On Silicon Valley Companies' Bet On Boosting Their Userbases in Developing Markets With Dirt-Cheap Phones and Lite Apps (buzzfeed.com)

As user growth slows in developed markets, Silicon Valley companies are increasingly looking at developing markets such as India for new customers. The playbook of many of these companies is similar: make services work on low-cost devices that are increasingly popular among new users in these nations. Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Twitter, Google, and Amazon have all released "lite" apps (they usually have fewer features, but are comparatively less resource intensive) for these markets, with some also offering their services as progressive web app (that mimic app-esque behavior on a website, but don't require installation of any special app for access). But how do these apps fare on the low-cost devices? And what is it like to live on a low-cost smartphone? A reporter ditched his iPhone for a $60 Android handset to find out: The phone is, well, basic. It comes with a slow-as-molasses processor, so little memory that I kept having to remove and reinstall apps to keep the thing running, a camera that would have been at home on the first iPhone, a two-year-old version of Android, about a dozen pre-installed Google apps that take up hundreds of megabytes, and a single, measly gigabyte of usable storage. Imagine your favorite Android phone, except with a waaay crappier screen, cameras, storage, and battery to get an idea.

What I bumped into immediately after turning on the Bharat 2 for the first time was the lack of storage, and this limitation entirely defined what I used my phone for. I had to start off by uninstalling the pre-installed bloatware before I actually installed any apps, because the first thing I got after switching on the phone was a low storage notification.

Slack went out the window because it was too bloated; Outlook, my email app of choice, was too big to install; and pretty much everything else -- banking apps, shopping apps, games, and more -- was a luxury I'd live without. Even Google Maps Go, a lightweight browser version of Google Maps that the company said is "designed to run quickly and smoothly on devices with limited memory," was crippled, allowing me to look up a location only to prompt me to download the full version of Google Maps when I asked for turn-by-turn directions.

So I boiled down to the essentials: staying in touch with people, catching up on news, ordering cabs, and watching videos (which went shockingly well, and supports the huge popularity of video here), pretty much the same as the Next Billion. Further reading: Shitphone: A Love Story (2015).

Comments

Pay a little more

[jonsmirl]

For $100 you can get a pretty decent phone. The mistake is in buying a $60 phone.

http://www.dx.com/p/umidigi-a1...

Oreo 8.1 , 5.5in screen, 13MP camera, international 4G bands, quad core, 3GB RAM, dual SIM, etc..

Measely 1Gb?

[MpVpRb]

Ahh.. I remember when 640K was a luxury

Further back, I remember getting a 64K memory card for my Imsai 8080. It was approx 10" x 6", completely covered in chips

The dude at the computer store asked ..what are you going to do with all that memory?

Modern software is incredibly wasteful

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Maybe, just maybe

[ShanghaiBill]

What is the point of having resources that are never used? Sensible people prefer functionality and good presentation over false economy. A cellphone uses about 2 kwh per year. At 12 cents per kwh, that is 24 cents annually, or 2 cents per month.

How do make a 'lite app'

[randomErr]

What is the best way to make a 'lite app'?

• Aren't Progressive Web Apps processor and RAM hogs?
• HTML with wrapper like Cordova have a pretty good storage footprint. From my tinkering apps are 4 megs minimum for a basic app on a phone with almost no space is not a good situation. I've seen some apps get to 600 megs.
• Java - is good in size but Google is moving away from it. Also I've had pure Java apps run real slow.
• C++ is the best overall but hard to work with on Android and you have to make custom versions for almost every major processor type.

So what is the best way to make a lite app?

Re:Maybe, just maybe

[mikael]

Run task manager or cports.exe and see all the tasks that are running under Windows. svchost.exe is running half the tasks out there, which almost seems to be all servers; everything from SAMBA to plug-and-play, USB port monitors, keyboard and mouse drivers. All of those are written in C++ but are built from templates. Then the applications depend on 100+ different dynamic libraries. Each has grown and expanded as network protocols, bus architectures have been enhanced with burst modes, large packet sizes, and the need for real-time response speeds.