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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

#121

Post by herbst »

agumonkey wrote: post #118
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.

that's right, you can find great xiaomi phones at around 100$. I'm having no trouble with a moto g3 and these are way better in all specs. 2nd hand they're probably around the 70$ mark in india too.

I have a oppo a-something I acquired in Malaysia nearly 2 years ago when my phone broke down. Even thought it was like $120 I still use it and have zero issues except outdated software which I can live with.

In fact I never had a smartphone this sturdy.

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

#122

Post by dang »

vedanthbekal wrote: post #114

This author Pranav Dixit is an idiot. He is one of those typical Indians who live in India but they think they live Bay Area. And they super proud of owning an iPhone even though have nothing else to speak of. Notice how many times he wants to speak so highly of iPhone. This article is biased because the phone is not made for outlook app or games or any of that. The phone is a really really entry phone for calling li…

Please read and follow the site guidelines when commenting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

#123

Post by bm1362 »

toredash wrote: post #65
bm1362 wrote: post #37

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…

How do you this testing? Any public service?

We have a lab environment with multiple phones plugged into a single controller. The controller runs a set of Jenkins agents which advertises the different devices as targets for Jenkins jobs.

Plus, lots of tweaking and perf related fixes to the phone. If you're looking for an off-the-shelf solution, check out Headspin or the Google Cloud offerings.

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

#124

Post by code_duck »

hedora wrote: post #119
code_duck wrote: post #6

I did an experiment similar to this a few years back, but I lasted about six months. After touchscreen on my iPhone 6 Plus died prematurely two days after the warranty expired, and neither Apple nor Verizon would help, I decided to simply forgo owning a smartphone for a while. I used one on WiFi only, and went back to an LCD flip phone from 2002. This worked great, except people kept complaining that they couldn’t te…

> Out of the box, though, the system couldn’t keep up with typing. Until the most recent iOS update, my 6+ couldn’t reliably keep up with typing on iOS 11, fwiw.

Right, I think it’s a matter of running an OS made for a new machines on an old machine. It was also a matter of switching off superfluous graphics features. This phone had android 4.4 new and got upgraded to 5.1, and worked better with 5.1.

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

#125

Post by bgorman »

A common problem with low end devices is specs that make no sense. Why does this device have a quad core processor? I bet this phone would perform much better if they used a slower processor but doubled the memory. It's crazy that Android is so bloated that 1 gig of storage isn't enough.

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

#126

Post by toredash »

bm1362 wrote: post #123
toredash wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you this testing? Any public service?

We have a lab environment with multiple phones plugged into a single controller. The controller runs a set of Jenkins agents which advertises the different devices as targets for Jenkins jobs. Plus, lots of tweaking and perf related fixes to the phone. If you're looking for an off-the-shelf solution, check out Headspin or the Google Cloud offerings.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into headspin. I'm not into mobile performance or testing so not sure how I would automate and log the performance on different devices. Honestly I'm not sure what tools I would use on the device to run the tests.

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

#127

Post by bm1362 »

toredash wrote: post #126
bm1362 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lab environment with multiple phones plugged into a single controller. The controller runs a set of Jenkins agents which advertises the different devices as targets for Jenkins jobs. Plus, lots of tweaking and perf related fixes to the phone. If you're looking for an off-the-shelf solution, check out Headspin or the Google Cloud offerings.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into headspin. I'm not into mobile performance or testing so not sure how I would automate and log the performance on different devices. Honestly I'm not sure what tools I would use on the device to run the tests.

We are trying to build something similar to CT-scan; except it’s a 1-man team so it’s been a longer journey:

https://code.fb.com/developer-tools/mobile-performance-tooli...

We run functional UI tests with a performance tracer wired up- we already had them setup by feature teams so it was easy to get started. Instead of a Zookeeper scheduler, it’s just Jenkins.

Right now we’ve been able to catch 2-3% relative regressions in things like startup, opening a Google Maps view etc which is pretty good. It was easy to setup and then hard to optimize the variance down so we could get a strong signal.

We’re hiring if any of this is interesting, it’s Golang/San Francisco/Full-Time.

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

#128

Post by imtringued »

hedora wrote: post #120
paradite wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. The article used inaccurate term in the title. Later in the article they mentioned it's the "best selling phone for sub $75 brands".

Got it. I was wondering how the most popular phone was $75, but the mean selling price was $157, and owning a lowest-end $269 iPhone was unheard of.

At $100+ you're in a completely different league. At that point you can get 32GB storage, 2GB ram, decent screen albeit with 720p.

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

#129

Post by smolder »

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…

Many software developers like to claim that any focus on performance is "premature optimization" and never bother to test on low end or to optimize.

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

#130

Post by xkcdefgh »

It's misleading to call it one of the bestselling phones in India. This article is the first time I even heard about this phone.

It's just a bit below the price of the cheapest xiaomi, which is miles better, and can arguably be used as a less shiny i-phone replacement

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