One word: Swift It's making app bundle sizes explode in size
Swift libs are ~ 10 MB, still 265 MB to go.
App sizes are out of control
81–90 of 455 posts
Re: App sizes are out of control
#82I have been replacing traditional apps with PWA's or mobile websites wherever possible (on Android). They hardly take up any space and also seem to behave well (drains less battery) compared to traditional apps.- Twitter
- Instagram
- Flipboard
I could replace the following with PWAs:
- Uber
- Lyft
- Google news
- Shopping sites like Walmart, Wish
and many more.
Facebook and Amazon have no PWA's but have mobile websites. (Facebook mobile web works well with Opera. On other browsers it annoyingly redirects to play store to install messenger)
Re: App sizes are out of control
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
They went off the deep end with their "engineering" of the app (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... ). It's really amusing to me when "engineers" start talking about the "scale" of the UI. It's a client. Thin vs. Fat aside, if it's that fat it's almost certainly a bloated mess of redundancy and what is called "overengineering" (which is actually underengineering--that is, a deficiency…
Are these slides available anywhere? The backup link is down, too.
I don't know. I just did a search for "facebook ios can't handle our scale" because I remembered reading this some time ago.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#84I was comparison shopping something this week and wanted to check Best Buy, so I went to the app store. 100+ MB and needed to be on wifi to download. What in the Best Buy app could be over 100 MB? On another note, I just went to check some of my apps and iOS 11 got rid of the size from that view. You now need to dive into each app to see the size.
Why didnt you go staight to their web site? Its well usable on a mobile browser.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#85Normal apps are around 10 to 20mb, which is still big. But the reason for this is support for different screen resolutions. Images of different sizes are bundled with the app, even though the phone only needs on of them. Vector graphics will solve this, but is not mainstream yet. The facebook android app is 88MB (zipped), i did check the APK of why its so big: 90mb of code 30mb of assetes (javascript, metadata, librt…
I don't know the status of iOS, but Android has done some work on sending diffs on updates, so real sizes should be smaller: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/improvemen...
Doesn't do anything for size on disk, but should help network a lot.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#86The problem is it's not really in Apples interest to get app sizes smaller. Larger apps means you have more "need" to upgrade your phone to the latest version with more space, power, speed etc.
This is usually my thought when I see issues like this. If Apple wanted to fix the problem, they would fix the problem.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#87Most of the time it's the same reason why web pages are MBs in size today: lazy developers that uses a new library for every feature they need, without a deeper analysis of costs and benefits.
Not only, there is IMHO also a "technological supremacy" bias.
Quite obviously most developers will have:
1) VERY powerful hardware
2) VERY fast (and unlimited) internet connection
It's not like (they should do it as part of quality assurance or similar) they take a car, drive in some remote countryside, possibly in the middle of nowhere, stay there a couple days and try accessing their website (or running their app) on the lowest/cheaper entry level hardware on a metered connection.
It's easy when you have a T1 or faster connection on a recent top-hardware to forget how a lot of other people have slower devices, with less memory and limited bandwith and metered connection.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#88Short a major customer outcry, Apple is largely incentivized to not fix this— (1) They substantial profits from memory upsells on their product lines (2) Larger apps take more horsepower to run— so older models become less effective sooner!
But it also adds to their bandwidth and storage bills
It's probably a drop in an ocean compared to their other services.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Interesting, thanks for sharing that.
I didnt know this as the only mobile I have dabbled with has been game dev with android in which case assets are the main cause of bloat.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#90the solution is, everyone should uninstall these apps. if everyone did that, i bet you they would fix the problem reallly fast.
This is why i uninstalled pokemon go -> it used up to much data and to much battery. Uninstall -> problem solved. unfortunetly, the vast majority of people don't care about app sizes, or how much data they use, etc.