• cylon@programming.dev
    29·
    6 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.

  • buddascrayon@lemmy.world
    21·
    7 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.

  • the_wiz@feddit.orgDeutsch
    5·
    6 days ago

    Is this the appropriate point to reference the suckless community? I mean, that’s THE point of the movement…

  • x4740N@lemm.ee
    21·
    6 days ago

    Lazy devs not removing old non functional commented code and background code additions ?

    Though I do get it if they don’t want to remove the old code if their employer is an asshole

    • SketchySeaBeast@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      That’s not why. It’s the dependency trees that run a dozen layers deep and end up importing “isEven”. If you’re building a react app odds are good you’ll import way more code than you ever write yourself.

      And no one should be leaving commented-out code in their app, that’s what source control is for.

  • Aux@feddit.ukEnglish
    24·
    7 days ago

    Most resources are not consumed by wonky code or dependencies. Most resources are consumed by images and sounds.

      • Aux@feddit.ukEnglish
        11·
        6 days ago

        Every decent piece of software has crap loads of resources: icons, texts, translations, manuals, sounds, fonts, etc. Even hello world app contains at least one resource - “hello world” string and what’s funny is that executable meta data required by operating systems and the string take more space than the actual code to print this string.

  • Stovetop@lemmy.world
    338·
    8 days ago

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

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      1631·
      8 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.

      • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        19·
        8 days ago

        I saw an ad request with an inline 1.4 MB game. Like, you could fit Mario in there.

        • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
          9·
          8 days ago

          The Samsung shop hands out 1.4mb JSON responses for order tracking, with what I estimate 99% redundant information that is repeated many times in different parts of the structure.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
      36·
      8 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.

  • enemenemu@lemm.ee
    168·
    8 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

      • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
        131·
        8 days ago

        LMAO, he also made me check it.

        347 MB for me, no wonder why I am always struggling with storage for my 128 GB phone (with not expandable storage of course), and I don’t even have that many games, even less ROMs 😅

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      17·
      8 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.

      • enemenemu@lemm.ee
        5·
        8 days ago

        Native alpha sounds good since it’s foss and uses vanadium’s webview. Are you still logged in to paypal (any annoying website) a couple of months later. Or does it revoke your rights after a while?

        I only use it rarely and I hate providing my info for 5 minutes just to do one transaction.

  • count_dongulus@lemmy.world
    140·
    8 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.eeEnglish
      55·
      8 days ago

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

      Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.

      • Tanoh@lemmy.world
        9·
        8 days ago

        Also the storage is the cost for the user, and google in the case of play store. So the developers have no incentive to reduce the size.

      • UnityDevice@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        8 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
          42·
          8 days ago

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

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      195·
      8 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
        1·
        2 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.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    89·
    8 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.

    • nutt_goblin@lemmy.world
      241·
      8 days ago

      See: Webview2

      Unfortunately, it is extremely painful to work with😔 Enjoy rolling your own script versioning and update systems instead of using squirrel et al

      Edit: I think Tauri works by targeting this and webkitgtk via their wrapper library, unfortunately I can’t get my coworkers to write rust

      • kungen@feddit.nu
        6·
        8 days ago

        Isn’t that just the same pig, just wearing different makeup? I’m not a fan of msedgewebview2.exe allocating 500+ MB RAM just because Teams is open, but maybe that’s Teams fault…

        • nutt_goblin@lemmy.world
          4·
          7 days ago

          Not quite. instead of a bundled pinned version of electron, it is an arbitrary version of edge’s WebKit fork shared across all programs using it. That means you don’t need to keep multiple copies of the webkit libraries loaded into memory.

          That’s not to say that building things on web technology is an efficient use of resources. Even if multiple programs are sharing the webview2 library, they’re still dealing with the fundamental performance and memory problems caused by building an app in JavaScript.

          As for why teams is so memory hungry? I would blame Teams.

          Discord manages to make a half decent, highly responsive webview app, and that’s with the overhead of having its own separate instance of electron.

          EDIT: the original poster was also talking about application binary size, not runtime memory consumption. Application binary size should actually be significantly helped by linking webview to instead of bundling electron.

    • devilish666@lemmy.world
      61·
      8 days ago

      Is there any alternatives to electron ? And why people’s doesn’t move on to alternatives if electron is huge & heavy resources ?

      • dpflug@kbin.earth
        12·
        8 days ago

        I mean, Object Pascal was doing the “write once, run anywhere” thing decades ago. Java, too. The former, especially, can make very small programs with big features.

        • uuldika@lemmy.ml
          33·
          8 days ago

          Java (and Object Pascal, I’m assuming) have very old-looking UIs. Discord’s gonna have trouble attracting users if their client looks like a billing system from 2005. Also, what do you do about the web client? Implement the UI once in HTML/CSS/JS, and again in JForms?

          So if you’re picking one UI to make cross-platform, and you need a web client, do you pick JForms and make it work on the web? or React and make it work on desktop?

          • dpflug@kbin.earth
            6·
            8 days ago

            I think maybe you’re confused. Java drives a significant percentage of Android apps. It absolutely can do modern UI. I can almost guarantee you’ve interacted with a Java program this year that you never considered.

            Pascal is more niche, but it can do modern, too.

            Java was doing web clients before the web could and still can. I don’t know much about Delphi’s web stuff, but I know they’ve targeted it for years now.

            WASM and transpiling blur the lines, too. LVGL can provide beautiful interfaces on the web as well as platforms Electron could never target, and works with any language compatible with the C ABI.

            I’m not saying these strategies are without their own warts, but there are other ways to deliver good experiences across platforms with a ~single codebase in a smaller payload. But mostly nobody bothers because they just reach for Electron. It’s this era’s “nobody ever got fired for picking Intel”.

            We need more people working with and on alternatives, not just for efficiency but also for the health of the software ecosystem. Google’s browser hegemony is feasting. Complexity has become their moat, preventing a fork from being viable without significant resources. Mozilla is off in a corner consuming itself in desperation.

            A US-based company holds a monopoly over the free web and a hell of a lot of our non-web software. So maybe let’s look for ways to avoid feeding the beast, yes? And we can get more efficient software in the process.

            • uuldika@lemmy.ml
              1·
              7 days ago

              Isn’t jfx still actually using HTML and CSS, though? like it’s cool that the UI logic is in Java, but doesn’t using CSS mean you still need to lug a rendering engine around, even if not a whole browser?

          • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
            2·
            8 days ago

            Yea, electron has flaws, but it’s basically the only way to make a truly cross platform native and web app. I would rather take a larger installed size and actually have apps that are available everywhere.

            The sad truth is there aren’t enough developers to go around to make sleek native apps for every platform, so something that significantly frees dev time is a great real world solution for that.

      • dbx12@programming.dev
        6·
        8 days ago

        The alternative is “just serve it as a regular website”. It doesn’t need to be an app to do its job. Name a functionality which only exists in electron but not in the standard browser API.