I noticed that my Lighthouse scores for Mobile with Simulated Throttling were lower than expected - around 50-60. I wanted to look into this to find out what I could do to improve it.
I looked into this quite a bit and found that the same Lighthouse scores for Uber, AirBnB, and Pizza Hut were even lower! (8, 23 and 0 respectively!) This was not making sense to me so I asked about it on StackOverflow. Yesterday a Lighthouse core contributor responded and solved the mystery.
Connor Clark: This is working as expected. Lighthouse, by default and with the settings you showed, throttles the network speed and CPU (simulated). See lighthouse/throttling.md at main · GoogleChrome/lighthouse · GitHub
Me: Yes, but I think it’s just supposed to emulate normal mobile phone network/CPU speeds – and those sites do work on most mobile phones.
Connor Clark: No, it’s meant to emulate low end mobile devices and network speeds. (source: I’m a core contributor to Lighthouse) see this nice ~1 minute clip from my colleague for a nice summary on why we target low end devices: youtu.be/XxvHY4wC8Co?t=95