properties and fought the dev team trying to improve them, but internal apps were significantly faster. Sigh.
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