In 2014 I bought a ~50$ Android while traveling Latin America. I didn't expect much more of the browsing experience than reading mostly text based articles. But I didn't even get that. Literally half the linked articles I clicked on hacker news led to sites which where close to or impossible to navigate because of JS shenanigans and the assumption of an least a 4G internet connection.

It is especially annoying if one claims to target a world audience, but expects them to have a +500$ phones and vast data subscriptions.

The market fixes this, though. If your websites don't load on a low-end Android over 3G, you won't attract the sort of audience that uses that setup. Conversely, if you know what a large portion of your audience uses specs like that, you'll go through great lengths to ensure your sites are performant and usable.

It seems that most 'western' sites have decided focus on people with desktops or +500$ phones and vast data subscriptions.

So it's really a Western web and not an open web. You've proven exactly what everyone on here is saying: there's so much focus on marketing and audiences that many users get completely shafted. That's sad to see given that the web is often heralded as something that gives under privileged people access, and the ability to share, to powerful and useful information.

In your example, most of the time the "market" won't fix that though, because there's no money to be made in servicing the users with "cheap" phones.

In some places, $500 is about a half-year salary from which one has to live and feed their family. Nobody in their right mind would waste it on an electronic toy.

Indeed. I think it’s important for engineers working on any kind of end-user facing software to remember that a lot of people aren’t using cutting edge or even recent hardware. There’s lots of Core 2 Duo laptops and 3+ year old smartphones floating around in use out there and their users need to be able to use the websites and apps we make as much as the guy who buys new everything every year.

I think this is particularly easy to forget for those of us living in tech hubs where everyone is using almost-new Macbook Pros and iPhone 6Ss.

+1

I've never seen that client devs test their apps on lower end devices.