So the cost is there, it's just not paid (directly) by the developer. But we all end up paying someone else's externalized cost, included said developer that is paying some other developers' externalized costs.

Yeah. I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post doing the math on that. If I spend $2000 on a computer, and that gets me a certain amount of ram and cpu and so on, we can figure out a dollar figure on that bloat.

Then multiply by the number of people who use a piece of software (eg slack) and we’d get a figure for the externalised cost of a piece of software.

Consider also the missed market opportunity: my personal devices are 13yo laptop and 9yo phone. If an app isn’t compatible or makes it lag, I delete it and download a competing one. I’m not alone, and yes: I have money to spend on your app. I just don’t want/need to upgrade hardware that often.

Worst offender being Google, who toggled on VP8 / VP9 decoding on YouTube despite the vast majority of devices only having h264 hardware decode.

The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams.