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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

> Given the fact that most people are already maxed out on apps on their device

This argument has been given a few times here. But I question whether web applications are a solution. Aren't these just more applications that people are overwhelmed with but harder to find and use?

If you've got a brilliant new app (web or mobile) I'm still fatigued either way. The mental effort is the same. Saying the mobile apps are "maxed out" seems to me to apply to web apps in just the same way.

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I think they were referring to RAM or storage space rather than human fatigue or mental effort, although I'm not a native English speaker so I may be misinterpreting.

Indeed, there are many low-end smartphones that run out of storage space after one or two years even without installing anything, just with the automatic updates of the preinstalled apps (Facebook is a major offender here, why does their app grow more and more?). Being forced to install an app to use a service when you are in this situation is highly frustrating.

What year are we in? I've got a $200 phone with 128gb storage and 4gb ram. It will be a long time before I can max this out if at all.

Not everyone buys a new phone frequently, and not everyone can or will spend $200 on a smartphone without a second thought, especially at the global scale.

Smartphones are getting better and hopefully this problem will be irrelevant in a few years, but I still know plenty of people for whom it's still very real at the moment.

Sure, I was part of a startup designing apps for emerging markets and I understand the restrictions but I think these restrictions changed somewhat for phones bought from 2018 on. I just returned from 2 weeks in India and it was common to see people in the streets with ~$200 phones

Sub $100 phones rule the streets here in Nigeria. In those cases storage is very precious and limited.

The flip side is that people who can only afford sub $100 phones are not as valuable targets to develop apps for.

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