What are some apps that are very very slow for no reason?
I already see the electron apps coming!
On the desktop side, definitely Microsoft Teams. It's insanely sluggish, even just going into a chat takes half a second or even a whole second and noticable time to load the UI. On a device that's completely overspecced for something like a chat app.
On the mobile side, Discord. It's quite alright on Desktop or in a Browser, but wow is the Android app bad. It's soooo sluggish, and half the time forgets what it wanted to load because it takes too long.
Discord. It takes like 12 seconds to start each time I launch it. Of course it's plenty fast after that, so I guess it's just the startup time that's slow.
My laptop boots up in the same amount of time as discord starting up. That is kind of sad.
Discord takes about 6-8 seconds for me, but if you think that's bad Steam takes 3 times that time for me.
Another problem with discord is CPU usage, it randomly decides to eat 40% of my i5-10400. Even while playing
Biggest offenders: MS teams on desktop. And even more so Epic Games store. Just ridiculously slow and laggy even on strong (Ryzen 9 5900HX, 32GB RAM, NVMe gen3 SSD) hardware. They almost take more time to open than Windows 11 (which is also slower thsn it should be). Buggy too.
Software that got much slower with a recent update:
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Steam. Seriously, it takes almost as much time to open ever since the last UI change as the Epic Games Store. At least it's smooth once it's opened, but I seriously want an alternative to launch my steam games.
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Firefox, specifically to open PDFs. There's now a 5-second delay when opening any PDF, even a tiny one. It's really frustrating honestly. It takes 90% of the time to open a 1 page PDF than to open a 10 page PDF.
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Windows file explorer. On battery on my gaming laptop, there's a 1-2 second delay when I click anything on this app. Constantly seeing "working on it". The Windows 10 file explorer was much faster. And the search is atrocious, use Everything by VoidTools instead.
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Some third party map apps on my Android phone used for public transportation start becoming really unresponsive after 10 seconds. It freezes my entire phone. This did not happen a couple months ago, and it really would've made getting around the city much harder if it wasn't for the motorcycle I recently bought.
I think so but you do need to set it up with your steam account and connect all that which is a bit of set up. Once you have it up though you can connect all of your launchers to it and then just have everything in one spot. I use it mostly for my GOG, Steam and Game Pass games.
The Walmart app and the website itself are absolutely horrendous. You'd think I was using a Windows 98 PC and a dialup modem every time I try to use it I swear. No idea how it's so shit and I don't think I've ever used a less optimized website in my life beyond overloaded Lemmy instances.
Just use a browser. Amazon app is the only one that can arguably be justified. Even then, I know im trading my soul. Fight me, guys
I use it too, but came here to list it as my stupidly slow app also. You literally own AWS, how can a search for "Black T-shirt" take 40 seconds to load?! If you're going to be an evil corporate monopoly at least be quick about it.
What does the Amazon App have that the website doesn't? I've just been using the website, now I'm wondering what I'm missing out on
The browser version for Walmart is honestly probably even worse than the app. I don't know how they made a website so terrible.
That and you have to have an account just to use it. I shouldn't have to sign in to a 3rd party to test on localhost
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They have to do something while they're sending all your data top the mother ship.
Actually, in a lot of cases it's probably because the app is just a wrapper around a web UI, via some bloated system like PhoneGap. That's why your compass app is 128MB.
There are UI guidelines to make apps show something however useless it might be. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/loading
I guess most developers go for a logo rather than a spinner. Maybe they worry that folk will forget what app they tapped on?
Discord and Snapchat for Android. Both are laggy as fuck, and Discord can't seem to fix their app's many bugs.
Snapchat has always run great on Pixel. Google has worked with them many times to implement new features, though.
Like the Pixel visual core back in the day, the double tap the back to launch feature, etc.
Can't really comment on other Android phones.
Logitech’s mouse and keyboard apps are garbage. LogiTune, Logi Options+. OSS alternative Mac Mouse Fix does everything needed and doesn’t need to run in the background constantly.
I hate it when a piece of hardware requires some closed source software for it to be used to its fullest. It would make sense for it to be open source sense the income comes the sale of the hardware always. I feel like at this point big tech companies just like bullying everyone imao.
Another vote for shitty Discord from me. If there was any app I could just magically give a speed boost to, it's that.
Some days it annoys me enough where I just run it through Firefox/Web, especially on Linux where it's really janky.
You want a magic Discord speedboost? It's called OpenAsar. Mitigates telemetry, and speeds the client up to usable levels, especially on lower end hardware.
In a similar vein to deadcade's comment, Ripcord also exists also an alternative. If this exchange had happened a few months ago I would've recommended it above anything - but unfortunately it hasn't been updated in a very long time at this point and it's starting to cause some core functionality to not work.
EDIT: It's pretty much exclusively the Slack functionality that doesn't work anymore. The Discord side is great and is IMO has a much more useful UI, ex: you can group arbitrary channels from any number of servers into a single group which is presented in the UI pretty much as a new server. No more server hopping to check out all of your favorite channels!
The day we worked out (a decade ago) that we could stall discord by talking about world news was the day we moved to more secure communication.
I'd definitely love to move away from Discord, but unfortunately I've not been able to get my friends to move to anything else. Additionally, I have to use Discord for work (yes, it's strange - definitely wouldn't have been my decision) so I'd still be stuck using it even if my friends went over to something else.
Not like there is a better free alternative.
The alternative is a combination of multiple other programs some of which are associated with cost.
Apple Podcasts app on any platform. If you subscribe to like more than few dozen podcasts it runs at a snail’s pace even on the latest M1 and M2 devices from my experience. I turned off automatic downloads and it still ran slow. I don’t know why because a podcast app should be little different than an rss reader in theory, no?
Anyway I switched to Overcast last year and haven’t looked back.
There's probably always a reason for an app to be slow. Even if the developer intentionally made it slow on purpose to fuck with people, that's still a reason. 😂
The Amazon Alexa app for android is really slow and clunky for me. Especially irritating when you just want to turn things on or off or access a device quickly.
Windows start bar search.
Same damn text file I open daily, why does it rake you 10 seconds to find it every time....
If you open it daily, why are you searching for it..? Put it, or a shortcut to it, somewhere more accessible
Because I have so many pinned items for apps, I don't have room for the dozens of docs I open daily. Great question though.
I never saw the reason to upgrade either. The old desktop version is still going strong for me.
Don't you need to have flash to run it or something? Is it safe to still have flash on your computer in 2023? I think I got ynab on a steam sale, but it's been awhile since I've opened it. And I refuse to pay for a subscription for something that used to be perfectly fine with a one time purchase.
Microsoft Teams. Literally the only web app I’ve seen where it just randomly needs a refresh. As a dev I can imagine the reasons for it, but it’s so sloppy. It’s the sort of thing that would be a major embarrassment to a little startup, and here’s a leading tech corporation putting out software that just has to refresh sometimes because there’s some bug they can’t figure out.
Hopefully one day we'll see something like Element X for desktop. Right now the only way to run it on PC is through the iOS compatibility thing that some MacBooks have, AFAIK.