It's amazing how megacorporations like Meta can't just make a normal application. Fine when you have legacy from a decade ago, but this is supposedly built from scratch.
Let's not guess whether it will take off or not, and about the functional requirements that are basically missing - that's for later. The main battle there is obviously for users and the technical side doesn't really concern anyone. Meta's killer feature would be the ease of registration for people from Instagram plus a good app - that would be a great chance. Let's talk about their Android app.
It's weird. In screenshots it looks pretty decent, but in motion under your fingers it feels like a terrible hack job. Twitter's official app is light years ahead, although it's far from ideal either. In fact, like any unofficial Twitter client from the past or Mastodon from the present - all are ahead. Threads is a really average app from what I've seen, possibly even below average. And this is one of the richest companies in the world launching a new project this way, with which they want to lure people away from another top company. I'm even curious how many people on the mobile side worked on it.
This poor quality manifests in very different ways: missing ripple on press, some jerky scroll with unusual inertia, hitboxes on buttons, text selection in the new post input field, obviously iOS-style text buttons. How can you make 2 different switches in an absolutely new app when going to two different screens from settings - I just don't understand. Or 4 different cursors in text fields, differing in width and colors. Or different loaders on different screens.
Though I say I don't understand, I'd bet a hundred that half the screens are on React Native. I rather don't understand how a company of this level can release this to prod. Design review? QA? People in management whose eye twitches looking at this? Anyone at all?
Threads immediately takes 250 megabytes of memory on the device. Twitter - 150, but it has so many features that we're not even aware of, you can almost believe it. Mastodon - 6, but it's in Java and almost on bare SDK, so not really a typical example either. But still, how does 6 megabytes fit tens of times more functionality than 250? A 40x difference is insane. I really want to believe that there are years of work behind feature toggles that were disabled for the first release, otherwise this is typical Facebook disgrace.
The project's App ID is com.instagram.barcelona, which is visible in the Google Play page URL. Obviously some internal name that wasn't cleaned up before release. Also a good indicator of how much everyone didn't care and how rushed everything was, and this is something you can't even fix later.
Instagram, ten years after acquisition, still has similar chaos in the app. So I think this is their corporate culture. And most likely, we won't get a good official app, and they won't let third parties write them.
From this thread we learned that Threads for Android is almost entirely written in Jetpack Compose and their main feed is a LazyColumn (!). That's bold at this scale.
We learned that they have React Native there, supposedly because they copied the basic infrastructure from Instagram. All 250 MB apparently.
From the rare questioning comments, I understood I'm not alone in being annoyed by the lack of clickability and the feel of scrolling, they clearly did something to it on purpose.
Mostly there's super positive feedback and complete delight from all Android superstars, it's hard for us with our mentality to understand this.
By the way, few people mention it, but how aggressive is minSdk 28 for such an app.
Are there any oldies here?
