this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Man, this whole API thing really makes me think of how much of a shithole the web is, still after all those years.
I basically have to buy a keyboardless laptop with an awkward resolution if I have to buy a smartphone, all because the software for it is less than optimized crap that mostly just spies on you for the sake of ad revenue, and then leaves garbage all over the system it barely ever cleans up. A wonderful package for a multi-core, multi-threaded CPU paired with at least 3 GB RAM (if that's even enough today) that you almost certainly can't use with any comfort to browse the web because almost no one who pays big money to their devs cares that these devs build a proper mobile version of the website - which is part of nearly every webdev interview anyway, and for what, just to make me download the app anyway? What a fucking joke, honestly.
Web on desktop is just as much of a disgrace for all the bloat.
Funny you mention the resolution because in the 90s we had 640x480 which was way smaller than what cell phones have now and we still managed to have very functional web. Yeah the fonts weren’t as pretty and pictured had jagged edges but it worked and it was great!
Exactly! Screens are so big now, they should pack so much real estate, but they just don't most of the time, and it's not even because of human eyesight limitations.
I don't understand how or why modern interfaces have less information density than in 1997 on 640x480.
Or why they are less customizable.
Someone said the use just the middle of the screen display is based on some studies of what people can actually read or take in, but I don't think I agree (hacker news isn't as limited and it works for me). But why not have 60 percent of our physical screens display off white blank space. /s
We waited for our images to load one line at a time and we were grateful, dammit!
Are you talking about the pinephone, or are you literally buying keyboardless laptops?
@doctorzeromd @sailsperson I assume any smartphone - they often have comparable specifications to laptops but few keying options that don't suck.
I was actually trying to call out basically every smartphone out there because they have to be packing multicore CPUs with at least 3 GB of RAM in order to be functional.
My current phone has 2 GB, and almost all of it is dedicated to the Android system itself, even without any shells (i.e. not MiUI or anything like that, which is basically Android OS plus something on top, eating up even more resources), and can be really painful to use at times. I seem to have won some performance back by switching to Via browser instead of the native Google Chrome, YMusic instead of the native YouTube app, and RedReader for Reddit (might kiss goodbye to that some time soon, as we all know) - the rest of the applications I use either lack a proper mobile version of the website (viewing some with the desktop option on is horrible), a lightweight alternative, or both. I also don't have the memory to download every single app for the websites I use as they keep suggesting - more importantly, I don't want to.
When I'm on PC, I use the web applications available for nearly every single thing I use - but oh no, I can't do that on mobile, I need an app, which I'd have to update frequently, wasting even more space with the piss-poor solutions they go for in the name of profits.
Damn I'm getting worked up talking software and especially the mobile world.
And half of the apps are just a basic frontend connecting to the same web app anyway. I feel you. Linux for mobile is probably still decades away from being truly usable but I can dream