[podlp]

I wrote an article comparing Cloud Phone and Opera Mini. It’s impressive what Opera Mini enabled, given it’s been frozen in time for roughly a decade. You’d think with SSR, more websites could support it. Despite coming preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones, it doesn’t represent proportional traffic since navigating on these devices is so difficult

https://developer.cloudfone.com/blog/cloud-phone-vs.-opera-m...

Disclaimer: I work at CloudMosa, the company that makes Cloud Phone

[catwhatcat]

I've just started reading that link so I apologize if this is redundant, but would you elaborate some? What sorts of considerations / limitations exist? What would allow an app/site to run better on this platform?

[podlp]

TLDR-Cloud Phone is actively developed and newer, while Opera Mini is outdated and hasn’t received a major update in many years

There are two components to a remote browser like Cloud Phone or Opera Mini: the thin client that runs on device, and the server that performs remote transcoding and rendering

Opera Mini uses servers with the Presto rendering engine that hasn’t been updated in over 10 years. It’s officially discontinued, and not used by any modern Opera browser for desktop. Opera Mini is also intentionally limited to reduce potential for abuse, since it’s a general purpose web browser. Abuse often looks like websites taking advantage of servers to perform expensive computation, like crypto mining. The Opera Mini Native client also hasn’t been updated in 5 years. It doesn’t support media playback (audio or video streaming), or asynchronous JavaScript execution

Cloud Phone is much newer, actively developed, and only allows published “widgets” to be accessed. Because widgets must be approved, the potential for abuse is much lower. It uses Chromium (currently v128), and supports many more modern Web APIs and asynchronous execution. SPAs and JS-heavy websites will work well on Cloud Phone, but probably don’t work at all on Opera Mini. Finally, the Cloud Phone client offers more capabilities including multimedia playback, access to the camera/ microphone, and other Web APIs like vibration and soon notifications and badging