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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#51

Post by potatolicious »

silassales wrote: post #36
vec wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge chunk of that probably goes to, well, videos or hi-res photographs to be used in building the UI. Hi-res splash screens plus a bunch of hero images plus 2+ prerendered sizes of each display element for different pixel densities plus a dozen 30 second tutorial videos can easily add up to a couple hundred megs of assets alone.

I think a large factor is the ever increasing need to have different display sizes for different pixel densities, developers essentially have to create and package a couple versions of the same application into one package and that is alot of waste.

At least in the context of this article (iOS app bloat) this is no longer the case - developers upload all assets for all pixel densities, but Apple repackages for each specific device, so that each device only gets one set of assets. Same goes for binaries for multiple architectures - each device only gets the binary for its specific CPU architecture.

Also to the GP's point - Apple also now no longer supports splash screen images, so that element of bloat is no longer a factor (though some legacy apps have retained them pointlessly).

I think for non-game apps assets are not the primary driver of bloat.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#52

Post by Swizec »

potatolicious wrote: post #40
rlv-dan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that whenever coders today need some fairly trivial functionality, they tend to go out and find a library that contains it. So you end up with lots and lots of libraries where only a tiny bits of them are used. Just a hypothesis though.

I think this is likely the biggest culprit. Another user pointed out an analysis of the Facebook app: http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707 Most of it is actual code - not assets. For some types of apps (see: games) assets do take up a significant portion of total size, but for most everyday apps bloat by code over-inclusion is likely a bigger problem than asset-bloat. I wonder if it's possible to get major open-source libs…

> I wonder if it's possible to get major open-source libs to move towards more fine-grained build targets and internal dependency management, so that devs don't pull in a gigantic binary when they're only using a small slice of the functionality.

Fwiw, this is already a trend in JavaScript land. Libraries are moving towards many small packages so you can import only the parts you need either manually or using a tool like Webpack to throw away what isn't used.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#54

Post by ge0rg »

msoad wrote: post #44

One word: Swift It's making app bundle sizes explode in size

Could you please elaborate, or provide examples?

I can see how high-res pictures embedded in the app can add dozens of megabytes, and maybe a different runtime that you have to bundle for compat reasons, but multiple hundreds of MB?

Re: App sizes are out of control

#55

Post by marcusjt »

custos wrote: post #15

I have a cheap phone, and due to this I can only have like 6 apps installed at a time. I'm constantly removing Facebook/Messenger for situations like when I had to download Ticketmaster app for a concert ticket. And with all these apps disallowing you from moving them to SD card, I can't even really use my 32GB SD card for them.

There's also Facebook Lite https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.l...

And if Play Store won't let you install it then download & install manually from here http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/facebook-2/lite/

Re: App sizes are out of control

#58

Post by vanderZwan »

gok wrote: post #38

Awesomely, this blog post of less than 200 words and one screenshot loads over 1.41 MB for me. Software expands to fill all available resources.

For the few among us who haven't read "The Website Obesity Crisis", this is as good an excuse as any to link it again:

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Re: App sizes are out of control

#59

Post by r0ze-at-hn »

The only real solution I can think of would be if apple actually incentivized app creators to reduce their size. They are actively harming the Apple ecosystem by preventing users from having a large number of apps which hurts Apple.

* Charge owners a fee for apps over a certain size "a processing fee" or whatnot

* Charge owners a fee based on the download costs. Under XMB and it is free. The more you cost apple to transfer your app to their customer the larger the fee.

* Penalize large apps in the app store search results or give bonus to smaller apps.

Or rather than straight up bonus's / penalize apps based on size go after specific things that cause bloat

* Apps that don't use pngcrush on their png's

* Shipping wav files and not acc

* ...

Maybe Apple doesn't even need to actually implement any of these, but just threaten to.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#60

Post by trevor-e »

Xorlev wrote: post #11
ghostly_s wrote: post #4

There were a few articles with actual content on this topic covered on Daring Fireball in recent months. Not sure what this blog blurb is adding to the conversation. 1. https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth 2. http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707 3. https://blog.halide.cam/one-weird-trick-to-lose-size-c0a4013...

It's a blog, the content doesn't have to be novel. That said, the author would improve the post by replicating your context links.

Yea, I wasn't trying to think too hard about the subject, I know there are many excellent posts out there already (like those linked above) that go into detail. I only wanted to show some actual download numbers to demonstrate how absurd it has become. Linking those other articles is a great idea, thanks for the feedback!
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