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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an incredibly low bar to hurdle. FB Messenger on iOS is legendarily bloated. In the couple of weeks I had it installed it also managed to be the biggest battery drain on my phone, even more than some 3D games.

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Is this incompetence or aggressive data mining? I fail to see how a texting client is that complicated...

Consider two competing apps. One looks 5% nicer but uses 1000% more memory, cpu and battery. That one will be preferred by users. And this is why things are how they are.

Looking pretty is hardly that expensive.

If you know exactly how you want your app to look forever, sure. But you don't. So you want a flexible app that can easily be redesigned. And that means prioritizing developer comfort very high. Which means bloated frameworks.

Have you seen how much memory and CPU time Signal uses on the Desktop? Or Slack? The era of running a chat app for almost no resources is gone unless you're an IRC holdout.

> Have you seen how much memory and CPU time Signal uses on the Desktop? Or Slack?

Aren't those using Electron?

I think that's the point.

Right, but if Messenger is not using Electron why is this related?

All of those are chat apps.

And bloated. And using web technology. Wonder whether those are related.

Or Telegram.

i use telegram web and it is awesome. Messenger web just sucks, i don't why actually, maybe it is because of the design. I have not checked the others (signal, wechat).

tl;dr web clients are probably more performant than their electron counterpart

I mentioned Telegram because the desktop version does not use electron. It's a QT application and is small and fast.

It doesn't look like, though. I refused to use the desktop Telegram for long because it looked like just another Electron app, until one day a friend enlightened me that it's actually a lean(er) QT app.

I think they went through a period (or still are, I honestly moved over to messenger lite a couple months into it) where they were seemingly intent on making messenger the WeChat of the west. It got real chunky real quick. It was around the same time everyone was excited about conversational ui and Microsoft announced their bot framework.

It may have been slow and bulky before that, but that's when I started to notice.

They were trying to make it the WeChat of the non china east and africa, not the west. And they've been pretty successful at that, "messenger" is almost synonymous with "Internet" in some parts.

definitely. Facebook is the internet in my home country. But still lots of Messenger features were not used. So still bloated. Not that anybody complained or moved away from it.

I wasn't aware, but honestly quite happy they succeeded. A lot of the extra features they were adding seemed pretty out of place for my local market, but they definitely put a lot into it.

Those things literally put up some text and an occasional gif and a scrollbar.

It's unreal, our industry has lost its mind.

Low bar or not, they had to rewrite the entire app to get those gains. I think it's still technically impressive.

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