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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#151

Post by [deleted] »

whowouldathunk wrote: post #43
TeeWEE wrote: post #18

Normal 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…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: App sizes are out of control

#152

Post by Kiro »

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…

What exactly is the difference between a PWA and a mobile website?

Re: App sizes are out of control

#153

Post by adamnemecek »

chc wrote: post #145
adamnemecek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make code reuse possible. Watch this Sean Parent video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4moyKUHApq4 where he estimates that if Photoshop was rewritten using generics, the code size would go from 3,000,000 LOC to 30,000 LOC. You are right, during compilation, generics are specialized so you end up with code, however going all in on generics removes a lot of accidental complexity.

I think you've misunderstood my point. What code reuse is possible with generics that is not not possible in Objective-C without generics? I don't think there is very much, because Objective-C fundamentally doesn't care the types of objects.

The full answer would be kinda long but this is a rehash of the debate that has been had many times over.

You cannot just compare obj-c vs generics, you need to also account for the fact that when you are obj-c development, you might need some fast code and as a result drop to c. And code reuse is hard to impossible in C.

The fact that code reuse can be done without a performance hit is enough of a difference difference on it's own as it pushes down the level at which code reuse can be done. E.g. you can use generics for Graphics or Audio or general low level stuff.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#154

Post by jimbobjim »

The reason the LinkedIn app is so big is the number of frameworks they use. 87 frameworks accounting for 248MB of the 277. The swift runtime takes up about 20MB, and something called VoyagerFeed takes up over 190. All the images actually only make up about 12MB. There's also about 0.5MB for each localisation.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#155

Post by thehardsphere »

jaclaz wrote: post #87
twsted wrote: post #62

Most 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)…

This absolutely.

I wouldn't be surprised if half of the outrage about file sizes simply comes from the fact that there are people who remember what software was like before all of this "technological supremacy" was a thing. People joining the workforce today didn't grow up with the experience of installing something off of seven floppy disks, which would have been considered an emormous program before the CD-ROM drive was common. They also don't know how much better those programs run, because they had to do so with 8 MB of memory or less and nowhere near 1 GB of hard drive space.

It's pure decadence.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#156

Post by allannienhuis »

rayiner wrote: post #135
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.

Not if they use caching (whether service worker based or not) aggressively.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#157

Post by hengheng »

jamieomatthews wrote: post #134
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.

I'll bite. In what ways can you use up 100MByte with a fancy reimplementation of an online shop? That should be enough for a text to speech engine, or a 3d engine with quite a few assets.

I am being deliberately ignorant, having no idea what functionality one might add, but I'm actually genuinely curious. All that I see is a small databse and a lot of assets that are being downloaded on the fly.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#158

Post by progval »

trevor-e wrote: post #64
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.

Sorry for the extra bandwidth, forgot to optimize the images.

Images do not seem to be the biggest culprit (unless you already fixed them). I see 200kB of images and 600kB of javascript (most of which comes from disqus)

Re: App sizes are out of control

#159

Post by vladdanilov »

The situation is messy. Take Facebook.app. The reported size on the App Store is 377MB, the distributed .ipa is 241MB. But it is a universal app which includes fat binaries arm_v7 and arm64 and all the graphics 1x, 2x and 3x. App Thinning halves that size for end users. Yet the App Store reports the full size.

There's more. App Store also provides some sort of delta updates [1], which save a lot bandwidth, but failing to report it properly again [2].

App Thinning does not work for standalone image assets. It means you are forced to use Asset Catalogs where all PNG files are stored as LZFSE (previously zip) compressed BGRA bitmaps. It's good. But optimized PNG files can be 30-50% smaller on average. I'm fighting this [3] but not sure if there's a simple solution.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1779/_index...

[2] https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/878051126704254976

[3] https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/892015508203216896

Re: App sizes are out of control

#160

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #69
noahmbarr wrote: post #7

Short 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 if Android apps are smaller and faster, people will switch over to Android.

[deleted]
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