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Comment by nsonha | Hacker News Reader

it's always bothered me that this dogma exists. Somehow web apps need to be super frugal with code size, while apps distributed on other (native) platforms never have such a problem. Somehow it's the bloated web that blocks the access for children in Affrica, but they can download bloated android apps just fine?

Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't the size of the javascript, it's how broken the entire web stack (specifically caching & PWA) is, that makes a trivial thing like code size a problem.

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If Atlassian did't use a full minute to update a certain roadmap view on my MBP from January I would be one step closer to agreeing with you even if it was still 50 MB.

But I am old enough to remember Gannt charts didn't use to take that long on old Pentium processors back in school, way before Git was invented.

Another thing is the sheer yuck of it:

If a typical web app was lots of business code, maybe. But when you look at the network tab and it feels like you are looking at the hair ball from a sink drain, lots of intertwined trackers to catch everything that passes, that is another story.

yes, the problem with the narrative is that web apps that are logic heavy are lumped together with content based sites who cannot justify their code bloat.

> while apps distributed on other (native) platforms never have such a problem

Could you give an example? I was an android app dev over 5 years ago and there was a huge push for lower app size everywhere. Google even made Android App Bundles to fight this issue specifically.

however big, you're only required download an app once. Next time there is an update that you cannot download, generally that won't block you from using the app at that point in time.

It actually depends, developer can block you from using the app until you update, either themselves or through Play Store's 'Immediate updates'.

I did say "generally"

There's always a speed/storage tradeoff. Apps should be more economic too, but you download native apps once, and web apps almost every time you open them. So indeed, caching could help, but how large would your cache have to be? Big enough to hold all 50MB downloads for every website you visit? That's an awfully large cache. So I'd say economy is more necessary for web-apps than for native/store apps.

I just checked my web usage on my work computer. The last 120k opened URLs were on 8300 unique hosts. 8300 * 50MB is not feasible.

Web sites should be frugal. If content websites, even more so if they even lack comment sections, are getting huge that's a pure "skill issue". It's not our place to speculate why what should have been a content site became a web app.

No. Native apps are not exempt from this either. Nothing justifies the bloat

are you deliberately not getting the point for some reason? How big is considered bloated in native apps, how big can a native app can get before it hurts accessibility because people cannot download it? Is it a few MB?

Web apps are soon going to be if not already matching native apps in terms of complexity yet we are still distracted from the real problem and quibble about some arbitrary and frankly pathetic code size restriction. Fix the root problem with PWA or something.

> How big is considered bloated in native apps, how big can a native app can get before it hurts accessibility because people cannot download it?

I'd say if it takes more than 50 megabytes to display a list of text, it's a problem :)

> yet we are still distracted from the real problem

Yes, I agree, "how broken the entire web stack" is the main problem. And the ungodly amounts of javascript you end up for the simplest problems is the symptom. However, neither caching nor PWA are the specific main problems in the web's brokenness :)

> the ungodly amounts of javascript you end up for the simplest problems

replace javascript with any native programming language, this has been always a problem with UI programming, but it's not THAT big of a problem because in other platforms people download the app once, instead of every time. There is a long list of problems in software engineering, but sorry to disagree with you, "the binary/script is too big" is no where near the top.

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