> GMail is fast. All the time. No matter how much mail you have. That's because it runs from a local database and all server interaction is abstracted behind sync and local accesses to data.
I don't know about Android, but on iOS, the Gmail app is much slower to launch and navigate than the stock mail app. I think that, on launch, the Gmail app makes some requests before showing you any of even your locally cached data, which always struck me as poor design.
That's also how the GMail website still acts, which confuses me as well. Why can Facebook load a complex web app instantly while GMail still shows a loading bar on launch?
actually, when you load facebook, it shows an interstitial which looks like a page of posts, but is really just a bunch of blocks carefully arranged, and it has nothing to do with the final load page.
Huh. I checked back a few times. It looks like facebook loads an interstitial with boxes, that actually corresponds to the layout of the page, but not the content. This includes sentence layout (the boxes cover the area that gets replaced with text, similar for images). Now I'm curious what's going on.
Re:Hold the Phone: A Big-Data Conundrum
by walterbell on Saturday July 26, 2014 @10:37PM
(#8091775)
Is there a fixed limit to the size of the local GMail cache?
There are often better explanations. GMail is fast. All the time. No matter how much mail you have. That's because it runs from a local database and all server interaction is abstracted behind sync and local accesses to data. Google Play is slow because it is a REST app with a native app veneer. It's harder to make an app like Google Play use sync'ed databases. So sometimes it does puzzling things like taking tens of seconds to go to the next track even when you are shuffling only your downloaded music.
Fast apps can "do more" and remain fast. Slow apps are slow for architectural and algorithmic reasons rather than because they "do more."