Picture this: you sit down to write something, and instead you're staring at a blank editor, wondering why your brand-new laptop - which should be flying - feels like it's wading through treacle. It gets you thinking about something worth noticing.
Phones and laptops are genuinely more powerful than they've ever been. A modern machine has more RAM than a small fleet of early desktop PCs combined. So why do so many apps feel, well, slower?
You've felt it too, haven't you? That moment when you click an icon and wait. And wait. For something that should be instant.
Feature bloat is real
Think back to when a simple note-taking app just stored text. Now it probably needs to sync across five devices, support markdown, embed AI suggestions, render animations, and check in with a cloud server every few seconds. All that stuff takes resources. And somewhere along the way, the basic job - helping you write a note - became secondary.
Features aren't the enemy - Jolly Good Apps builds browser extensions for a living. Timestamp Bookmarks for YouTube is one of them - it lets you save labelled timestamps in long videos so you can jump back to the important bits. It's genuinely useful. But even a developer who loves features has to fight the urge to cram in more stuff. Every feature adds complexity. Every animation costs CPU cycles. Every background sync eats memory.
The problem is that most companies don't have to care about efficiency anymore. Hardware keeps getting faster, so they just throw more code at the wall and hope it runs OK.
We've traded speed for convenience
Remember when apps were offline-first? You installed them and they just worked. Now everything wants to phone home. Load a web view. Fetch personalised content. Show you ads based on your location. All before you can even see the main screen.
Say you buy a supposedly ergonomic potato peeler - the kind with a fancy swivel blade and rubber grip. It's fine, but it's not actually better than a basic steel one that's lasted thirty years. Same with software. A lot of modern apps have added layers of polish that don't really make the core experience better. They just make it heavier.
And the updates. Oh, the updates. Every few days something needs to download and install. Half the time you can't tell what changed. A new icon? A slightly different shade of blue? And after each one, the app feels a bit more sluggish until you restart.
What can we actually do about it?
First, it's worth being more honest about what we actually need from an app. Do you need AI-powered suggestions in your to-do list? Or do you just need something that opens quickly, lets you type a task, and doesn't crash? Be brutal with your own requirements.
Second, vote with your wallet - or your attention. Use the leaner tools. The ones that respect your time and your battery. There are still developers out there who care about performance. Jolly Good Apps tries to be one of them. Review Radar for Amazon is another of its extensions - it highlights patterns in fake reviews. It does one thing and tries to do it well without eating your RAM for breakfast.
Third, if you build software yourself, consider this a nudge. Every millisecond of load time you shave off matters. Every unnecessary feature you say no to is a gift to your users. Nobody's saying ditch all the bells and whistles. But maybe ask yourself: does this feature genuinely make someone's life better, or is it just there because a competitor has it?
Anyway, that's worth wrapping up before some laptop demands another update. Go easy on the bloatware, mate. Your future self will thank you.