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A comment on The End Is Near for Mobile Apps?. Parent comment

Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by skohan on Monday November 05, 2018 @07:29AM (#18381767)
Performance is a detail which is often lost from the mobile/web discussion. Yes there are many reasons for good web-apps to exist, and they can often deliver a very good experience on modern hardware. But conceptually, the idea that all software should run on top of a compatibility layer, with many restrictions and performance considerations compared to running directly on the OS is a strange one.

It’s an ecological concern as well: how many gigawatts of electricity a day is spent fetching react.js?

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Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by TeMPOraL on Monday November 05, 2018 @08:31AM (#18382150)
> It’s an ecological concern as well: how many gigawatts of electricity a day is spent fetching react.js?

I've been asking questions like this for years now, mostly as rhetorical devices, but I swear one day I'll try to get data and compose a chart of "how much your bloated product is contributing to climate change".

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Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by JoeAltmaier on Monday November 05, 2018 @08:57AM (#18382311)
I have to think that bitcoin etc are far worse offenders.

And it seems that server usage consumes around 1% of the USA energy budget. Heating, industry and transportation are most of that list. Not sure apps are going to show up.

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Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by TeMPOraL on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:06AM (#18382369)
Yeah, ceilings should be easy to establish. The max possible cost of bloat on mobile is (number of mobile users * average phone battery) / average charges per day. The max possible waste on backend will be roughly constrained by the energy use of data centres, and that value is available.

I don't expect the answer to come out very high, relative to other things. But it would be good to see an absolute value, if only to drive home the point that everything your software externalizes to your users has costs multiplied by the number of those users.

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Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by gspetr on Monday November 05, 2018 @08:54PM (#18387722)
Facebook iOS app was 400 MB last time I checked. And it also wants to get updates.
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Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by 21 on Monday November 05, 2018 @08:55AM (#18382299)
How much electricity is used to power casual games on mobile phones? People should stop playing games, they are contributing to climate change.

How much electricity is spent by developers using Electron based apps like VS Code and Slack and npm packages during their work hours? We should all develop in terminals, with no GUIs and no GPU usage. Only in non-bloated languages like C and ASM. Anything else is crime against the climate.

All sites should also be text only (like the motherfucking website), no images, especially hero ones.

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Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? by TeMPOraL on Monday November 05, 2018 @09:09AM (#18382382)
I think nobody reasonable would argue that you should stop all use of energy, period. The question always is, what does the energy use buy you? Does it buy you food? Safety? Entertainment? Or is it just pure waste created by a combination of greed, laziness and bad engineering?
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