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.
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.