Maybe they weren't covered for a reason?
The ability to have your web team churn out lowest common denominator bloated JS based mobile/desktop apps was not a real requirement, more like a wish of some.
Now businesses do that just because they can.
Cheapest to produce AND worst quality. In this case by bad performance and unneeded cellphone battery drain.
These products will be dominated by superior options eventually.
Would love that to happen, but all the other market sectors suggest otherwise. "Cheapest to produce and worst quality" seems to be all that's available to majority of the population.
- we haven't figured out how to make companies care about "delivering value" part of the "delivering value in exchange for money" work, and
- we allow them to dump externalities on users without consequences or compensation.
So the most cost-effective solution in this scheme will be a half-assed product that's barely good enough to be sellable, and which makes my computer use more electricity while being less capable of running software simultaneously.
I don't feel like this is a valid justification for being wasteful, though.
(Personally, I didn't even realize OnePlus phones still exist - I thought they died out somewhere around OnePlus 3.)
I do think though that we will only be seeing more and more of this, and very soon.
Come on, the requirement has always been there. It is "Shit out that underbudgeted project in half the promised time". Those small frameworks where you can hire a cheap front-end guy and have him manage the entire project alone or in a small team are perfect to fill that niche.
There is a better solution. It's called native app development, without a hyphen of any sorts in front of "native". Different platforms have different quirks and there is no way to have the exact same UI/UX on all platforms.
The true challenge is to explain the executives, that hiring 2 developers will be much better in the long run, than 1 underpaid JS developer for all platforms.
Speaking from personal experience, I have found it vastly more productive to focus on the good than the bad. Yes, even in situations where the other person is literally [1] too dumb to put their underwear on correctly without assistance.
I don’t know how or why it works to do that, but it does, and the improvement from doing so is immense.
[1] Alzheimer’s.
It's hard to think of it as an improvement
The idiocy is in the hundreds of engineering hours spent to build half baked solutions that never work as expected and never will
It's developers not wanting to adapt, while if they spent half of that effort on red or even visual basic 6 we would have end up with something better
Diversity is king, web everywhere for everything will impoverish the entire developer's community
I’m not really that into the idea of JS-as-a-platform, but it obviously emerged because it fulfilled certain requirements that weren’t covered elsewhere.
The “way back” from this is for people like yourself to stop dismissing others’ work as “idiocy” and start building better solutions to these problems as you see them.