I Decompiled the White House's New App
blog.thereallo.dev
The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes, and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages.
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What Is This App?

It’s a React Native app built with Expo (SDK 54), running on the Hermes JavaScript engine. The backend is WordPress with a custom REST API. The app was built by an entity called “forty-five-press” according to the Expo config.

  • mr_anny@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    687·
    24 hours ago

    I can’t say anything about the content of this blog. It was horribly laggy to scroll on mobile device. And by horribly laggy, I mean like aunt’s 1986 vacation slide show on a projector while having dry cookies and tasteless off brand earl grey.

    I’m sorry if it sounds rude but I had to bring this on out in the open. What even runs under the hood on that blog…

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      291·
      24 hours ago

      It’s a bit funny that it’s completely at odds with how they describe their goals (emphasis mine):

      I am thereallo, a web developer who makes things look pretty and work smoothly >w< been building stuff since 2020, mostly frontend but i can do fullstack too! i use react, next.js, and tailwind css because they just work, and motion for animations that don’t feel plastic. i prototype in figma, steal components from shadcn/ui when i’m lazy, and deploy to vercel or cloudflare depending on the vibe~ i used to reverse engineer games (genshin leaks era lol) but now i just make websites that don’t suck. i know typescript, python, go, and dabbled in rust and lua. my goal is making ui that feels human such as smooth feedback, clear buttons, keyboard accessible, no confusing bs. mobile first always! outside coding i listen to vocaloid and play project sekai, which definitely influences my color choices uwu. oh and i care way too much about bundle sizes and performance. currently learning native ios/android development. hmu on discord or github if u wanna chat! ♡

      • nawa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        23 hours ago

        It wasn’t horribly laggy on my Pixel but it definitely was less performant than a page like this should be.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      7·
      15 hours ago

      Even if the effect didn’t lag, there’s almost no added benefit to it. The title is cut off, and the description is even worse.

      If the author wanted to, they could have done something like this with no scripts, minimum effort, and probably zero lag.

      (If OP’s website chugged for you, I’m curious whether this demo is seamlessly smooth. It is for me.)

    • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      23 hours ago

      Worked fine for me, but I block ads and trackers on my home network so that probably helped.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      23 hours ago

      Yea for me too, it appears to be something we the title header following your scroll. It’s super smooth just until it tries to pin it to the top.

      Reader mode works until I realised that they did explain the pictures, so just referenced text I didn’t see.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Not a performance problem. My guess is, they (poorly) emulate native scrolling via JS on mobile. Probably for some progress feature or something.

      JS disabled, scrolling works. Though it was only slightly laggy for me.

      • grinde@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        23 hours ago

        Unfortunately all of the code blocks are loaded after-the-fact with JS for some asinine reason (highlighting I’d understand… but why the actual text?), so disabling JS also disables all the code snippets on the page.

      • alakey@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        23 hours ago

        Definitely a performance problem, no HW acceleration on PC produces the same insanely stuttery scroll.