Microsoft thinks there are people on 2G networks who want to use Outlook Microsoft has made Outlook Lite available in select markets for low-powered Androids. “Outlook is used by millions of people daily for their email and calendaring needs across the world. Yet, there are a wide range of devices that do not have all the capabilities required to get the best Outlook experience on their smartphone …
Yep, I'm always intrigued by "lite" versions of apps as they're presumably somewhat free of the needless bloat that comes with regular versions. That said, I used Messenger Lite for quite a while (I have to use it to keep in touch with certain people, unfortunately) and only found out after a long time of using it that it'd been eviscerating all uploaded media including voice recordings — they seemed fine to me in the app but the recipient could barely make them out.
Slow, but I can see its usefulness.
Last winter we had numerous lengthy power cuts here after storms - as well as knocking out home power (so no domestic broadband) it also demonstrated that the local base stations didn't have back-up power, so mobile Internet was off the cards as well.
A trek up the road got me in range of a GSM cell that was functioning, but not offering anything above 2G - none of the apps on my phone wanted anything to do with that. Having some sort of connectivity - even if it was really slow - would have been very useful.
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Hardware is usually ridiculously overpowered and relatively cheap
Except that this "lite" version exists precisely because there are markets where that simply isn't true.
Maintaining two versions doesn't sound like efficient use of developers' time. Nor, in most cases, does the pursuit of elaborate features used by hardly anyone that disproportionately absorb both development and maintenance resources.
One of the reasons hardware is (relatively) cheap is that there is an enormous focus on cost throughout its life cycle. The mere utterance of the letters SDLC seem sufficient to ward off any consideration of cost when it comes to software development.
Doesn't need to be "optimisation".
It's more like "write actual software instead of writing a website and then shipping it with an entire single-purpose browser".
Aside from the crypto, what does WhatsApp do that MSN Messenger didn't? The latter downloaded in about 5MB and comfortably ran on a system with 32MB of RAM... WhatsApp will happily consume >500MB of RAM just sitting in the background.
But you are correct with:
Development time is very expensive.
Getting your web team to sling something into Electron is indeed cheaper than hiring actual desktop/client software developers.
I remember back in the day, being chuffed when I could save a single byte in my Z80 assembled code.
Of course, those days are long gone, but even so, some of the things you see these days are so bloated, it can only be down to poor design and programming.
It's a bit like when security issues are found in certain software: Usually, it's a silly mistake, or subtle bug, but sometimes it can only be due to the obvious complete cluelessness of the author, where the logic behind the whole process is completely flawed.
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Throwing it in the garbage, setting the dumpster on fire, throwing the whole thing in a blast furnace, then launching the whole mess into the Sun.
Then blow up the Sun for good measure.
At least Outlook Express and its various descendants never went around gratuitously restructuring the formatting and de-organizing the headers.
Surely Outlook is a Black Hole?
When you sit at a pc that's got Outlook on it it is advisable to wear a lead suit to protect you from X-Ray emissions.
(IIRC the biggest PST I've ever had the immense pleasure to run the Inbox Repair Tool on was a tad over 35Gb).
It's not what would be considered "full featured" by today's standards. Rightly or wrongly, people's expectations have increased and if you tried using an old version of Outlook Express or whatever preceded it, it wouldn't likely go well even if we don't consider the security issues that the software no doubt has. We were still barely into the Web 1.0 era at the time. A lot of emails probably rely on CSS and other HTML functions that simply didn't exist at the time.
Upvote, because lower end tablets only have 1 or 2 GB onboard and tend to run Android Go. I have two (freebies with magazine subscriptions) and they are actually pretty capable devices for "free", just a bit slow [*]. So having software that doesn't assume everything is a Samsung flagship would be good for, you know, the rest of us.
* - This is, of course, completely relative. As it's nice and I'm on holiday I've been running my old Pi1 outdoors with a little 7" LCD panel and a hefty battery to power them both. I run RISC OS and use Netsurf. (for more demanding things I use my phone) I am shocked at how astonishingly slow everything is. Once upon a time that little 700MHz ARM11 processor was extremely nippy and could run the rings of Saturn around an ancient RiscPC with an ARM710 clocking at 40MHz. Now? The Pi1 is the RiscPC and the main machine is a Pi3B+ which is like an order of magnitude faster. My phone can do stuff the Pi (either) can't even dream about. So the tablet is fast or slow depending upon what it compares with. But it's a quad core jobbie (one of those Allwinner chips) so it isn't a total piece of crap (just pretend there's no camera). Handles Netflix...
"If more people realised just how bloated Outlook is"
I'm not disagreeing with that, but you're assuming quite a lot (perhaps too much) about the general Outlook user base. I'd have to think most of the ones who could understand the concept of "bloat" in relation to software already know that Outlook is a bloated piece of dung. The rest couldn't understand it even were it explained by Barney in a nursery rhyme song.
Maybe it's just me, but these mobile apps are getting far too data and battery hungry these days. Offering lite versions of apps that just get the job done should be the standard. I don't need this extra fluff like fancy UI's and doing more than the scope of say an "email app".
Really, the words "on 2G networks" are redundant in that headline. I use it every day. I don't want it, it's just that my company bought it and forces me to use it, much to my displeasure (especially every time it* goes into its new favourite infinite loop of "Outlook has encountered an error... repair now?")
* to be fair, Excel actually seems to do this way more often.
the full android outlook caned my poor phone so much it lost all free space and was almost impossible to remove once in that state.
I wonder if I might risk it again....
It work want to email me something on my personal phone, well, they can pay extra for the space. So - I don't' do it. Even teams is disabled unless I'm travelling abroad.
I just returned from a week in rural area that had what is possibly the lowest possible bar for 2G data connectivity. It was barely able to eke through an email or two or RCS/other text messages through every five to ten minutes. I cannot imagine trying to use MS bloatcrap over such a connection. Don't ask about other experiences with Microtrash out there on what passed as an "Internet" connection. OneDrive? Expletives. Lots of expletives. Outlook Web? So many more expletives- and that was when I did have a usable Internet connection.
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