alt Hacker NewsYes. Apple Music is the most egregious example of this. It could be ridiculously fast on your pocket supercomputer but the moment a web request gets fired off from stumbling blindly across the field-of-dung user interface, bam, you’re done. Especially if your network connection isn’t great at that time.
Things like this really pushed me to everything local systems. I’ll move actual files around if I want to do anything on the network. Or sometimes even use cables! Shock, horror!
Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great.
The original design had the speakers setting up a private mesh network, and the app would send commands directly to the speakers via your LAN. Then, they got the brilliant idea to route commands via their cloud service. The app would send commands to an endpoint, which would send them back to your speakers. Imagine trying to smoothly fade volume with a WAN hop. This went over as well as you’d expect, and they’ve since promised to work on performance. Thus far they seem to have been doing so; it isn’t as snappy as the original, but it’s quite a bit better.