data budget / note 06
Notes from a metered SIM and a three-year-old Android handset.
My plan gives me 1 GB of mobile data a month, so before I judge an H5 game on graphics I look at what it costs to load. A browser title that spends 25 MB before the start button appears is not one I can play on the bus, and the bill arrives a month later.
Measuring it is quick. Open the game, disable the cache in the browser's developer tools, reload once, and read the transferred bytes at the bottom of the network panel. A mid-range Android on 4G pulls roughly 1 MB per second where I live, so 25 MB is half a minute of staring at a loading bar. That is the real first impression.
Size also shows where the weight sits. Some pages, like id098, load the menu and the first level before anything decorative, which is how a game stays playable when the signal drops. Others put a full-screen image in front of a 300 KB script and call it a day.
Installable packages are a separate bill. If a title also ships an APK, that download lands on top of the browser version, and apk rr777 is the kind of page where I read the stated package size before tapping, because 90 MB on a metered plan is a decision rather than a tap.
Caching decides the second visit. fc888 felt fine on the first load and quicker on the second, and that is the pattern I want: the browser keeps the sprites and the page asks only for the level file. iw777 and csx 8888 both came back without pulling the whole shell again, which matters more than any spec sheet.
None of this makes a game good. It decides whether I ever reach the good part.
Written from my own phone, on my own data plan. No scripts, no trackers on this page.