The Redundancy Crisis: Why Modern App Development is Broken
This is not another Gnokestation post 😂
For years, the tech industry has accepted a bloating reality: the average app on the Play Store or desktop now sits comfortably at 100 MB or more. We’ve been told this is the "cost of complexity," the price we pay for high-definition assets and cross-platform compatibility.
But if you peel back the layers of popular frameworks like Electron, Tauri, or various hybrid mobile wrappers, a more frustrating truth emerges:
We aren't always shipping more meaningful functionality. In many cases, we are shipping redundant infrastructure.
The Underlying Technologies Powering Frameworks are Actually Browser Primitives
Every time you download a 100 MB utility app that mainly displays text, forms, and images, you often aren't just downloading the app’s logic. You are downloading a dedicated runtime environment—commonly Chromium or a WebView wrapper.
These frameworks are built on top of capabilities that already exist natively within modern browsers. By bundling an additional browser engine inside an app to run on an operating system that already ships with one, we sometimes end up duplicating massive layers of infrastructure just to render interfaces and execute JavaScript.
It can feel like shipping a car inside another car just to use the steering wheel.
"for (let i = 1; i <= 5; i++) { console.log(i); }" Is Equivalent to "(1 2 3 4 5)"
One scales. The other exhausts.
When you have ten different apps running heavy bundled runtimes independently, the system is forced to manage multiple isolated instances of nearly identical infrastructure. This creates a fundamental efficiency gap:
- Memory Exhaustion: RAM is consumed by redundant processes running in silos instead of leveraging shared optimized runtimes.
- Battery Drain: CPUs spend additional cycles maintaining duplicated environments.
- Storage Waste: Gigabytes of disk space are occupied by infrastructure rather than actual user data or functionality.
One approach iterates efficiently on top of existing resources; the other exhausts them by duplicating the entire environment repeatedly for every task.
The Shock of True Performance
I recently built a site using a more primitive-first approach, and the execution was so instantaneous that for a split second, I genuinely thought something was wrong. 🧐
I was unconsciously waiting for the usual lag, loading spinner, or the “jank” we’ve become conditioned to expect from framework-heavy applications.
Then it hit me:
That’s just what software is supposed to feel like. 🤣
When devices are not forced to parse and hydrate megabytes of unnecessary abstraction layers, many of those loading rituals simply disappear because they are no longer mechanically necessary.
The Primitive Path Forward
The alternative is not anti-framework ideology. It is about understanding where abstraction helps and where it silently becomes duplication.
For a large class of modern applications, browser primitives are already remarkably capable.
Using Vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS directly on top of modern browser APIs can dramatically reduce application footprints while still delivering sophisticated behavior.
With APIs like:
- Web USB / Web Bluetooth for direct hardware communication
- IndexedDB for robust, local-first persistent storage
- Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) style persistence patterns for data durability
- Service Workers for offline execution and intelligent caching
- WebAssembly (Wasm) for near-native execution speed of complex logic
- WebGPU for high-performance 3D rendering and compute tasks directly on the hardware
The browser increasingly resembles a universal, sandboxed, highly optimized application runtime rather than just a document viewer. 🤷
I'm not against frameworks. They solve real problems and accelerate development in many situations.
However, like many senior developers have said before, engineering is ultimately about understanding the cost of your abstractions and using tools appropriately.
The juniors of today will become the seniors of tomorrow.
Efficiency is a virtue not an ideology ✌️
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