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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

#41

Post by bsimpson »

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 able to get surprisingly good animation performance on an NBU quality device as well with Houdini's Paint Worklet.

You do have to be intentional to get good animation performance on the web, but it's amazing that when you are, you can make transitions that perform better than the ones that come with the phone.

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

#42

Post by black6 »

bovermyer wrote: post #34

...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.

“The best phone is a landline, and the phone should be made out of Bakelite!”

John C. Dvorak

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

#43

Post by exikyut »

peatmoss wrote: post #10
ggg9990 wrote: post #4

This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with crap that rich people don’t have to.

I hear that, but there’s something instructive here as well for members of the HN community who write software. Namely, it’s that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the size of the Indian / developing world market, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to provide a good experience (apps or OS) on more meager hardware. I certainly don’t remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why can’t we m…

Because the problem isn't technical, it's political.

I presume the author used the Bharat 2 Q402. I dug out some specs:

- Android 6.0

- 4" 24-bit 480x800 TFT LCD (capacitative of course)

- Quad-core 1.3GHz Spreadtrum SC9832 (Cortex-A7)

- Dual-core Mali-400 MP2 (512MHz)

- 512MB RAM

- 4GB of storage

- 2MP rear camera (1600x1200 photo, 640x480 (!) 30fps video)

- 300k (haha) front camera

That's kind of all over the shop, but 4 cores at 1.3GHz, ARM notwithstanding, is fundamentally decent from a bare-metal standpoint.

512MB RAM is also not entirely terrible - I could limp (albeit badly) with ~70 tabs in Firefox (back in the memory leak days) on a machine with 512MB RAM many years ago.

So really this is entirely the Android ecosystem's fault. When I say "ecosystem" I'm obviously looking sideways at app developers, but the OS core could probably be designed a little better too.

But neither are. I strongly think this is due to precedent: nobody is penalized for making apps that perform well on non-flagship devices. Indeed, app development on Android seems to strongly mirror (to the point of there really being no dividing line) iOS development - and in the Apple camp lots of websites are only tested on Macbooks nowadays, so it seems that designers/architects are increasingly getting away with not doing the grunt work to test.

Maybe this is because of simple bubble-sheltered designer snobbishness ("that kind of work is below me"). Maybe there's a bit of "and a lid for your coffee cup will be $3" (where the coffee cup lid, representing adequate testing, was previously included for free) in the mix as well.

If only phones were a bit more standardized (think x86 ISA), we could bring the demoscene over to them. Rip Linux out, show what the hardware can _really_ do, generate some popular demand, and actually set a standard for OS vendors to meet.

Because right now the only standard is "next year's phones will have more X, so build in a way that will need so much of that the current device is really straining".

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

#44

Post by suprfnk »

bovermyer wrote: post #34

...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.

The problem is that times have changed. Back then the scenario you are describing was everyone. Right now, if you were to go 'back' to that life, you will be an outcast. People won't understand why you don't respond to their messages. If you explain them, people have to make an exception in communication just for you. That gets annoying, and you will be skipped over easier.

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

#45

Post by osrec »

bsimpson wrote: post #41
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 able to get surprisingly good animation performance on an NBU quality device as well with Houdini's Paint Worklet. You do have to be intentional to get good animation performance on the web, but it's amazing that when you are, you can make transitions that perform better than the ones that come with the phone.

Absolutely - I've seen native apps struggle to provide the same animation performance as our PWA. It is hard work though, and I've seen even the best web devs fall short on performance. We luckily hired an absolute gem of a developer that thoroughly understood JS and CSS animations. We make sure we retain her, because her work makes our PWA infinitely more usable.

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

#46

Post by megablast »

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…

Except this phone isn't for kids, this is for people where the phone may be there only device. No laptop, no desktop, no parent to organise things for them.

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

#47

Post by bovermyer »

suprfnk wrote: post #44
bovermyer wrote: post #34

...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.

The problem is that times have changed. Back then the scenario you are describing was everyone. Right now, if you were to go 'back' to that life, you will be an outcast. People won't understand why you don't respond to their messages. If you explain them, people have to make an exception in communication just for you. That gets annoying, and you will be skipped over easier.

No, the scenario back then was a group of maybe 60 people at most.

The scenario now is also a group of maybe 60 people. Those 60 people are not so high strung as to require a response immediately.

My biggest problem with "downgrading" to a landline now would be the loss of Google Maps, to be perfectly honest. I would lose none of the richness of connection that I have now.

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

#48

Post by spiritcat »

Had to buy a $79.99 Blu C5 at target last minute few weeks ago when my phone died night before I had to catch a flight. Everything is really crappy and really slow, but so far perfectly usable.

Still been using it last few weeks since I can't decide which phone to get. If it had a slightly better speaker I'd prob keep it. Guess my needs aren't that demanding in hindsight.

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

#49

Post by Ezhik »

peatmoss wrote: post #10
ggg9990 wrote: post #4

This is the tech equivalent of slum tourism. News flash: poor people deal with crap that rich people don’t have to.

I hear that, but there’s something instructive here as well for members of the HN community who write software. Namely, it’s that sometimes performance and optimization matter. Given the size of the Indian / developing world market, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to provide a good experience (apps or OS) on more meager hardware. I certainly don’t remember the first gen iPhone being painful or slow. Why can’t we m…

I think there's just a problem with software nowadays. I bought a 2005 PowerBook G4 for nostalgia's sake, and ended up finding out that even if I push the CPU of the poor thing to the max by compiling GCC and downloading stuff, it still manages to have smoother animations than my maxed out quad-core i7-powered Dell XPS 15: https://twitter.com/SilverEzhik/status/1017622599696896001

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

#50

Post by joe_the_user »

spiritcat wrote: post #48

Had to buy a $79.99 Blu C5 at target last minute few weeks ago when my phone died night before I had to catch a flight. Everything is really crappy and really slow, but so far perfectly usable. Still been using it last few weeks since I can't decide which phone to get. If it had a slightly better speaker I'd prob keep it. Guess my needs aren't that demanding in hindsight.

I used $50 alcatel phone for the last four years. It was actually pretty nice for the first three years, it wasn't even slow for many purposes (though cruising the web was annoying). That it's screen was 1/3 normal size helped - sped things up and made the phone much tougher.

The phone was killed in the last year by the gradual process of applications upgrading themselves and exceeding memory. And then the touch screen started dying.

The cheapish thing I have does more but is not more aesthetically pleasing.

See: https://medium.com/matter/shitphone-a-love-story-a44e6643480...

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