THD Lite

Thursday, September 11, 2025. I make a Reddit post titled "Home Depot's app is slow, so I'm making a better one".

In less than 4 hours, the post gets over a 100+ comments and 4k likes, and as of today (January 1, 2025) sits at 1.1K comments, 8.8K likes, and 1.7M views. If you're wondering what community sentiment was like, the top comment sums it up:

"Amazing! I always wonder how these huge corps manage to make such bloated steaming piles of garbage (and I don't think HD's is even the worst). Meanwhile one talented person cranks out something better."

— teh_trout, 2 minutes and 53 seconds after the post was published.

1. Where it all began

I was with my dad looking for materials to finish building a studio booth. On one particular day, we were looking for an acrylic window (a cheaper, lighter, durable option to glass).

Looking around the store, the prices we saw hovered around $150.

My dad hands me his phone, tells me to find something cheaper that we can buy today. I open the Home Depot app, but unfortunately for me, that's when the app decides to have a stroke.

Simply opening the app felt like a gut-wrenching eternity, dismissing popup after popup, then having to wait for the search bar to load.

No, not the search results, the search bar!

After 2 minutes, it finally permitted me to use the keyboard. I searched up "Acrylic Windows," and then the akward part began.

This intensely long period of just waiting... waiting... waiting...

Mind you, this entire time my dad is standing there waiting for me, and I have no words to account for the delay except, "it's slow ¯\_(ツ)_/¯." Akward... and it just looks bad.

Eventually, after 6 or 7 minutes, we finally give up and save it for another day. That was the breaking point for me.

2. I've had enough

Perhaps the pain can be best described visually. Imagine you're in the store, you're in a rush, and you're using the WiFi that is, to say the least, not the best.

You have one goal, find the aisle/bay for the mop buckets.

Go on your phone and open the Home Depot app.

How fun is that? You have to wait for it to load before you can even start searching for products. Wait a while, it eventually does load.

Alright, now press the "Search" bar and search for "mop bucket."

Ah yes, the hallmark of modern software. Load the title and image, and then placeholders for the rest. How long they'll stay as placeholders is anyone's guess.

After a few seconds (sometimes minutes), it finally fully loads. But wait, what's that? It doesn't even give you the aisle!

Now you have to click on the product and go through another grueling page load.

After that, you've finally got all the information you needed.

Oops, spoke too soon. Of course, it can't load all the content at once, that would be an unreasonable expectation 🙄. I mean, just look at Menards.

This is where the app seems to take the longest, if not stop altogether. Many people have told me that at this point, they give up and go about to find an associate. Lucky for us, the page eventually does load.

The pain doesn't end there, there's much more I could go on about, like:

Filtering in search results
Sorting by Price
Scrolling through product images
Product images, description, reviews are janky
The screen jumps while you're pressing a button, causing you to press something else

As someone who's built many good apps (and bad), I have the expierence to say, "Yeah, none of this necessary".

A page load before showing the search bar is not necessary. Loading the titles & images without the rest of the information is not necessary. Hiding the aisle/bay in the product page rather than in the search results is not necessary. And loading like molasses is definitely not necessary.

You don't need to take my word about it, others have been complaing about this for a long time: Home Depot app is ass.

3. So, I made my own app

It really... puts it into perspective, doesn't it? Check out everyone's reaction.

"Hell, I knew there app is slow and trashy. But you really pointed it out. Kudos to you." - No-Adhesiveness6841

"things I didn't know I needed. we thank you for your service" - Kunia-102

"I hope home depot and other stores buy your app." - TryShootingBetter

THD Lite is currently in beta, but you can join our Discord group for early access and provide feedback to help development.

It's only available for Android right now, but read if you'd like to change that!

Users in the Discord seem to be liking it :)

"Dude... this is amazing. I was expecting it to be better than the HD app, but not this good. You just made my job easier. I will definitely be giving any feedback I can."

4. Donations

THD Lite is an app I work on entirely on my free personal time. Since the very beginning of the Discord group (September 18, 2025), I've been pondering the question of donations.

Many users who've tried the app have expressed their willingness to give multiple times, but I've always said, "not yet, later, maybe one day."

I hesitated at first because I worried about the risk that Home Depot might shut this app down, which means donors wouldn't be receiving the app they supported.

Even though I know many of the users are comfortable with donating given the risk, I just wasn't. In addition, I didn't want THD Lite to feel like an obligation because, honestly, I simply couldn't dedicate the time to meet such an obligation.

Several times, everyday development and app updates would slowly come to a halt for weeks straight, before picking back up again. If I were to accept money for a project, I'd want to make sure to give regular and consistent updates.

I know donations wouldn't suddenly turn THD Lite into an obligation, given that donations aren't contracts and I've happily worked on it for free, but it's a feeling I struggle to shake off.

4.1 So, what's changed?

Time. I've come up with a schedule so that I could consistently (albeit slowly) develop the app and make updates.

Plus, I've realized that not accepting donations has been hampering development on THD Lite. And not just on this app, but on my other projects as well.

App Development is a resource-intensive [thing] that requires powerful hardware and tools. You can get by with cheaper hardware but it's like draining water meter box manually.

In addition, THD Lite is an Android-only project, but I'd like for it to work on iOS as well.

However, that requires a capable Mac and iPhone, on top of fees for an Apple App Store account. Here's an estimate I made a couple while back on Discord: