Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

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> Not brilliant, but hey, it’s a cheap Android tablet, what can you expect?

People on cheap Android tablets deserve the same experience as anyone else. You aren't rendering 3d graphics, you're displaying a few hundred characters of text.

There are hundreds of millions of users around the world with low-end Android devices. There are people in the world who are not rich white tech people living in suburbia, believe it or not.

> Are native apps dead? Not yet… but they’re going to be.

You don't have a crystal ball. What happens to all the legacy Java, Kotlin, Objective-C, and Swift code? That all just gets rewritten in JavaScript overnight? Right.

> You see as humans we’re comfortable with 60fps of animation performance. We don’t need 70fps

Bullshit. This person has never used a 144hz monitor. I'm never buying another 60hz display.

> Our reaction time is ~200ms, we don’t need 100ms

Our reaction time may be about this, but we perceive times much shorter in duration, which will matter if the tablet has a high refresh rate display like many of the iPads.

To be somewhat fair to the author, if the device's own setting app is slow and janky, you can't expect better from an application you download.

There are tablets out there, no name brands but also Lenovo branded ones, that are a complete waste of natural resources. I've had the displeasure of using a few of them in store demos and they couldn't even get video to play back at a consistent rate.

You're lucky to get an app working at all on that crapware, let alone at a smooth 60fps.

Strangely enough, I've had smoother experiences with some Chrome web apps on an old Android tablet than the native device UI is capable of providing. This thing was mid-range and outdated when I bought it years ago and it still runs Android 7 through LineageOS relatively well, but nobody is going to make that thing have a smooth experience. I'm hoping for the powervr video driver to be ported to postmarketOS so I can flash a lightweight Linux distro on there.

Sometimes, though, when the wind is just right and the stars align, Chrome is doing a smooth 60fps animation on that thing and I honestly can't figure out how they've manage to do it. It's impressive to see what modern web browsers are capable of squeezing out of slow hardware.

Total agree on all your other points. I don't think this stuff matters for this specific developer because of the nature of the application, but it's not great general advice.

> not rich white tech people living in suburbia, believe it or not.

Could really do without the racism. Tens of millions of non-white people have good phones.

It’s also a case of knowing your audience. If your app isn’t targeted towards Bangladesh, why optimize for those users? ForeFlight for example is native, iOS only. Should they release a version optimized for cheap Android devices? Of course not. People that can’t afford good hardware aren’t flying airplanes. Something like What’s App however, the audience is far more broad, so optimizing around the most users makes sense.

A non-native version of ForeFlight to me is a scary thought. Considering that it’s such a critical application being used by aviators in-flight.

In terms of the 60 fps, he’s referring to apps on mobile devices, not your FPS game running on a PC. I think you’re being a little hard on the author.

GP is being a little hard on the author but high framerate applies as much to apps on mobile devices as it does an FPS game on a PC, particularly if you have touch based interaction. Even just simple scrolling will feel janky if you're only hitting 60 FPS on a high refresh rate mobile device.

Have you used an iPad with ProMotion and one without? Seriously try it, you can’t tell me that there’s no perceivable difference between the two when scrolling through something or writing with a pen.

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