Same Planet, Different Speed

Narrated

Your trip planner is getting popular. You added internationalization in the last lesson, and now people from all over the world are using it. Users in Brazil, Japan, Germany, Australia. That’s exciting. You’re going global.

Then you run a speed test. You use one of those free website speed checkers and test your app from different locations. From Virginia, where your Cloudflare deployment lives closest to, the app loads in 300 milliseconds. Snappy. From London, it’s about 800 milliseconds. Noticeable, but fine. From Tokyo, it’s 3000 milliseconds. Three full seconds. From Sao Paulo, it’s even worse.

Three seconds doesn’t sound like much. But research shows that 53 percent of mobile users abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Your Japanese users are literally leaving before they see the app. You translated the whole interface into Japanese last lesson, and they’re never getting far enough to read it.

Then something else happens. You get an email from a user in Brazil. It’s polite, one paragraph. It says: “I love your trip planner. Quick question: do you comply with LGPD?”

You have no idea what LGPD is. You google it. It’s Lei Geral de Protecao de Dados, Brazil’s data protection law. It’s similar to Europe’s GDPR but with its own specific requirements. Then you start digging and discover that Japan has APPI. California has CCPA. China has PIPL. India has DPDPA. It turns out almost every major country or region has its own data privacy law, and they all have slightly different rules about how you handle people’s personal information.

Two problems just landed on your desk at the same time. Your app is too slow for users who are far away. And different countries have different laws about what you can do with user data. Both of these problems exist because the internet is global, but the physical world isn’t. Data travels at the speed of light, but that still takes time when it’s crossing oceans. And laws stop at borders, even though your app doesn’t.

Let’s tackle both.