The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 is... poor

This is getting really frustrating for me personally, not just from a developer standpoint but from a consumer standpoint. I love my phone (Moto X 2014) and much prefer Android to iOS but as JS apps are becoming more ubiquitous we’re almost at the point where a (personally) inferior experience on the rest of the device is worth the trade off to have the sites I use and love work well.

We have a discourse forum for our sports site (thesportscollective.co) and many of our writers have been complaining about poor performance of the forum on their older android phones. I don’t WANT to move away from discourse, but if Android performance doesn’t start to improve we may have to since 68% of our active users are on Android devices. At this moment in time, I would support discourse moving away from Ember, even though I think the functionality Ember provides is pretty core to the Discourse experience. It’s just not worth the performance trade off in my mind at this time on such a large segment of our users devices.

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