I keep coming back to thinking that it's the gap between dev and "mainstream" hardware. Forget about phones for the moment (lol, Javascript performance on a $99 Android). My PC is a 6-core, 32GB of RAM beast. I suspect that most (non-PC gamers) people's machines look closer to https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/acer-aspir... . Dual core, 8GB of RAM, spinning hard drive (!) I can tell you from experienc…
Something similar happened to a designer I was working with: The guy had his Apple Retina display Super-duper whatever, which he used to design. At some point, he went to a developer screen to see how his designs were looking once implemented in code, and his first comment was "Why are the colors looking so bad?" ... Well, apparently the colors he chose looked great on his retina display but did not look that good on…
Yeah, your UI runs fast against a local copy of that API with a local ElasticSearch instance backing it with 0% load on a $3000 Macbook, now test that bitch on a $100 dollar Android running on 2G against AWS.