This means 2G, slow 3G or satellite using customers are extremely common. No G too, if they're using your product out in the field. I myself lived 30 minutes drive from a mobile connection in 2021. A sheep literally ate my internet by chewing through the cable from the satellite to the house.
So those users definitely exist in my demographic. And very much in the demographic of my clients, as potential customers.
Still, it seems to be a hard sell to make things work with crap connections or offline. First off, frontend devs resist because you're taking away their favourite toys. (Very rational from their perspective - their next gig is probably in banking or retail or somewhere else with ubiquitous fast internet). Second off, those allocating budgets are very hesitant to spend money on any software dev out of the mainstream. From their perspective software is risky enough given its expense, let alone doing something that might require specialists. (This may be more of an Australian thing, they're not risk takers like Americans).
So yes, you're very right on a technical level. I'm with you, and would love to talk to others who see this. On a more practical level - it's hard to make the stars align, even if it will land you customers.
Anything in that post that caught your interest in particular? I'll make it happen.
Basically the idea is how much can we provide with 'only' a 2G link (afaik equivalent to 2 56k modems).
Nothing can ever top the fact you have a cable from a satellite to your house!
That must have been a pretty long cable!
I don't see why you think this would be the case. A friend of mine lives down in Gilroy, CA (south of the San Jose) in a veritable mansion. He and his wife have done very well for themselves. Because they chose land over some SF row house their only internet access is a spotty 4G connection that really acts like a spotty 2G connection much of the time. No ISP is willing to run a landline out where he lives and WISPs aren't much better than the 4G. He's definitely not the only monied person with shitty Internet access.
Lost 2G users don't necessarily have 2G (or equivalent) connections all the time. There's plenty of places or times where 4G gets congested and performs terribly even when the end users have high end devices and nominally good connections. A lost sale because someone couldn't complete a form because of poor coverage on the subway is a lost sale.
Mobile Internet should never be expected to be some fixed value for any user. Someone with a brand new iPhone on a network with great 5G coverage can still be standing behind a lamppost or something and get 2G levels of network performance. Since an overwhelming percentage of web traffic is from mobile it doesn't make sense to not degrade gracefully in poor network conditions or just minimize resource use.
Also Australia is a pretty rich country.
It's like PHP but this time in JavaScript.
Suspense is still not done, and it's been over 4 years. Server components aren't happening anytime soon IMO. The only reason why I think this year is still tenable is because Vercel ate up all the React devs who can contribute to such a task.
Most JS devs I've talked to or work with are writing code based on what we have now.
You're either vastly underestimating the number of developers at that skill level, or overestimating the number of those devs you or I might ever have even heard of.
What you describe, a PHP style server rendering of mostly static HTML, with small bits of JavaScript for interactivity, sounds great. But will that actually be possible?
I'm really really sick of web apps and mobile apps that flash the "no content here" version of widgets while they wait for data to be loaded. It's the very very worst sort of user experience.
a sizeable improvement maybe, also does using the same language on both side a pro or a con ? real question
The other big issue is the things I was working on actually needed high parallelism, and node really provides concurrency, so I quickly hit issues there as well. I'm currently working in a GQL based world and the golang based one we use is massively parallel and very performant, and I'd be worried about the speed loss writing in node.
This makes me very sad because I really do like Typescript as a language, and writing everything in one language seems like it'd be great. But it's really brought down by all the typing issues with legacy javascript, node, and other tools.
But then again, I'm not writing crud apps at work or for fun so your mileage may vary.
Jokes aside, theoretical knowledge is definitely lacking. There doesn't seem much interest either - that is, until you show how they could have saved days and get more reliable results more efficiently, if only they had known there's that 50+ year old algorithm they could have used. Experienced and knowledgable devs are still very important to have around.
1: https://paydirtapp.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/FastG...
1. Other mobile browsers update independently from the OS, whereas Safari is only updated when there is an update to iOS. iOS devices that are no longer supported with newer versions of iOS cannot update to the latest version of Safari.
2. All browsers in iOS are based on Webkit: There are Chrome and Firefox versions for iOS but those use the same engine as Safari in iOS. This is because of an Apple guideline which mentions that all iOS browsers must use Webkit.
These users can't fix this problem without getting a new device.
Disagree. It costs them time and attention. If they don't have to do something, they won't do it.
Updating software is low on people's priority lists. And not everyone has automatic updates enabled.
Cross-platform desktop software has been a thing for decades prior to Electron showing up on the scene, there are frameworks designed explicitly to support that, and there is a truly massive ecosystem of native libraries and tools.
Only in the most developed countries, as places like Bolivia are still hanging on to 2G. You just don't hear about those places because of that demographics problem, so people assume 4G/5G are all that's out there.
Wikipedia tells me that Bolivia has a GDP (PPP) of $89.018 billion, and there are a bunch of countries like Bolivia.
For all that people sometimes go on about untapped market potential in poor countries, it really isn't that easy when >90% of the population lives on less than 350 USD/month.
Sauce: spent the first 1/4 of century of my life living in a third world shithole.
On the other hand, Coca-Cola has a presence in Bolivia, and apparently controls about 60% of the Bolivian market.
With 11 million people, that's gotta be a nice piece of change.
If what you're selling is closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo, you probably shouldn't write Bolivia off.
If what you're selling is BOTH:
a) closer in price to a Coke than a Lambo
and
b) closer in demand to a Coke than a Lambo
Then, sure, you shouldn't write it off.
However, if you're selling stock-trading software, even for the price of a coke, you might not make enough money back to justify supporting Bolivia.
Cokes, even in poor countries, are still purchased by tens of millions of people at least once a month. Selling a similarly priced item that may be purchased by a few hundred people at most is not the same thing as Coke.