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Comment by a2128 | Hacker News Reader

I may be way off-base here but this is what I imagine the problem is:

1. Company executive decides their developers need top-of-the-line hardware to remain competitive in today's market

2. Developers make web apps on their company-provided M5 Ultra Pro Max 128GB RAM powerhouse laptop

3. They never test it on their father's old 2010 family PC, or at least they don't test often/thoroughly enough to realize many parts are broken or unusable

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Also, network connections. Someone running the app off a Wifi 7 backed by symmetric gigabit fiber Internet at the office is going to have a difference experience than someone running the app at an apartment complex with a shitty wifi router on top of a shitty consumer Internet connection.

This is easily fixable.

I develop using Dev Tools set to mobile and throttled connection. This way mobile-first responsiveness (limited screen-estate) and potential problems with bad connections are first class citizens.

Now, what usually happens is that I signal problems to the product owner and they wave them away. So I might update your third point that sometimes they do test it on their father's old 2010 family PC but it's not of concern to more relevant stakeholders.

So this is part of my current job: testing things on older hardware or less powerful hardware plus older but still used browsers, especially on mobile.

You're not off base. The article was about imagined problems.

Related point, do google android engineers dogfood android phones to themselves? I guess most of them would be Apple users.

Not a Google engineer, but I do keep around a device that represents “potato” specs that I test against when doing Android development. Not a perfect solution since there’s a bevy of old/low end SoCs with varying performance characteristics, but I figure it’s better than what many are undoubtedly doing which is testing against their newish flagship and calling it a day.

I used to do the same on iOS, but came to find that performance differences on older devices there generally weren’t nearly as severe and that iOS users as a whole tend to use newer devices. When combined with reasonably well written Swift, performance on old devices generally isn’t a problem.

Android encompasses $80 burner phones to what... like $2K flagships? It's a big target.

Isn't that the point? Make a system usable on low-spec devices.

A decent number do.

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