Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Apple could use their walled garden to tax developers based on the amount of resources their app uses. You need $100 to put your App in the store; you need to pay $1000 to use more than 10% of CPU performance; you need to pay $10000 to have an app bundle more than 10MB; and so on -- charging ridiculous amounts for access to high-performance battery-draining features. For dealing with app developers with deep pockets like Google -- you could charge the developer something egregious like $10 per install. At some point the screws are tight enough that you just build your app to behave better.

It would be absolutely dastardly -- but could actually have the effect of forcing app developers to care about performance :) They won't care unless they have to. Web developers have to care about performance because of SEO (and click metrics...) but it only goes so far because it's not forced.

I disagree completely with the walled garden model of iOS (and the direction of macOS) but, if it nonetheless exists, I'd like to see them do something hardcore like this. The performance and battery gains would be out of this world.

For productivity apps I could see this working, but this would be the death of e.g. phone games, VR experiences etc.

Some things just take a lot of power to compute.

The issue I see is that it's kind of hard to measure whether the app needs this much CPU or if it's a bad design.

Aligning these incentives is obviously necessary. But it's not such an easy problem.

You'd have to start categorizing apps by how fast they should be (e.g. calendars should start in < 0.5 seconds and use at most 3% CPU on average). Then you may be able to align incentives this way. However then the problem becomes categorizing your apps and having useful categories for everything. Then maybe somebody has an idea for an AI calendar that needs more CPU, but is a lot more useful, because it can predict a host of events. Now they can't upload that to the app store.

I wonder if Apple could reduce the regulatory pressure on them by charging App Store fees as a function of bandwidth usage that Apple must use to serve the app. This would incentivize developers to keep their app bundles small ;)

Search engines should punish slow/big/bloated websites or promote light ones. Is google doing something for that? It is so annoying to spend time on web nowadays. I find myself skipping search results when website looks bloated to me. So it is like ‘search something, quickly look at results, try to click on most accurate and lightweight looking link, if website is actually bloated click back without waiting it to be fully loaded and try again on another link.’

Google definitely uses pagespeed as a major factor. They may also with AMP although that may be changing. They could do more though.

Yeah because you will be the one deciding what's normal for a given piece of software... If someone implements that bs policy it surely would be apple.

Why would Apple want this? Slow stuff makes you upgrade to the new thing.

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