Didn't Apple implement delta updates for apps?
App sizes are out of control
101–110 of 455 posts
Re: App sizes are out of control
#102One of my first jobs was as a technician at a tech support call center. For a while around 1997-1998, a good 1/3 of our calls were customers who ordered a new system with a hard drive over 2.1GB, but Windows/DOS could only make partitions as large as 2.1GB. Customers wondered why they got a smaller hard disk than they ordered, not realizing the extra space was that Drive D under My Computer. Fast forward to today, wh…
This misses a large point of the article:
It's not the storage size that is problematic as much as the transfer size. Websites and developers really need to be aware how long it will take for someone to even get your product. If a website doesn't load in X seconds, you're losing Y customers. If your app takes an hour to download, your customer has probably already moved on in frustration.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#103Earlier 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.
There are many reasons why apps are so big, but I think you are right about a major part of the problem. Development environments these days make it very easy to add in third party libraries for very little effort. At a previous job we had a monolithic java server that ended up at over 350Mb of compiled code simply because each development team had imported whatever libraries they thought they needed. In some cases,…
This is why code coverage is so important as part of the general development cycle.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#104There 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...
[deleted]
Re: App sizes are out of control
#105What blogging engine is this? Real nice and clean.
There is a reference to django.css in the source, assuming you meant the style. As the blogging engine wouldn't necessarily dictate the cleanliness of the look.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#106I 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. I could replace the following with PWAs: - Twitter - Uber - Lyft - Google news - Instagram - Flipboard - Shopping sites like Walmart, Wish and many more. Facebook and Amazon have no PWA's but have mobile webs…
PWAs? Public Welfare Assistance schemes?
Re: App sizes are out of control
#107Re: App sizes are out of control
#108I wonder is this is due to lack of generics in objc.
Objective-C has fully dynamic dispatch. In a context like that, generics are just a type safety thing to ensure that you aren't sending messages to the wrong type — they don't make the executable any smaller.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#109I never understand where this increasing size comes from. For videos or hi-res photographs, I understand. There is however no reason that code, either compiled to a binary format or in a textual format, uses so much data. Heck, the memoirs of Casanova spans 3000 pages, and is 6,5 MB. People don't understand how incredibly large a megabyte is for simple code. Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what comp…
Too many programmers, too many templates and frameworks, poor factoring, too much code reuse, bad build configurations, and lack of LTO.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#110I never understand where this increasing size comes from. For videos or hi-res photographs, I understand. There is however no reason that code, either compiled to a binary format or in a textual format, uses so much data. Heck, the memoirs of Casanova spans 3000 pages, and is 6,5 MB. People don't understand how incredibly large a megabyte is for simple code. Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what comp…
Lots of things. Most companies now have huge development teams and that means that you're going to get a lot of duplicate and triplicate media assets. Duplicate and triplicate static libraries and frameworks (which Apple is trying to address with it's new dyld improvements[1]). As you also can't forget all of the analytics and A/B testing frameworks that are put in place. Each one of these apps can actually probably run 100^2 permutations of the app.