Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by unlinked_dll 2367 days ago
>That's how most of the world's population will experience your site.

Unless you're FAANG you probably don't care about most of the world's population, but the tiny slice that is most likely to see your site and generate revenue for you.

It's not baffling that most developers don't make things for most people. That's just a waste of time and money.

3 comments

> Unless you're FAANG you probably don't care about most of the world's population, but the tiny slice that is most likely to see your site and generate revenue for you.

That is simply not true for pretty much most companies in existence. Also those users will still be mostly using phones that are significantly slower than iPhone.

> It's not baffling that most developers don't make things for most people. That's just a waste of time and money.

Empirical proof shows that most web developers make things for other web developers (optimizing for 4000$ MacBooks and 1000$ iPhones while forgetting that poor LTE signal areas exist) instead of making it for targeting your actual companies user reach.

(Remember, people who don't return on your slow loading JS bloated web site do not appear on simple dumb Google Analytics.)

What people fail to consider is even with the high end smartphones, how do we know you are guranteed full speed 4G all the time? The network speed varies greatly in various places (in the subway, through the tunnels etc) and more often that not, we have sucky network speeds even though we are on "4G"
I suppose it depends on how much you want to put effort into optimizing a single app for all users, rather than having a lite version of the site.

For my company, we serve images and video. Even multi megabyte JavaScript only equals one minute of a 720p videos runtime.

For people on restricted connections, we have a lite versions with less than 100k JavaScript and videos transcoded to 260p.

it's not, because phone coverage can be spotty when in a car using the train, busy wifi connections etc. aren't we supposed to be optimizing for mobile? SPAs should only be used for things like gmail. Newspapers offering megabytes of javascript , when they know that a lot of their reading happens in trains is obscene.

On the one hand google promotes SPA frameworks. on the other hand , google makes AMP because they are too slow. It's not stated often enough, but modern web is schizophrenic