I can’t think of a nice way to say this, but I wonder if this is part of the reason they both perform so poorly once you’ve loaded a lot of data into them. I get so frustrated trying to use the on-console store after only a few pages of scrolling.
For a product that is responsible for billions in revenue every year, I would expect them to have some of the best native developers working on it. Instead, they sorta wrangled web technology to sorta work. I don't understand why the performance is so bad on the PS4 of all things, given how it's a pretty decently specced machine.
They, and many other companies, should really look at the iPhone's early success - a BIG factor there was native code, meaning they could run on a single core machine for years while Android was struggling to push device specs up just to get their UI to feel performant.
And Apple's wasn't even optimal; they used objective-c which adds some overhead with every single function call (simplified: 'can I call this method on this object? Yes? Then call the method on the function call'. Only fixed with Whole Module Optimization in Swift iirc).
But it made such a huge advantage in terms of performance and battery life, Apple was easily five years ahead of any competition.
?????? Honestly I don't understand this argument - the iPhone didn't even support apps at launch, only the 2007 equivalent of today's PWAs, pinned websites.
It's absolutely atrocious; I don't think this has much to do with them using webtechnology, it's just an atrocious heap of spaghetti (and probably, guessing from the weird settings syncing and authentication, an architectural nightmare).
The ball of mud would roll faster if it were written in C++, for sure, but it would still be a ball of mud.
To be blunt it's probably more cost-effective for them to hack something like that together, then to take time to actually fix it. If you bought a ps4/5 you're effectively stuck with using that interface. I think they're moving to flutter now, but this is just how big companies work.
Not enough customers are going to not buy a PS4 because the web store is a little clunky.
It doesn’t help that game updates go onto the SD card, not the cartridge. So updates to the whole game basically make your cartridge a DRM dongle.
Wow, I'm surprised to see it used in that large of a capacity that soon. I was under the impression that it was still a somewhat-glitchy prototype (especially in any non-mobile uses), but maybe it's time to give it another look. Thanks for mentioning this.
It's already miles better than React.
Dart itself is absolutely a pleasure to work with. No Babel !
Source for Sony using Flutter
https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embe...
Node.js isn't slow, especially for this use case, but any sort of HTML-based layout definitely is.
IME, it's not the presentation, is the loading of assets into memory. Once the assets (like thumbnails, descriptions) are loaded, the display is as fast as always, but you scroll beyond what's cached and it turns back into molasses.
My personal gripe with the eShop is the horrible startup time (compare to the time it takes the settings application to open - part of this can be assigned to it being a web application indeed), lack of partial/incremental presentation, and possibly lack of prefetching. Asset loading causing bad UX is always a frontend problem.
Sure, you can write slow code in any language, but the language will limit how fast your code can ever be.
This from a Python fanboi, FWIW. I'd never try and use Python on an embedded device where performance matters, not only for UI responsiveness, but for battery life.
Some things will never JIT. Some things will JIT much later, leading to sudden CPU spikes later. And importantly, code will often deoptimize a few times, meaning that it drops back to interpreted to re-trace even if it had already optimized this code block.
And as most web "applications" are loaded only to be thrown away as you finished reading fixed text, all of those resources were burnt for nothing. This includes an application like the eShop, which has limited need for JS for anything other than lightweight asset handling.
One thing I noticed was that when attempting to switch between e.g. 'Offers', 'New' and 'Highlighted' or whatever the headings are, there's a large lag / hangup. It certainly doesn't feel like they're working on keeping it fluid and snappy. That might not be a priority, but I'm certainly put off browsing and buying when it's unpleasant to do so.
To be fair, it's worse on other consoles IME, and if I keep my browsing light, stay at the top of lists and don't get too impatient, it's okay.
So, yes, I think that using Javascript on a low spec device is probably a source of slowness.