App sizes are out of control • Hacker News Board

Re: App sizes are out of control

#131

Post by whowouldathunk » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:01 PM UTC

lcnmrn wrote: post #119

whowouldathunk wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vector graphics will solve this, but is not mainstream yet. Then you're trading off battery life vs. space. Vector graphics can be far more expensive to render than bitmaps.

Why vectors can't be pre-rendered and cached?

That's what a bitmap asset is.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#132

Post by prophesi » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

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'd be interested in seeing an analysis of the Instagram app post-takeover by FB. Its size has risen considerably since then.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#133

Post by neogodless » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #106

dallamaneni wrote: post #82

I 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?

Progressive Web Apps - basically HTML5 web sites that work well on a phone, and take advantage of some newer browser features to make a web page more "app-like." Not sure if there's a distinction to be made between PWA and Single Page Applications (SPA), but in either case, you can use Service Workers, local storage, offline mode etc as well as "app" features like notifications and a homepage shortcut. The experience ends up being very much like that of an app, without a huge install.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#134

Post by jamieomatthews » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #120

It's pretty rich how these companies are well known for the rigor they apply to interviewing candidates on technical subjects, yet actually drop the ball in production with poor engineering like this. Where does that rigor go after the interviews are done? Are there any examples of well-known apps from large organizations that aren't excessively large in size?

I work on Amazon Prime Photos iOS app. It's currently 60mb in size, and a good chunk of that is the Swift runtime.

Even the main Amazon shopping app is less than 100mb.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#135

Post by rayiner » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

dallamaneni wrote: post #82

I 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…

But those websites suck down enormous amounts of data each time they load.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#136

Post by rayiner » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

dallamaneni wrote: post #82

I 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…

But those websites suck down enormous amounts of data each time they load.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#137

Post by wooter » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #86

laurencei wrote: post #74

The 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.

this incentive analysis is so shallow it doesn't pass first muster. does fitting/selling more apps make Apple more money? are storage and bandwidth expenses? do users value performance? most people here seem to agree more bloat = less users.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#138

Post by sehugg » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

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...

That second link about the FB app is hilarious. As an example, there are 3 copies of a 3.6 MB binary file used as part of an optical flow algorithm (likely for 360-degree videos)

So it's not just that there's a bit of sloppy (or pragmatically careless) packaging, but there's just a lot of stuff in these apps.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#139

Post by wott » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #50

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.

The worst part is that they probably use huge PNGs to make sure the flat graphics are clean. You know, the kind that are perfectly suitable for vector graphics .

Unless your graphic designer provides you with vector graphics embedding a vector for each pixel of the rasterised image of the original vector graphic.

Sigh...

Re: App sizes are out of control

#140

Post by djKianoosh » Tue, Aug 01, 2017, 5:05 PM UTC

lsv1 wrote: post #103

AndrewStephens wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, code coverage? How does that address the number of libraries used or duplicate versions of the same library?