Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days | Hacker News Reader

Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

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149 pointsmmaanniisshh124 comments

We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA (https://usebx.com/app), so we tried to optimise for low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy Note or iPhone. Just goes to show that if you don't over-bloat your app, even low end phones can offer a very good experience.

I've been surprised by how performant you can get with CSS transitions and a will-change property. But good grief is it difficult.

On one hand I understand why a transition on `left` isn't hardware accelerated but a `translate3d` is, but on the other it seems crazy that we expect people to think and know this kind of stuff when they just want to do something very simple.

I agree with you. Performant animations with JavaScript are generally painful. CSS helps, but can be limited. It can also be a bit fiddly, especially when you want to chain animations together. Perhaps the web animations API will solve this as it matures.

That's was my intention when I proposed will-changed. I was trying to get the Firefox OS home screen slide transitions to be performant without hard coding it in the Gecko layout engine.

Thank you for proposing it! I was astonished by the difference when I used it.

That site literally has a loading popup and constantly changing fonts and UI. Whatever you're doing, its not working.

Hmm, I know the initial load is a bit slow, but once that's done, it should be fairly performant. The slow load is caused by our in-browser PDF rendering library. We are due to make it a "lazy load" in the upcoming release, so things should be significantly faster.

I've been able to get surprisingly good animation performance on an NBU quality device as well with Houdini's Paint Worklet.

You do have to be intentional to get good animation performance on the web, but it's amazing that when you are, you can make transitions that perform better than the ones that come with the phone.

Absolutely - I've seen native apps struggle to provide the same animation performance as our PWA. It is hard work though, and I've seen even the best web devs fall short on performance. We luckily hired an absolute gem of a developer that thoroughly understood JS and CSS animations. We make sure we retain her, because her work makes our PWA infinitely more usable.

In the demo, when you mouse over the sales chart it creates a jittery effect.

This is because you're setting the position of an element that has a transition with a curve. In effect it's restarting its animation every time you move the mouse, causing it reset its velocity.

May I know which browser and OS you're using please?

A bit off-topic, but does the OS matter? Don't all browsers render the same between OSes? Although I can see them being different in things like font rendering...

It can matter, depending on what responsibilities the particular browser offloads to the OS. I just like to ask, so we can diagnose issues fully :)

True true, I was just idly wondering how many OS-dependent bugs people had seen, as a rough proportion.

Firefox on iOS and Firefox on Android are completely different beasts, OS definitely matters when Apple forces you to use their layout engine.

> Don't all browsers render the same between OSes?

Canvas fingerprinting wouldn't be as effective if it did

I did an experiment similar to this a few years back, but I lasted about six months. After touchscreen on my iPhone 6 Plus died prematurely two days after the warranty expired, and neither Apple nor Verizon would help, I decided to simply forgo owning a smartphone for a while. I used one on WiFi only, and went back to an LCD flip phone from 2002. This worked great, except people kept complaining that they couldn’t text me. I try to get sms set up, but they said my phone was too old to work with their current network.

Then I moved somewhere new and wanted to do some dating. It was obvious I was going to need a real phone. I bought a Kyocera Hydro for $40. It has similar specs to the device in the review - 1 GB ram, 1 GB clock speed, 2 MP camera: https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/kyocera/hydroreach/Ky...

My first impression was that it was amazing to get a device like this for $40, if you put it in a perspective from 5 or 15 years ago. Out of the box, though, the system couldn’t keep up with typing. Simply entering text was a strain on the processor. In general though, it seemed roughly as capable as an iPod Touch G4, though with inferior system software, but less capable than a Samsung Galaxy S3. I would complain about the buggy firmware and apps but it seems no worse than Motorola or Samsung, who are each poor in the regard compared to Apple. The main drawback was the camera. Battery life on it is still better than my current iPhone. Reception is poor.

To make a long story short, after using the phone for six months, I realized that I should’ve just bought an iPhone 4s for $50. I would have had at the least a good camera and OS updates.

I still use the 64GB iPhone 4S that my dad gave me as a graduation present in 2011. It's great: nice camera, USB sync, Third Rail battery case, small screen, enough space for offline maps/music/Wikipedia and 300+ apps, and lots of jailbreak tweaks including OS downgrading. I bought a used 32GB iPhone 5 from my friend who wanted to get rid of it, but I prefer my 4S for daily use (including this comment).

I bought a used Galaxy S3 Mini a few years back after my two years without any phone at all. Had to replace the screen once but even that was a used part.

I think people should put their phone into sleeves more often, I see them walking on the street carrying the phone unused and unprotected in their hands and accidents happen too often.

I find it a bit disheartening that in this day and age, one apparently needs a good enough phone if one wants to date. :)

Thankfully, just for texting capabilities and not appearances. If I was able to hook up my flip phone to SMS I would have kept using that. Also, it’s fairly egalitarian since ‘good phone’ was satisfied adequately by this $40 prepaid from RadioShack.

It's not a hardware problem. Typing worked just fine on Windows 95 withd 8 MB of RAM and 50MHz processor.

If you installed Windows 7 on that machine it would probably be slow, though. I think this one was running Android 4 when new. Probably it would have been better with a version made a few years earlier. I looked into rooting it to install a more lightweight OS, but this was my first experience with that and it doesn't seem to be a popular phone to hack.

To old to work with SMS I doubt that :-) it just the poor way sms was implemented in the USA. Though I thought they had solved most of the really egregious problems ie cross etwork SMS now.

Right, one would think it would work since the phone had SMS built in, and it was the same carrier (Virgin, i believe using the Sprint network). I have no idea of the technical details but I assume it’s some protocol version incompatibility.

> Out of the box, though, the system couldn’t keep up with typing.

Until the most recent iOS update, my 6+ couldn’t reliably keep up with typing on iOS 11, fwiw.

Right, I think it’s a matter of running an OS made for a new machines on an old machine. It was also a matter of switching off superfluous graphics features. This phone had android 4.4 new and got upgraded to 5.1, and worked better with 5.1.

Oh, and I’m replying to my own post to add another advantage of an old iPhone over a cheap android: good included system utilities. On the Kyocera many important tools are some combo of crippleware and spyware. There are ads in the included file browser, unless you pay this random third party.

Also, there are several useless apps that I cannot install, like the Sprint and Virgin game apps, and apps from people who have paid them, like Lookout, but I guess that is more of an android thing than merely a cheap android thing.

I remember buying a burner phone in India once and it hurt my ears when I received calls. It turned out the phone only had one loudness setting which was at a level able to pierce through the din of Mumbai. Ear bleedingly loud.

Well, except when I'm indoors, I wouldn't mind that. The few times I've had to call 911 by the side of the road to report accidents[1], the phones I had just couldn't produce sound loudly enough to be heard over passing traffic. I know there was an initiative to protect people's hearing a few years ago by limiting volume - but sometimes you really need it.

[1] Other people's - not mine!

I just hold my phone at half an arms length from my ear in quiet conditions.

This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based on my experience.

It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not people in your social circle.

I too have never seen anybody using it in at least North India. In fact, I never ever heard anyone even talking about it. Unlike many people here, I am actually very close to rural life in India and I couldn't spot this phone. South India may be?

I don't know how it was the best selling phone in India.

I live in Kerala (South India) and I haven't seen this phone with anyone. Most of them uses budget phones from Samsung which costs around 5k-8k INR.

I don't know where they got the figures. Micromax does not even have 5% market share these days.

It's not. The article used inaccurate term in the title. Later in the article they mentioned it's the "best selling phone for sub $75 brands".

Got it. I was wondering how the most popular phone was $75, but the mean selling price was $157, and owning a lowest-end $269 iPhone was unheard of.

At $100+ you're in a completely different league. At that point you can get 32GB storage, 2GB ram, decent screen albeit with 720p.

that's right, you can find great xiaomi phones at around 100$. I'm having no trouble with a moto g3 and these are way better in all specs.

2nd hand they're probably around the 70$ mark in india too.

I have a oppo a-something I acquired in Malaysia nearly 2 years ago when my phone broke down. Even thought it was like $120 I still use it and have zero issues except outdated software which I can live with.

In fact I never had a smartphone this sturdy.

I think his expectations are just out of balance. The phone he describes sounds a lot like the phone I gave my kids. I just want them to have a phone that they can use in case of emergencies. That's basically what my baby boomer parents need as well. So he's right, phones at that price point are limited, but that doesn't mean they don't fulfill the needs of portions of the population - just different demographics than his own personal needs.

If you really need just calls, dumbphones are still a thing, and I see plenty for sale here in provincial China (/me waves from Xining). The article's point is that cheap smartphones aren't working well for their intended users because the vast majority of apps aren't designed for their limitations.

Well, this should be easy- open the Git-Repository from five years ago, compile the old version of the app and release.

The irony is - you cant do that, because maybe, just maybee all your current users would drop the HOT NEW SHINY, bloat-add-ware in the store, like a hot rock, if they could go back to something basic- basically have the whats-app experience, before the feature bloat came.

Except this phone isn't for kids, this is for people where the phone may be there only device. No laptop, no desktop, no parent to organise things for them.

I'm not sure the target customers of this phone organize things on their phone (TFA has a quote from Micromax related to this).

These days, basic chat apps are common enough that they're close to core "phone" functionality -- even a few Nokia smartphones had WhatsApp support before they went the way of the dodo.

And one would assume that that's not really that hard to do. After all, for SMS support you've got a very similar set of features already running on the phone. Maybe videos won't work that well, but that shouldn't degrade the basic support.

In New Delhi, I'd also want my kids to have access to some car hailing app and maps. Heck, I'd want a stun gun integrated in the phone…

I'd be interested to know how these $60 phones perform compared to a 9 year old Motorola Droid. Obviously, the level of content 9 years ago was at least an order of magnitude less than today, but how much of these devices slowness is content vs delivery technology? Is it because web apps are dynamic instead of static? Is it a matter of framework bloat? What is really the root cause of the terrible performance?

Operating system bloat and app bloat.

A motorola droid was super fast, I had it for years.

If you made a brand new motorola droid today with the same exact hardware and software it would be too.

Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time: https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth

It's for iOS but the same logic follows for android

>Here's a chart showing apk bloat for popular apps over time

What the fuck did Google add to Gmail in 2016?

Is ProGuard or similar widely used these days? Is it good enough?

There was a parallel trend of some really awesome apps clocking less than 4MB, which I attribute to good tooling. I wonder if Gmail, Facebook, et al have stripping & such turned off, or if they just have huge asset stores?

iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium phone?

I am surprised :).

I went through that process. After I stopped buy good phones subsidized by the phone company & started paying full retail phones upfront, I became less interested in having a top of the line phone. I just don't wanna fork out $900 for any phone. I bought two versions of a sub-$100 phone, they both sucked and/or were defective in some way. I bought a $240, and it was OK, but I was constantly fishing for an excuse to get rid of it. I finally came to the conclusion that I had to spend about at least $400 for a phone I'd be happy with (I wanted new + 32GB internal storage + not-crappy camera + removable battery). That strategy has worked well for me so far!

By my maths that was $840 minimum, versus $900 iphone. As is often the case, it seems that things cost a little often, or a lot but less often.

You're not wrong. I returned the two sub-$100 phones for a full refund. I had rooted the $240 phone, which broke it's ability to (easily) get system updates. I sold it on eBay for maybe half what I paid for it. So my downside wasn't as bad as it could have been. I decided I'd be content pay the price for learning how to shop for a phone I wanted. I'm also saving on every $400-not-$900 I buy in the future.

What did you end up with? I got a great deal on an LG V20 from B&H, and everything is great apart from reception..

I have an LG G5. I'm very happy with it. At one year, I replaced the battery, and only because I could.

If you are in the USA, what mobile carrier/network do you have? I use AT&T, and the network has been good enough. I tried T-mobile here in San Francisco for a week, and had too many "can you hear me now?" moments, so I went back to AT&T.

I also am on a non-subsidised plan and have messed around with cheap phones in the past, with similar experiences. However one thing I've found that eases a good phone's price tag is buying used, through a site like Swappa or Glyde (what I have experience with). Having a hundred plus dollar discount on something that's lightly used is quite helpful, especially considering that if I were to buy new I'd just void the warrantee with rooting anyways.

I disagree, it can be done below $400. The first two generations of the Moto G where really awesome for the price (< $200). They had vanilla Android, frequent updates, reasonably good screens and were fast. I used one for a while full time while my Moto X was being repaired. And I briefly considered switching to the G full time because it had some nice features (could be bought with dual SIM and had a bumper available that could replace the back). Unfortunately, quickly after Lenovo bought Motorola, they diversified the product line and the quick updates stopped.

Currently, Nokia (they are not really Nokia, but have ex-Nokia staff and are a Finnish company) makes really great Android phones around $200-$300. They are in the Android One program and do 2 years of feature updates and monthly security updates. So far, it seems that they are keeping up this promise. Phones like the Nokia 6.1 are fast, have a nice screen, etc. Obviously, it is not a $700 phone, but speed/quality/update-wise they are very similar to the old Nexus line.

I recently bought a Nokia 3 for testing stuff on. It's $179 outright in Australia (so US$150ish) and I've been pretty impressed.

It's slow, but usable. Pure Android, and ok camera, screen and build quality.

(My daily phone is a Pixel, and I have had iPhones in the past to compare)

They released the 3.1 in May and it seems that they bumped up the specs quite a bit (4 to 8 core, 2 to 3GB RAM, 32GB storage).

https://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Nokia-3.1,Nokia-3/...

Last week I bought a Nokia 6.1 and it is pretty fast. I have been an iPhone user since 2009 (with an Android excursion 2013-2015). But my beloved 64GB iPhone SE had water damage after a bike ride through the rain last week. And I didn't want to buy a new iPhone just ~2 months before the keynote. I'll see after the keynote whether I'll buy a/the new iPhone or whether the Nokia is good enough.

At any rate, I am very impressed what they are doing. I hope they stay on this course. I think there is a place for phones with pure Android and regular updates, but that is cheaper than the Pixel line. Basically the void that Nexus left.

> it can be done below $400

Absolutely!

I have a Moto G5+. It was under NOK 2000 in January this year, that's less than USD 250. It's great. Much better value than my sister's Huawei P9 which was much more expensive..

Even for a low end phone, getting a "low" storage notification out of the box is not acceptable.

Oh please. Most of those apps worked 5 years ago on phones that matched reviewed tech

Wow, way to belittle an interesting article. And if you mean not performing well, as being able to run 4 apps, I guess you have a point.

This reminds me of when Apple said they would refurbish older phone models and sell them in India and people got irate that they only sell them used stuff. So, okay, no iPhone for them at all, I guess.

They're basically stuck using older, cheaper technology. That's fine, but you can't really access the older software that was developed for that level of hardware anymore (hence the 'lite' apps mentioned in the article). It's an interesting disconnect between hardware and software in the market.

The article talks a lot about storage. Is an SD card not possible? I have a somewhat average Huawei phone that's a couple of years old (sensible charging, battery still good though not great) and a 32GB SD card carries all I need in terms of photo after photo, and app data from less used apps.

SD cards on Androids are kind of weird. It's not always consistent where things will be stored. Unless things have changed, many apps can't be installed to SD (and if you force it, you'll find that they are subtly broken). When you're building the phone to hit a low price point, you might not have the budget for a slot anyway; and unfortunately, you're likely to not put much more storage than is needed to boot the phone; let alone handle the play store updates that will be ready when it's unboxed.

It would really help if Google made translations suck less. They are stored uncompressed in the apk, even though human language text is easily compressed.

Back in the early Android days, this wasn't the case, you could easily push most apps onto MicroSD. Yet, versions of Android up until adoptable storage was added (which essentially makes your mSD non-removable) have continued to make it more and more difficult to use your MicroSD for storing apps.

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps.

We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

Android has supported apps on SD cards for ages. First with Apps2SD then since 6.0 Adoptable Storage which just treats internal+SD as one big storage pool. A lot of higher end phones have disabled the UI for Adoptable Storage due to performance concerns though it is still possible to set up with ADB commands. This type of phone however is the exact sort of thing it's meant for.

You can run apps from SD on Android provided the vendor hasn't neutered it. It was a custom Moto feature for KitKat but was upstreamed for Lollipop and up.

As of Marshmallow, you can format the SD card as internal storage. I did that on my dad's phone just this week and it doesn't seem to have the limitation you described.

This is absolutely incorrect.

So its just best selling phone under $75 not the best selling mobile which i would take would be Samsung or Xiaomi.

Had to buy a $79.99 Blu C5 at target last minute few weeks ago when my phone died night before I had to catch a flight. Everything is really crappy and really slow, but so far perfectly usable.

Still been using it last few weeks since I can't decide which phone to get. If it had a slightly better speaker I'd prob keep it. Guess my needs aren't that demanding in hindsight.

I used $50 alcatel phone for the last four years. It was actually pretty nice for the first three years, it wasn't even slow for many purposes (though cruising the web was annoying). That it's screen was 1/3 normal size helped - sped things up and made the phone much tougher.

The phone was killed in the last year by the gradual process of applications upgrading themselves and exceeding memory. And then the touch screen started dying.

The cheapish thing I have does more but is not more aesthetically pleasing.

See: https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e6643480...

I've been using a Nokia 216 for a month while my smartphone gets repaired. It has 4G and Bluetooth, but not WiFi (why?). It has a lousy camera, but the LED torch is good. It has threaded texts (this is not common, apparently) and the battery lasts forever even using data. There is no GPS nor, tragically, Snake.

You get Opera Mini installed which is... an experience. There is no cache (and probably hardly any RAM either), so if you close the browser your entire session gets deleted. History somewhat works. Every now and then you get an ad injected - the ad never seems to change. My phone is trying to make me buy a German Honor A10. I live in the UK.

Javascript, of course, is not supported. If you want to interact with an element it refreshes the entire page and re-renders it to reflect the update.

It makes it painfully obvious which websites are really optimised for mobile, which ones just have a setting for small screens, and which don't bother at all. Simple sites work well - HN comments is good, most news websites (e.g. BBC) work, Wikipedia is fine. People are astounded when I can fact-check in the pub. Browsing Google images is also surprisingly good. Pages with custom fonts often don't load at all. Forms are hit and miss.

Data usage is really light. I have a 100MB bundle and I barely put a dent in it.

It's, on the whole, usable. I can look up things, check the weather and procrastinate.

What is really missing is maps. Google Maps does not work at all. The interface doesn't work - if you get a list of possible destinations, often you can't click on the one you actually want. There don't seem to be any usable ultra-low bandwidth navigation websites. Bing doesn't even try, and not much luck with Bing either.

If I had access to slack, 2-factor authentication (without using texts) and semi-decent mapping, I'd be tempted not to go back to a smartphone.

About 4 years ago, before my current employment made owning a smartphone a necessity, I was a dumb phone user. I was able to easily give up Reddit, HN, other various things but the single most painful missing thing to give up was maps.

My approach at the time was to route on my laptop and print directions. It worked most of the time but still was rather painful.

It ended up being a lot cheaper though. When I was a poor college kid I was able to get on a prepaid plan with no data, unlimited text and like 200 minutes of calling a month (way more than almost anyone in this day and age uses) for about $15 a month.

The title is misleading and essentially a clickbait. Later in the article they mentioned:

> At $60, the Bharat 2 is one of the cheapest smartphones in India with 4G LTE and, according to Counterpoint, it was the country’s best-selling smartphone in the sub-$75 price band last year.

When I made an app I went and bought the cheapest Android I could find to check the thing ran ok as I use an iPhone normally. It was quite interesting - I made it display a bit less stuff and the UI less fiddly as the screen response was bad. I think devs should in general try catering for the worst devices and network connections. One reason WhatsApp won, especially in India, was it worked as a java applet on old phones when the competition couldn't be bothered with that.

I'm not convinced by the current trend of everything requiring a ton of javascript frameworks to display some text info and similar. It causes issues along those lines.

The author just can't seem to understand the concept that these phones are an upgrade for most Indian users. He mentions it multiple times as if he complained about it to literally everyone he interviewed.

>Vikas Jain, Micromax’s cofounder, was not concerned when I brought this up to him. “Our target customers are Indians who are buying their first smartphone, or people who are upgrading to their first smartphone from a feature phone,” he told me in a phone interview. “These people aren’t really bothered about how fast the processor is, or how clear and rich the display is. Their needs are a lot more...basic, and as long as they get decent battery life, a decent camera, and a basic internet surfing experience, they are satisfied.”

A market ripe for disruption.

How so? Seems like the features/specs provided line up pretty well with the $60 price point. Are there examples of basic smartphones in this price range with significantly better features? (Legitimately don't know)

I work in mobile performance and have built out an automated testing workflow for our CI system to try and prevent big breaking changes to these types of phones.

The issue with testing these phones is the device introduces lots of variance due to the low hardware standards. We typically test for relative changes in key metrics and want to move to testing different types of phones for usability. This is generally hard because the noise makes the test inconclusive.

How do you this testing? Any public service?

We have a lab environment with multiple phones plugged into a single controller. The controller runs a set of Jenkins agents which advertises the different devices as targets for Jenkins jobs.

Plus, lots of tweaking and perf related fixes to the phone. If you're looking for an off-the-shelf solution, check out Headspin or the Google Cloud offerings.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into headspin. I'm not into mobile performance or testing so not sure how I would automate and log the performance on different devices. Honestly I'm not sure what tools I would use on the device to run the tests.

We are trying to build something similar to CT-scan; except it’s a 1-man team so it’s been a longer journey:

https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mobile-performance-tooli...

We run functional UI tests with a performance tracer wired up- we already had them setup by feature teams so it was easy to get started. Instead of a Zookeeper scheduler, it’s just Jenkins.

Right now we’ve been able to catch 2-3% relative regressions in things like startup, opening a Google Maps view etc which is pretty good. It was easy to setup and then hard to optimize the variance down so we could get a strong signal.

We’re hiring if any of this is interesting, it’s Golang/San Francisco/Full-Time.

...and here my age shows.

I remember a time when I used a physical landline phone as my only phone. I didn't care if I missed a call, because the people that I wanted to talk to either would see me at school the next day or would show up at my house if it was important. Texting was nonexistent.

Or, to put it another way - eh, life goes on if you can't do a thing.

“The best phone is a landline, and the phone should be made out of Bakelite!”

John C. Dvorak

The problem is that times have changed. Back then the scenario you are describing was everyone. Right now, if you were to go 'back' to that life, you will be an outcast. People won't understand why you don't respond to their messages. If you explain them, people have to make an exception in communication just for you. That gets annoying, and you will be skipped over easier.

No, the scenario back then was a group of maybe 60 people at most.

The scenario now is also a group of maybe 60 people. Those 60 people are not so high strung as to require a response immediately.

My biggest problem with "downgrading" to a landline now would be the loss of Google Maps, to be perfectly honest. I would lose none of the richness of connection that I have now.

> and you will be skipped over easier.

so let them, it is usually worth it.

Sounds like a terrible choice of phone, and I haven’t seen this model in the actual top 10 list.

I’m currently testing a Redmi 5 (should retail for ~100, maybe less) and it is impressive. Eight cores, great screen, fingerprint sensor, 3300mah battery, all in a very nice package - only let down so far is the camera.

Sounds like the assumptions of newer versions of Android and the ecosystem may mean feature phones like the Jiophone (running the FirefoxOS successor) can be competitive on the basis of the hardware and software actually being in step with each other.

from the comments, don't kill the messenger

>Can I use this article as a case study for Journo students on 'How NOT to approach a topic'? You took a wonderful subject and turned it into a gloating, patrnonizing pile of crap. Bravo. The takeaways from this article essentially are 'Cheaper products perform less efficiently than more expensive ones' and 'India is full of poor people'. Yep, right, We did not know this earlier. Thanks for your investigative journalism.

That comment seem unfair, there's a lot of other stuff in the article.

I was surprised the choice was not Xiaomi, the experience would be vastly different for slightly more money

if writer would not set Pierce limit it Redmi note 4 should be best selling phoned in India

https://www.mi.com/in/redmi4/ rocks

I'm writing this on a low end Android I bought 2 years ago for $25 bucks. ZTE force n9100, 1 GB ram, 1.5 GHz android 4.1.2 It works great for browsing the web and YouTube, havent tried anything else. It's just as responsive as any phone if not more responsive. The problem the author has is with the software, the hardware is exceptional in any phone, although 512 megs of ram may limit it somewhat.

Has anyone ever done anything productive with a cellphone? I doubt it.

The problem with the software eating up space is partially that Android itself seems to assume a ton of storage space as soon as you go beyond Android 4. I had an HTC Desire that I had to get rid of simply because the Play Store kept upgrading itself and eating up all remaining storage

A common problem with low end devices is specs that make no sense. Why does this device have a quad core processor? I bet this phone would perform much better if they used a slower processor but doubled the memory. It's crazy that Android is so bloated that 1 gig of storage isn't enough.

Great article I'm glad to see at least one tech giant is (attempting) to cater towards low-end smart phones:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/instagram-lite/

Google has been doing similar things as well with their "Go" series of apps. Relaunching web app wrappers as lightweight apps is nothing new.

> According to data from app analytics firm App Annie, Indians spend 36% of their screentime on communication (like WhatsApp), 20% on video players (like YouTube), and 16% on social networking (Facebook).

I wonder how much of that is self fulfilling due to the low powered devices?

Most, I mean upwards of 60-70% always search for charging point the first thing they arrive anywhere (be it airport, Hotel or even office). Always the devices are on charge. Always.

It's misleading to call it one of the bestselling phones in India. This article is the first time I even heard about this phone.

It's just a bit below the price of the cheapest xiaomi, which is miles better, and can arguably be used as a less shiny i-phone replacement

This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with crap that rich people don’t have to.

I hear that, but there’s something instructive here as well for members of the HN community who write software.

Namely, it’s that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the size of the Indian / developing world market, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to provide a good experience (apps or OS) on more meager hardware.

I certainly don’t remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why can’t we make an experience today that runs on low end, but still vastly more powerful hardware than the original iPhone?

My company still supports Android back to KitKat. We just dropped iOS 9 and we’re planning on dropping 10 in q4 (we typically support the two most recent versions of iOS). I pointed out that dropping 10 would orphan our iPhone 5/5C and older users, the 5C which was sold in India as recently as Mar 2017. It’s sadly too small a user base to justify continued support.

>I certainly don’t remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why can’t we make an experience today that runs on low end, but still vastly more powerful hardware than the original iPhone?

We can, but there's relatively little money in it. Which is why it doesn't get done very well.

Because the problem isn't technical, it's political.

I presume the author used the Bharat 2 Q402. I dug out some specs:

- Android 6.0

- 4" 24-bit 480x800 TFT LCD (capacitative of course)

- Quad-core 1.3GHz Spreadtrum SC9832 (Cortex-A7)

- Dual-core Mali-400 MP2 (512MHz)

- 512MB RAM

- 4GB of storage

- 2MP rear camera (1600x1200 photo, 640x480 (!) 30fps video)

- 300k (haha) front camera

That's kind of all over the shop, but 4 cores at 1.3GHz, ARM notwithstanding, is fundamentally decent from a bare-metal standpoint.

512MB RAM is also not entirely terrible - I could limp (albeit badly) with ~70 tabs in Firefox (back in the memory leak days) on a machine with 512MB RAM many years ago.

So really this is entirely the Android ecosystem's fault. When I say "ecosystem" I'm obviously looking sideways at app developers, but the OS core could probably be designed a little better too.

But neither are. I strongly think this is due to precedent: nobody is penalized for making apps that perform well on non-flagship devices. Indeed, app development on Android seems to strongly mirror (to the point of there really being no dividing line) iOS development - and in the Apple camp lots of websites are only tested on Macbooks nowadays, so it seems that designers/architects are increasingly getting away with not doing the grunt work to test.

Maybe this is because of simple bubble-sheltered designer snobbishness ("that kind of work is below me"). Maybe there's a bit of "and a lid for your coffee cup will be $3" (where the coffee cup lid, representing adequate testing, was previously included for free) in the mix as well.

If only phones were a bit more standardized (think x86 ISA), we could bring the demoscene over to them. Rip Linux out, show what the hardware can _really_ do, generate some popular demand, and actually set a standard for OS vendors to meet.

Because right now the only standard is "next year's phones will have more X, so build in a way that will need so much of that the current device is really straining".

I think there's just a problem with software nowadays. I bought a 2005 PowerBook G4 for nostalgia's sake, and ended up finding out that even if I push the CPU of the poor thing to the max by compiling GCC and downloading stuff, it still manages to have smoother animations than my maxed out quad-core i7-powered Dell XPS 15: https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/1017622599696896001

Try installing OpenBSD (or even Xubuntu) with XFCE on that i7 Dell. It’ll fly. Resource sipping, featureful software exists.

Many software developers like to claim that any focus on performance is "premature optimization" and never bother to test on low end or to optimize.

Buzzfeed, quartz, dailyO are all clickbait opinion articles.

https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3hf1hn/hey_india_wha...

The problem here is mostly the piece of s* Android OS. 1gb of storage is enough for a complete OS(100mb) and user files. 256mb ram and 500mhz single core is enough to drive a good OS without very much latency. And we only need a few functionalities (communicate and record) ... The 1000000 apps are a symptom we are confused about how computers work best. In time, we will have to figure this out, or we will have deserved to lose this tech.

Or in general, blame software bloat and the developers who push this sordid movement of inefficiency upon everyone else.

A 1.3GHz quad-core with 512MB of RAM should be plenty powerful for what people use smartphones for; it wasn't too long ago when the typical desktop PC was around that specification (albeit only a single core) --- and yet, people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat, and otherwise most of the things that smartphones would usually be used for today. At least, I could remember doing those things comfortably on a 733MHz PIII with 256MB of RAM.

Scrolling through my Twitter timeline was a stuttering, jerky mess, despite Twitter's claims to “load quickly on slower connections.”

I absolutely do not fathom how we got to the point where basic functionality like displaying some text and images seems to take far more processing power than they did years ago, and yet no one notices and tries to put a stop to it.

IMHO something is very wrong when apps that do seemingly trivial things are multiple megabytes; surely one does not need millions of bytes of code to open a browser window to a website or implement IM functionality, for example. When software came on floppies, size was measured in kilobytes and a 1MB app was huge and accordingly did quite a lot.

> people used them for watching videos, VoIP/IM/video chat,

I used a 260 MHz Win98SE for VOIP and video chat a long time ago (when Win98SE was current).

No one cares about efficiency any more.

Biased article.

The phone is really really basic and designed for light apps and light browsing and is being compared to iPhone 8.

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