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by dksidana 3889 days ago
We, at hike ( http://www.hike.in), did following things: 1. gave the cheap android smartphone to use as their primary phone 2. asked employees to stay on 2G on their mobile phones

It helped a us lot to improve our product for India market.

4 comments

Your landing page takes 15 seconds to load on a simulated "Regular 3G" connection in Chrome. If you'd like I could walk you through fixing some of the most obvious problems, my contact info is in my profile.
I need help understanding why this is being down voted.
As you asked.. firstly because doesn't speak to the actual idea being put forward, merely implying that they are—at best—incompetent and at worst hypocritical. It then compounds this faux pas with a tender for work which seems a little galling.
"I could walk you through" seems to me to be an offer to help, not a pitch for business.

It struck me as basically somebody saying "if you care about it for your app, I'd be happy to help you care about it for your website".

I feel like you're assuming bad faith, and the person confused as to why the comment was being downvoted was applying the principle of charity instead.

A cursory look shows that this is not an implication but a statement of fact:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151027_FV_1ATV/1/details/

I didn't get the idea that grk was pitching consulting services but just to be clear that I have no interest in that market, here are the most obvious things:

1. Enable gzip transfer compression for static assets like Bootstrap

2. Compress the large images more aggressively and perhaps turn on progressive JPEG, although that latter step might be CPU-costly on mobile devices

3. Set cache headers on all static resources so regular users and anyone behind a caching proxy will avoid the full server RTT

4. If you use www.hike.in, optimize the redirect to go directly to get.hike.in instead of having a full RTT to get the intermediate hike.in redirect.

Beyond that, I'd look into a front-end diet – do you need so many images, can you lazy-load images or that 350KB of youtube, etc?

I assume that it is because of the attempt to take the discussion offline when the information is probably relevant to the discussion and therefore relevant to multiple readers. Must discussion forums frown upon that.
the most obvious problems are that he don't concat images/js/css.

No SSL, No HTTP2/PageSpeed. Html not concated.

No additional server in america. It sucks to connect from Germany. It's twice as fast to connect to Servers in America so ALWAYS have a US Region.

I hope their messenger is better.

The first thing you need to fix is sending spam messages on behalf of a user to other contacts on his/her list. Here is a typical example that was automatically sent from my phone to a contact on my list without my consent:

"Happy Dussehra! Join hike this weekend & get a festive bonus of Rs. 51 free talktime on joining. It's 5 times faster with 10 new features. http://hike.in"

I'm thinking of reporting this to relevant authorities.

I totally agree with you. It was such a nuisance. I uninstalled the app 5 minutes after installing.

Also, after the hike fiasco, I kept getting callbacks from many of my contacts that I had given them a missed calls.

Very shady. I don't even know how they do it. I thought it was illegal to pretend as another mobile number.

The funny thing is I don't have their app installed. I have 2 Lumia phones that I use only for testing websites (no apps installed) and I have no idea how Hike was able to send messages via my phone to my contacts (have only 2 contacts on that phone). I haven't investigated it yet but looks like they were able to use some Windows related exploit to send messages on my behalf.
Ditto, I've installed and uninstalled hike a lot of times because of this. Guess they care more about growth at the expense of retaining normal users. Most people use whatsapp for 'timepass' and whatsapp groups. And not real communication.
You've got a typo:

>Free Group Calls With Upto 100 People With The Tap Of A Single Button!

"Upto" should be two words

Your app looks interesting, how come no "About" or "Team" page??
From when "Team" page is a standard?