The target consumer doesn't care, wasting time optimizing for space doesn't make sense in this instance .
I'm a little disappointed they didn't go purely React Native here. It would have been a great showcase as they ultimately own the React Native project.
The app's target consumer is advertisers, and the app is this way because of those advertisers and their concerns. I'm not sure the person using the app is a "consumer" from Meta's point of view, more like a "digital subscriber."
Isn't React Native more for when you lack the resources to have engineers dedicated to building platform native solutions? Meta does not have that limitation, it does not seem surprising they would not be using React Native for this.
I always figured React Native and Flutter were meant as alternative ways to develop apps. Kinda disappointing Facebook and Google don't dogfood their own frameworks too much.
React Native isn’t good for things like news feeds. Any extremely long lists where each item has a different height, it performs poorly on
However, the RN architecture does make it incredibly easy to bind to components written in native code - or use react native components from within native code
It was never Meta’s intention that something would not contain app-specific native code
People care. You just refuse to listen to what they say.
They say things like "my internet cap is reached", "my battery is drained faster", "my phone is slow" and a million other things that oblivious and clueless programmers don't hear because they can only hear when someone talks about megabytes, cpu cycles, RAM etc.
1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue that HackerNews makes it out to be.
2. Threads' main user base is Instagram. An hour of watching Instagram Reels is more data than the entire Threads app. I highly doubt Instagram users are data strapped.
> "my battery is drained faster"
App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out. If you're saying Threads is not optimized, I disagree. And again, considering the main targeted user base is Instagram and Twitter, Threads is going to be significantly better than either app in terms of battery life (little to no video options right now)
> 1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue that HackerNews makes it out to be.
Source? This seems like a really first-world country thing to say.
We really do have expensive internet in the US. Sim cards when traveling are so cheap. I think I have a 4gb plan with Verizon and it's expensive enough for me.
Jesus christ, we're talking about a 200MB app with text-based communication. The cost of living crisis is real but to pretend that people need to limit their internet usage to save money is ridiculous.
I live in Canada which has some of the worst data plans, and even on the 5GB plans I wouldn't bat an eye on using an app like Threads.
Those users already have Instagram. Threads is competing against Twitter clones.
> App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out.
Larger apps use more radio, use more CPU for decompression, use more flash writes on updates. All use battery. Decompression and writes for background updates slow the phone. The additional flash writes lead to wear causing storage to become slower even when the app is not being used or updated.
72MB isn't stopping people downloading it. If they later decide to delete, it will be because the UX is bad, or lack of content, or something like that. Nobody says "I use this every day but I need 72MB, delete" and nobody says "this app sucks but it's only 10MB, might as well keep it".
They may make a “Lite” version of the app like they did for Facebook or WhatsApp, but Twitter’s user base is much less developing world heavy, so I doubt it. This was clearly a skunkworks project, once it is established, it will get more resources including optimization specialists. Then again, Twitter, being the abode of bro-grammers, never got it and Musk had a point when he fired most of the team.
Precisely. I had a friend who downloaded an app, but it was 2kb over the limit that he prefers to have all his apps! He promptly deleted it and left a scathing review. Naturally this picked up and a few other users refused to download the app.
