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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

If you shipped most software from 2024 back to 2000 it would be (correctly) labelled spyware. It also wouldn't run at all because system requirements even for simple applications have bloated beyond belief.

AI is just the latest iteration of these trends - now the vendor gets to record everything you put into their software and a text editor requires exotic new hardware so that the AI "copilot" can run and help you type every character.

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Text editors and calculators seem to load slower now than 10, and maybe even 20, years ago.

Note: my expectations may have changed over that time, but still, I think my expectations run behind Moore's Law.

Third-party calculator apps on mobile are absolutely bloated because they're just ad-delivery systems. It's parasitic behavior from developers looking to cash in on basic software we've had for decades.

There are still mobile calculators that aren’t that, such as PCalc for iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch. They also have a Mac version.

https://pcalc.com/index.html

I don't understand why android calculator app keeps requiring updates. Why? Did math change in the past 6 months?

This was also an issue with flashlight apps after phone makers began integrating flashlight feature into their phones.

Worse, they load slower now on today's hardware than they did 20 years ago on hardware from 20 years ago. There is no excuse for doing what Windows 95 did, with one hundred times the system requirements of Windows 95. I'll give them a pass up to Windows 2000 or XP, because that's when it became stable by removing all the DOS compatibility stuff.

> Microsoft's minimum requirements for Windows XP are a 233 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, 1.5 GB of available hard drive space, and an SVGA-capable video card

Is it any wonder, when most modern text editors are a giant ball of javascript running in a giant browser? Seems like hardly anyone is making desktop applications anymore, everything is webapps in browsers masquerading as desktop apps.

There are clear benefits to building web apps vs native apps. You only have to write a single web app and it runs virtually everywhere. Also, there is a huge pool of talent that corporations can tap into, people who know web development. It's a less specialized skill.

What I really wish existed is a kind of web browser with a greatly limited feature set, so many web apps wouldn't need to be so bloated.

There are benefits to native apps too. Being able to work offline and not having your every action and input spied on in real time is a big one. It's all a question of trade offs. Users who prefer privacy, lower-resource consumption, offline use and more familiar/native interfaces will probably not want a web app. Users who don't care about their privacy and want a program avilable to them anywhere and anytime they have an internet connection might want a web app.

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