Our last chapter was about adding home screen installation and push notifications--both meant to improve the user's experience by adding functionality--but, as we described in our user stories at the beginning of the book, one of the most important features of this app was its inclusiveness; it was a chat app for everyone, anyone, anywhere.
From a web app perspective, we can better rephrase that as "any connection, any speed." The biggest blocker of web application performance is network requests: how long it takes to load data over a poor connection.
Developers can fail to give performance its due attention, simply because we usually test our sites on speedy connections inside air-conditioned buildings in urban hubs. However, for a global app such as Chatastrophe, we must think about the users in less developed countries, the users in rural areas, and the users who only have a tenth of the network speed we do. How can we make the app work for them?
This section is...