(I'm the Flutter TL.)

Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from what I can tell.

Also please consider how many seconds will it take for a cheap Android phone to parse 5 Mb of JS (and how much memory it would take after parsing, which can be up to 10 times more that original code size). I think it can become much more than 8 seconds, and during parsing the browser will likely become unresponsive.

Should try all your Dev and browsing on a 2gb low end Chromebook, and last gen lower end phone for a couple months. Then see how you feel about it all.

I develop apps for tvs, so size and performance matters a lot since they are a lot of tvs already shipped with low end SOCs. newer ones are more powerful, but people doesn't change tv as frequently as phones.

All of this takes memory. Also i do a lot more than use some crappy flutter calculator.

India. Next billion users.

Size matters a lot.

It's not just the transfer... It's the compile, load and perceived speed. 1mb compressed and gzipped can be a hundred MB parsed and in memory. Which isn't bad on a modern mid level desktop, but it's crazy on a lower end smart phone.

There are also other factors to consider. I'm not huge in premature optimization, but damn.

I think there’s a middleground there that if you want to support these countries then there should be a framework for this (Flutter Lite?).. But if you want the complete feature set that is “bloated” but has good ux/ui support then that should be fine as well.

"these countries"? I've seen schools in the US with 15 mb/s My mothers, Xfinity, has a low tier, 25mb/s.

A lot of Australia is still stuck on ADSL with speeds of 5 - 20Mb if your lucky

(I'm the Flutter TL)

Our current plan is to support the complete feature set while still supporting places with connectivity around 5Mbit/s. We are still in very early stages (we only just put out the tech preview today!) but we have some confidence that this is possible. Personally I'm more worried about the performance of layout animations (e.g. resizing paragraphs) than about download size, but again, it's early days still.