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Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

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Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#31

Post by bigdaddyrabbit »

ranji2612 wrote: post #18

This is probably an extreme example to use Bharat 2(which most considers a failed project) and using light apps on top of that. Choosing a budget phone does not mean choosing the cheapest one. Honestly i don't know anyone who uses the phone they mentioned, more phones from Honor or Xiaomi or Moto etc are more common. Its hard for me to have exact data on this, so this is just based on my experience.

It was a best selling phone in India last year. People are using it, just not people in your social circle.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#32

Post by asdsa5325 »

dizzystar wrote: post #11
nsenifty wrote: post #9

The chief complaint seems to be the lack of internal storage, but the phone has an SD slot that supports cards up to 32GB while his shiny iPhone 8 has exactly 0 GB expandable storage.

Except that's not how it works in the Android world. You have internal storage that needs to be freed up to hold apps. When that memory runs out, that's it. The SD card isn't for holding apps. We used to root Android for this reason. We needed to free up silly apps no one uses and we had to have the ability to aggressively clear out the system.

This is absolutely incorrect.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#33

Post by stefan_ »

osrec wrote: post #21

We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA ( https://usebx.com/app ), so we tried to optimise for low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy Note or iPhone. Jus…

That site literally has a loading popup and constantly changing fonts and UI. Whatever you're doing, its not working.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#34

Post by bovermyer »

...and here my age shows.

I remember a time when I used a physical landline phone as my only phone. I didn't care if I missed a call, because the people that I wanted to talk to either would see me at school the next day or would show up at my house if it was important. Texting was nonexistent.

Or, to put it another way - eh, life goes on if you can't do a thing.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#35

Post by amorphid »

lostlogin wrote: post #12
amorphid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through that process. After I stopped buy good phones subsidized by the phone company & started paying full retail phones upfront, I became less interested in having a top of the line phone. I just don't wanna fork out $900 for any phone. I bought two versions of a sub-$100 phone, they both sucked and/or were defective in some way. I bought a $240, and it was OK, but I was constantly fishing for an excuse to g…

By my maths that was $840 minimum, versus $900 iphone. As is often the case, it seems that things cost a little often, or a lot but less often.

You're not wrong. I returned the two sub-$100 phones for a full refund. I had rooted the $240 phone, which broke it's ability to (easily) get system updates. I sold it on eBay for maybe half what I paid for it. So my downside wasn't as bad as it could have been. I decided I'd be content pay the price for learning how to shop for a phone I wanted. I'm also saving on every $400-not-$900 I buy in the future.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#36

Post by jpatokal »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #27

I think his expectations are just out of balance. The phone he describes sounds a lot like the phone I gave my kids. I just want them to have a phone that they can use in case of emergencies. That's basically what my baby boomer parents need as well. So he's right, phones at that price point are limited, but that doesn't mean they don't fulfill the needs of portions of the population - just different demographics tha…

If you really need just calls, dumbphones are still a thing, and I see plenty for sale here in provincial China (/me waves from Xining). The article's point is that cheap smartphones aren't working well for their intended users because the vast majority of apps aren't designed for their limitations.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#37

Post by bm1362 »

I work in mobile performance and have built out an automated testing workflow for our CI system to try and prevent big breaking changes to these types of phones.

The issue with testing these phones is the device introduces lots of variance due to the low hardware standards. We typically test for relative changes in key metrics and want to move to testing different types of phones for usability. This is generally hard because the noise makes the test inconclusive.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#38

Post by osrec »

untog wrote: post #29
osrec wrote: post #21

We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA ( https://usebx.com/app ), so we tried to optimise for low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy Note or iPhone. Jus…

I've been surprised by how performant you can get with CSS transitions and a will-change property. But good grief is it difficult . On one hand I understand why a transition on `left` isn't hardware accelerated but a `translate3d` is, but on the other it seems crazy that we expect people to think and know this kind of stuff when they just want to do something very simple.

I agree with you. Performant animations with JavaScript are generally painful. CSS helps, but can be limited. It can also be a bit fiddly, especially when you want to chain animations together. Perhaps the web animations API will solve this as it matures.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#39

Post by osrec »

stefan_ wrote: post #33
osrec wrote: post #21

We have a lot of Indian users use our PWA ( https://usebx.com/app ), so we tried to optimise for low end phones. Generally, we found that animations still run reasonably smoothly. The trick was to be really careful not to carry out too much layout thrashing, and use GPU accelerated CSS animations wherever possible. On some of the cheapest devices, we got our animation running as smooth as a Galaxy Note or iPhone. Jus…

That site literally has a loading popup and constantly changing fonts and UI. Whatever you're doing, its not working.

Hmm, I know the initial load is a bit slow, but once that's done, it should be fairly performant. The slow load is caused by our in-browser PDF rendering library. We are due to make it a "lazy load" in the upcoming release, so things should be significantly faster.

Re: Living with a best-selling Indian phone for 10 days

#40

Post by AzzieElbab »

kumarm wrote: post #2

iPhone User with a $900 phone switches to a $60 phone and frustrated that it doesn't perform as well a $900 phone while trying to use it like a Premium phone? I am surprised :).

Oh please. Most of those apps worked 5 years ago on phones that matched reviewed tech
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