FastContact: A great replacement for the stock KaiOS Contacts app by Luxferre
Special thanks to Mort and Simon for editing
Today, after several months of the first release of FastContact, an open-source and super light contact app replacement for the stock Contacts app, I gave it a try. Perhaps “Super Awesome” is the best phrase I can find to describe my experience with his app.
If you've been a user of KaiOS smart feature phones, you definitely have suffered from the lag and slowness in KaiOS and its stock applications. For some apps like WhatsApp and Email, I don't suffer that much as I don't need them almost every time I unlock my phone to do something with it. The lag has at least two sources:
The KaiOS itself is based on an ancient version of Firefox, which is 48.
The app itself if the app is using JavaScript and/or CSS frameworks which are slow for KaiOS.
Luxferre on the other side has taken the approach to use no JavaScript framework in his FastContact app as well as other of his “Fast” apps, making the app as fast as possible. While I am not sure regarding the neglect of any JavaScript framework, even InfernoJS which has got a performance nearly as good as plain/vanilla JS, the performance of FastContact is more than impressive.
Two other measures for the lightness of an app are Memory and Storage usage. Taking a memory snapshot of FastContact while running shows only 0.5-0.6 MB while for the stock Contacts app on my 800 Tough, it's around 5.5 MB. One of the reasons definitely would be that the stock app shows 20 contacts at a time and has a more complex DOM structure and more complex CSS.
As for load time and storage, because FastContact loads only a little few contacts initially and because of using no “heavy” stuff is less in size which helps it load significantly faster when compared to the stock one.
In the last paragraph of the post, I make you remember that Luxferre is from Ukraine. If you are a Russian citizen perhaps it is a good advice for your government to stop the going war in Ukraine.
Bonus
Haha, one more paragraph as a bonus: You might be interested in this guide in the BananaHackers wiki which is about assigning FastContact to a hotkey to quickly open it instead of the stock alternative.