What are some apps that are very very slow for no reason?

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.

Microsoft teams and discord. Both use react native.

It's atrciously slow. Even Twitter loads faster.
And every time you click on a post, then go back it reload.

I like to read 1-2 top comments for most posts, but this 2 second white screen for each post kill it for me. This is why I used boost for reddit, and now for lemmy.

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.

Gotta register the mandatory tracking modules for the CIA, Red Army, MI6, Mossad, and FSB.
My laptop boots up in the same amount of time as discord starting up. That is kind of sad.
- If anything it's pretty wild how fast computers start nowadays.
- Do you have a HDD?
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
Discord takes around a second to launch for me. Even after force-stopped.
Interesting.

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

Lmao I was really confused until that windows 10 comment. Because I was really confused what kind of mess your system was if the file Explorer lagged even though it doesn't on some of the shittiest computers I own. I've so far refused to upgrade any of my systems to windows 11, and probably won't until 10 gets a true EOL
- Oops I should've told you that it is the Windows 11 version. That version is like 10-20% of the speed of the Windows 10 version but it has tabs
As for steam, have you tried GOG Galaxy at all? I use it as my main launcher and I love it.
- I've heard of it but never actually used it. Is it much faster than Steam?

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.

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.

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.
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!
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.
- Oh this looks great, thank you for the shout!

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.

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. 😂

Mcdonalds app.

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.

The McDonald's app on Android. I don't know if they use the same version of the app in the US and in Canada, but Jeeezus Christ on a bike the app is slow, both on WiFi and mobile data, and that's on a Pixel 7 Pro.

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.

The crypto.com app. I mean maybe the reason is "security", but it takes like 10-20 seconds to view my credit card details.

you're actually using crypto.com?
- Yeah the credit card works well. I'm not really using the rest of the crypto functionality it offers 😅
- Yeah the credit card works well. I'm not really using the rest of the crypto functionality it offers 😅

Element for matrix is actually cheeks

Check out Element X: Ignition
- 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.

YNAB

Always takes like 20 seconds to load a super simple web app

That pokemon sleep app thing. I have no idea why an app showing 2D characters runs so slowly.

The only explanation I can come up with, is that it's rendering everything in 3D, then putting a flattening filter on. Or that it's mining the everloving shit out of everyone's personal data on the phone.

Perhaps it is not putting a flattening filter butbusing a flattening shader?

Bunnings app!

Aussie will know what I'm talking about, the splash screen is too fucking long, when it finally opens, it's fucking blank while the items load and you can't search until it loads and when you return from a search to the main screen, it fucking loads again!

Okay end rant!