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Comment by lazerwalker | Hacker News Reader

I agree the loss of control is unacceptable. I agree that only being able to get commercial apps like this that monetize through advertisements and selling opaquely-gathered tracking data is unacceptable.

But I'm curious how much download weight matters, outside of as a proxy for "how much bloated ad bullshit is hiding inside the app bundle"?

I'd wager the difference between a 2KB PWA and a 5MB or 30MB native app download is relatively insignificant — in storage space, in cellular data use, in initial download time — to your average user when compared to streaming a film on Netflix or downloading a F2P game with 100MBs to GBs of assets.

(where "average user" is assuming most of these apps are only localized in English and only available in largely-western countries — totally get how the story is very different in emerging markets)

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In case of apps I imagine something like this:

2kB will feel instant. 5MB will feel mostly quick. 30MB will feel like it had to earn it.

When things are instant then it feels like magic. It's sad that having all those super fast machines everywhere we have to deal with so much bullshit. Your computer can push through gigabytes of memory on a second. Does it feel this way? That's why people still use CLI, at least there, many things feel instant and when not it's usually reasonable.

It's not only download speed, it's also verification time, compilation/optimization and whatever else happens during install. All of those will take longer the bigger the app is.

Similarly the problem with JavaScript on sites currently is not only download time and request count bloat. It's significant by itself, but it just takes time to even parse all this code and I did not start on execution.

But at the same time for me the proxy effect of "how much bloat and bullshit did they cram into it" is as important and can't be dismissed.

> 2kB will feel instant. 5MB will feel mostly quick. 30MB will feel like it had to earn it.

And that's just one usage, by one user. Multitply by thousands of usages and billions of users. It's inexcusable from a craftsmanship viewpoint.

I think it's worth distinguishing install time from subsequent launch time. You seem to be describing the time it takes to go from seeing the app to using it for the first time. For an app you use regularly (or even just more than a few times ever), how long it takes an already-installed app to open from cold start seems like a much more important metric.

While bundle size might sometimes correlate with cold start times for PWAs (depending on whether it's JS code that's bloating the bundle, or other media assets that won't trigger an initial parsing + evaluation hit), that's less likely to be the case with native apps.

I'm not sure of that. Plenty of my friends and family in the UK are using phones that are a few years old and only come with 8gb or 16gb of storage, such that they are regularly running out of storage space.

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