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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

A desktop app quickly runs to 200mb. Why do we think it is so unreasonable for a full app on the web to take even 5% of that amount?

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Because there's a LOT of people out there who have slow mobile data or poor signal strength. I think assuming that everyone everywhere has extremely fast internet is a bad assumption. Also there's an enormous amount of bloat in package sizes now, I don't think this really should be as bad as it currently is.

I agree 100%, in the use case I mentioned we were looking to either prove or disprove product hypothesis with real users fast so efficient code wasn't a priority, but rather to confirm wether what we were about to develop was valid.

If you're talking a user downloading it with mobile data, it's gonna take a while before it can setup and show anything.

I think someone else said there are other optimizations that happen when you shop production code.

You download a desktop app exactly once. You download a web app (almost) every time you navigate to the site.

This is, generally, not true for a web app with a caching service worker.

I don’t know what your caching settings are, but my users download the app exactly once, and then only again if I push any update (or their browser cache randomly decides to clear itself, don’t really have any control over that).

Aside from that, they use the app literally their entire workday, so spending 5 seconds loading the thing isn’t going to hurt anyone.

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