

Ask HN: Mobile dev...large JSON or multiple requests? - whittwuli

When doing mobile development is it better to return a large JSON object with all the referential data or to make multiple requests to get the data. Also what is considered a large JSON response for mobile.<p>Thanks.
======
cleverjake
Depends on a lot of things.

Where will the users be? If they are in america/western europe/japan/korea,
etc, mobile download speed is usually pretty fast, but the latency can be
killer. In this case, I would tend to go more towards one large JSON request.
The only reason I wouldn't is if it was something that requires a lot of
communication (a chat app, for instance). In that case, since it is a high
frequency of updates, I would work on making those updates as small as
possible.

If it is a lot of users in poorly connected areas, where data is super
expensive, just cut everything down as absolutely small as possible.

also - remember to remove all unnecessary whitespace and turn on compression
on your server.

