• ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    The hp printer app says it needs your location to connect to WiFi. It says it needs your location all the time when not using the app, again to connect to WiFi

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    Because companies give zero fucks. They will tell you they need tons of IT people, when in reality they want tons of underpaid programmers. They want stuff as fast and cheap as possible. What doesn’t cause immediate trouble is usually good enough. What can be patched up somehow is kept running, even when it only leads you further up the cliff you will fall off eventually.

    Management is sometimes completely clueless. They rather hire twice as many people to keep some poorly developed app running, than to invest in a new, better developed app, that requires less maintenance and provides a better user experience. Zero risk tolerance and zero foresight.

    It still generates money, you keep it running. Any means are fine.

  • enemenemu@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 month ago

    Paypal has 500 mb and just shows a number and you can press a button to send a number to their server.

    It’s insane

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Check out the apps Hermit and Native Alpha. They make web pages run like an app. I’ve only run into a couple sites where they don’t work right.

      • enemenemu@lemm.ee
        0·
        1 month ago

        Native alpha sounds good since it’s foss and uses vanadium’s webview. Are you still logged in to paypal (any annoying website) a couple of months later. Or does it revoke your rights after a while?

        I only use it rarely and I hate providing my info for 5 minutes just to do one transaction.

      • kratoz29@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        LMAO, he also made me check it.

        347 MB for me, no wonder why I am always struggling with storage for my 128 GB phone (with not expandable storage of course), and I don’t even have that many games, even less ROMs 😅

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      With that in mind, I LOVE how lean and fast some FOSS apps/projects are. One of my motivations to go searching for FOSS alternatives is when something seems slow for no reason.

      It’s not always the case, but it’s often the case

      • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
        0·
        1 month ago

        KDE Plasma has been getting so much more efficient with every release that you can almost recommend it for low-end systems.

          • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
            0·
            1 month ago

            lol my laptop is from 2011, i run gnome and kde easily. windows usually needs a round of debloating every update to be usable.

  • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 month ago

    It’s like Moore’s law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.

    When I was young, we’d get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.

    • Huschke@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 month ago

      Games is the one example that actually makes sense though. The game code size hasn’t really increased tremendously, but the uncompressed assets have only gotten more detailed and more numerous.

    • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      At least games make sense, as the graphics get better. Though in some cases, the compression is also better. Like PS5 games are smaller on average than their PS4 versions, even though they have higher resolution textures in most cases, just because the PS5 has better compression/decompression tech.

      • Flatfire@lemmy.ca
        0·
        1 month ago

        Better than that, the lack of reliance on spinning disks means that asset duplication and data read order is less of a requirement to reduce load times. It can still be argued that there’s just too many polygons, since simply scaling things back would be plenty effective in reducing storage usage and load times.

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        God, I hate Corsair. Not only do you need to download their garbage software to fucking turn off the RGB on a headset, you have to have it running or the RGB will turn on again!

          • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            Thanks for sharing that. My device isn’t listed, but I’d be surprised if Corsair changed how their shit works that much between devices. I’ll give it a try (it supposedly even works on Linux <3)

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      1 month ago

      And analytics. And offloading as much computation to the client, because servers are expensive and inefficiency is not an issue if your users are the ones paying for it.

      • kbotc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I saw an ad request with an inline 1.4 MB game. Like, you could fit Mario in there.

        • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          1 month ago

          The Samsung shop hands out 1.4mb JSON responses for order tracking, with what I estimate 99% redundant information that is repeated many times in different parts of the structure.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
      0·
      1 month ago

      Web “Apps” are also quite bad. Lots of and lots of stuff we’re downloading and it feels clunky.

      Sometimes that’s bad coding, poor optimization, third party libraries, or sometimes just including trackers on the page.

  • kamen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I’d argue that deploying from one codebase to 3+ different platforms is new functionality, although not for the end user per se.

    I wish though that more of the web apps would come as no batteries included (by default or at least as a selectable option), i.e. use whatever webview is available on the system instead of shipping another one regardless of if you want it or not.

    • Harlehatschi@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 month ago

      But if your tool chain is worth anything the size of each binary shouldn’t be bigger. To oversimplify things a bit: it’s just #ifdefs and a proper tool chain.

      In the web development world on the other hand everything was always awful. Every nodejs package has half the world as dependencies…

    • August27th@lemmy.ca
      0·
      1 month ago

      Nailed it. Things have changed to allow cheaper (interpretable in several ways) developers to create “good enough” software as quickly as possible. If that involves inefficient frameworks, technology, and practices that unlock this, then so be it; if the “best” code is the code that makes money, and money is what corporations prioritize above all else, and there is a way to do that quicker and cheaper, the outcome is obvious and now ubiquitous. Furthermore, if nobody at the top cares, why should anyone on the ground care? The problem compounds.

      Priorities are fucked.

      • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        inefficient frameworks

        I’d like to object to that. Frameworks are often built by dedicated and paid developers, so they tend to be above average in terms of efficiency. But being frameworks, they have to facilitate lots of use cases, so they also tend to be bigger than what you would write if you had 6 months to roll your own. And 36 more months to kill all the worms that got out of the can, to mangle a proverb.

      • bizarroland@fedia.io
        0·
        1 month ago

        If it runs “fast enough” on a completely clean system that would cost the average user $1500, then companies assume that that means that it is a good product.

        If you want better software, you have to give developers worse hardware to develop on, and more time to develop.

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          0·
          1 month ago

          If you want better software, you have to give developers worse hardware to develop on, and more time to develop.

          Shhh. There could be application development managers listening… (I’m joking… Mostly.)

        • JordanZ@lemmy.world
          0·
          1 month ago

          If it runs slow on my laptop then there isn’t a chance it will run at all pushed to the cloud. Our cloud servers are…not great. Single core 1.75gb boxes compared to my 16 core, 32gb laptop. We can do a lot with them though. Just takes a decent amount of tinkering. In some ways the cloud was the best thing for performant code.

    • TBi@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 month ago

      I wouldn’t say skill issue, more of time issue. You only get a week to implement something. Quicker to use existing libraries than try to optimise yourself.

      • Hawke@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 month ago

        It’s both, and they are in a sense the same.

        Cheaper less skilled or less experienced programmers take longer to get similar results. One week with a a skilled programmer is a lot more value than one week with an unskilled programmer.

        Even more if you want to invest some of that experienced programmer time to get the new guy up to speed.

  • count_dongulus@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Yep. Apps are 20x bigger with no new features…that you are using.

      Let’s not forget that the graphics for applications has scaled with display resolution, and people generally demand a smooth modern look for their apps.

    • zenpocalypse@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Yeah, though the joke is funny, this is the real answer.

      Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.

      • UnityDevice@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Storage is cheap on a PC, it’s not cheap on mobile where it’s fixed and used as a model differentiator. They overcharge you so much. Oh, and they removed SD card slots from nearly all phones.

      • Tanoh@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 month ago

        Also the storage is the cost for the user, and google in the case of play store. So the developers have no incentive to reduce the size.

  • Gxost@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    It’s all because of Electron, unnecessary libraries, and just bad coders. Asus Armoury Crate weighs a lot and is so slow, but it’s basically a simple app. Total Commander has much more features, but it’s fast, lightweight, and consumes 9 MB of RAM.

    • SirQuack@feddit.nl
      0·
      1 month ago

      I’ve said this on reddit before, but once for a joke I tried to make a windows program to play doot.wav during October at random, and tried programming it on Linux.

      Sinds playing audio and working with the system tray was tricky, I ended up with electron.

      So yeah, an atrocious 120 mb application to play a 6kb wav file with a Math.random(). I don’t remember the memory consumption, but it was probably just as gross.

      • Gxost@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 month ago

        Once I wrote an annoying program adding acceleration to the mouse cursor, so it was difficult to click any UI item. It was written in Object Pascal with Win API and weighted 16 KB. And I think in C it would be even smaller.