141–150 of 402 posts
Telegram has its own faults and issues, but the native Windows app is incredibly good and fast.
As the person who designed and fought for this app, I am a bit sad about the change. The native app was by no means perfect, but it felt like a real productivity tool that was trying to be respectful of it's environment. I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost. If you want to launch new features and exp…
Calling it nonlinear paints some horrible exponential picture. It's just squared (all to all communication). We deal with squared problems all the time (that's literally what distributed consensus is all about.....)
Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you c…
And from a manager's point of view it seems wasteful to develop the same feature across multiple platforms. And if you look at the numbers it does, but numbers-driven development has been a huge issue for a long time now. They don't consider performance or memory usage a factor, and perceived performance is "good enough" for a web app.
Well, the reason for the replacement seems pretty obvious: they're shipping new features on the web that aren't matched by the native client, and apparently that was just too hard to update for a multibillion AI-powered behemoth. So, a wrapper it is! You may not like that from a 'native look and feel' point of view, but the question 'what is a native Windows app these days anyway' is very much unanswerable, and you c…
When a developer/company decides to not implement things local and proper way and push it out and be done with it regardless of the resources the product use on the users' system, I mark the company as lazy and cheap, actually.
Shoving the complexity and cost to users' is being inconsiderate.
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Yeah, why not something else? There are a lot of better alternatives. Matrix (Element) although does the search functionality work yet? It sucked ass. I wonder if it works now. Even Telegram is better, then there is Signal, Briar, and XMPP, too. They are fully featured ones. If you are fine with text only, then Ricochet Refresh is the best candidate as far as privacy goes.
Most parents I know dont even allow their children WhatsApp (as you said there are safer alternatives like Signal without weird social network functions you can barely control) so why would parents use it? For me this just sounds nonsensical. I am sure it makes sense somewhere in the world
I do not think I would be able to get my kid off the grid completely so might as well use a better alternative, and in many cases you simply just can't because you have to submit your homework through Facebook, and so forth. Thankfully it has settled down a bit post-COVID but there may still be cases of this crap. I loathe it.
In any case, a privacy-oriented alternative is better than the cancerous Meta. If you want no IMs at all, well, that may be tough. Kids find a way, trust me. I know I did. :D
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Your reasoning seems counter intuitive as back in 2012 Facebook rewrote their HTML5 based app to native iOS code, optimized for performance, and knowingly took the feature parity hit. https://engineering.fb.com/2014/10/31/ios/making-news-feed-n...
Mobile is where the users are. Desktop users are vanishing before our eyes as a market segment.
But to edit large document, visualize any large corpus with side by side comparison, unless we plug our mobile on a large screen, a keyboard and some arrow pointer handler, there is no real sane equivalent to work with on mobile.
I do want to point out, as someone who uses the WhatsApp app (to me, it’s slightly more convenient than the web version) that the old native windows app was /awful/. It looked native enough, but it just didn’t work. For as long as I remember it would randomly stop accepting input into the text field and I’d have to restart the app, and this was insanely frequent. Typing dead keys was also randomly broken with accents…
Have you tried telegram desktop to compare? I don't use whatsapp, but I have never had a performance problem with telegram desktop and I've been using it for years on underpowered machines. I usually run some variant of Debian on them.
If companies needed to pay ressource usage of their apps, the digital world would look nothing like today
When I buy a refrigerator, if a model has insane power consumption that makes me think about my electric bill, I’d be less inclined to buy it. The refrigerator manufacturer is going to sell less. So in a way, you can say that they’re definitely paying for those wasted resources. For software companies it’s the same, in a way. They pay whatever the consumers deem appropriate. It’s just that consumers don’t really care…
Have you checked RAM prices this week?
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Windows doesn't even feel like a native Windows app anymore.
This is because many of the "native" windows components like the start menu are written in react native.