Yeah PWAs (progressive web apps) are really not aimed at us devs with fancy MPBs and good connections. You should probably open devtools and throttle your connection to 3g or worse to get a feel for the problem area they're trying to hit.

Don't forget to throttle the CPU too. Phones can't parse and eval script nearly as fast as a laptop or desktop.

I was an Android dev for 1.5 yrs (after coming from Andorid firmware/middleware background).

In these last 4-5 months that I have been a frontend dev (angular) and have played around with chrome throttling dev tool and questions by product about load time that I realised how life is difficult for web developers and users in emerging markets.

It's not like one doesn't have to think of load time, performance, and bandwidth in Android but, there, things are quite standard to some extend when comes to achieving a decent level of performance.

One thing I have learned, and still learning, and that is avoid jquery (and esp. it's plugins) as much as you can. I mean they can pile up really fast.

Or just browse on your mobile!

Overall they're pretty quick on my Galaxy S2. A bigger concern is formatting - some adjust for mobile, others do not and the font is displayed in .5 millimetre type. :(

(perhaps I should apply for a testing job!)

Thanks for pointing this out! I had thought they all fit mobile devices just fine but I'm most probably wrong. They should all definitely be fully responsive on mobile, feel free to log an issue on their implementations if you would like to :)

As others mentioned, throttling your settings will show you that the differences actually aren't that negligible. With the Chrome devtools, throttling network connections to Regular 3G and CPU slowdown to 10X will give you a rough estimate of how mobile devices with flaky connection interact with these applications.

Another thing is that each of these implementations pre-cache most (if not all) of their static resources with a service worker -> and that's why repeat visits on each site is quite fast. Using incognito or clearing the site data and unregistering the service worker and then loading the site as a first-time visit under those throttled conditions will let you easily notice how much faster some of the implementations are then others (for example: Preact and Angular)

Use the network simulator in Chrome or the system Network Link Conditioner and it's much easier to see how much of a difference it makes when the network isn't so good

No, it was not the connection (75MBit/s), I think - it just took some seconds(!) to load.