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App sizes are out of control

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191–200 of 455 posts

Re: App sizes are out of control

#191

Post by spyspy »

mfabbri77 wrote: post #180
vladdanilov wrote: post #159

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 failin…

I was wondering why not use SVG (or any other vector file format) files and render all the graphic on the device, instead of including tons of PNG at various resolutions.

I'm guessing but it seems logical that phones are not the place you want to do extra graphics rendering if you don't have to.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#192

Post by jayd16 »

kutkloon7 wrote: post #16

I 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…

>Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what compression ratios you get on 'apps'), and it should be possible to cut it down to a few MB.

This is pretty tone def. The bulk of apps are audio and ui assets and the compression rates on those are quite good.

That said, the compression rate for iOS apps is horrible as Apple decides to encrypt and then compress the binaries, completely blowing apart the compression ratio of duplicate data.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#193

Post by saagarjha »

mfabbri77 wrote: post #180
vladdanilov wrote: post #159

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 failin…

I was wondering why not use SVG (or any other vector file format) files and render all the graphic on the device, instead of including tons of PNG at various resolutions.

iOS vector asset catalogs (which use PDFs) actually don't support true vector rendering; any vector images are converted to PNGs at compile time.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#194

Post by babesh »

mtl_usr wrote: post #177
jarjoura wrote: post #146

Those numbers are mostly unfair. For some reason in the iOS 10 App Store, Apple started listing the complete fat (both 32-bit and 64-bit archs) submitted .ipa size. If you want to easily test that, clear your cellular data usage, update one of those apps (or install) and then go back to settings and see the actual bytes transferred. Also, most everyone is using Swift in some small part, so that automatically includes…

I'm as far to mobile development as I can be but is there no shared libraries on those platforms ? Other than the environment provided ones, isn't it possible to bundle some dynamically loaded libraries that can be shared by multiple apps ? Makes absolutely no sense for each application to implement it's own web browser/runtime. Can't believe we are constantly reinventing the wheel again.

For iOS, there are the shared libraries provided by the OS. UIKit, PhotoKit, etc...

Shared libraries beyond that would bring the hell of version incompatibility. One need only look at Apple’s evolution of Swift where there still isn’t binary compatibility?

Most people don’t want to crack open their phone and set paths so that their app has a version of Python that works with it.

Also shared libraries can be giant security holes. See the bug in AFNetworking that affected many thousands of apps. Imagine an errant app shipping a backdoor into a shared networking library.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#195

Post by LeoNatan25 »

Azkar wrote: post #167
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?

It's hard to move fast and have a well engineered product.

Then don't move fast. It's as simple as that. Move at the pace that you can sustain a reasonably engineered app.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#196

Post by richardwhiuk »

mtl_usr wrote: post #177
jarjoura wrote: post #146

Those numbers are mostly unfair. For some reason in the iOS 10 App Store, Apple started listing the complete fat (both 32-bit and 64-bit archs) submitted .ipa size. If you want to easily test that, clear your cellular data usage, update one of those apps (or install) and then go back to settings and see the actual bytes transferred. Also, most everyone is using Swift in some small part, so that automatically includes…

I'm as far to mobile development as I can be but is there no shared libraries on those platforms ? Other than the environment provided ones, isn't it possible to bundle some dynamically loaded libraries that can be shared by multiple apps ? Makes absolutely no sense for each application to implement it's own web browser/runtime. Can't believe we are constantly reinventing the wheel again.

It would have to entirely app stored manage - it's not possible for iOS developers to currently share code between apps.

Everything that is shared between apps currently is stuff that's provided by the shared platform.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#197

Post by saagarjha »

mtl_usr wrote: post #177
jarjoura wrote: post #146

Those numbers are mostly unfair. For some reason in the iOS 10 App Store, Apple started listing the complete fat (both 32-bit and 64-bit archs) submitted .ipa size. If you want to easily test that, clear your cellular data usage, update one of those apps (or install) and then go back to settings and see the actual bytes transferred. Also, most everyone is using Swift in some small part, so that automatically includes…

I'm as far to mobile development as I can be but is there no shared libraries on those platforms ? Other than the environment provided ones, isn't it possible to bundle some dynamically loaded libraries that can be shared by multiple apps ? Makes absolutely no sense for each application to implement it's own web browser/runtime. Can't believe we are constantly reinventing the wheel again.

> isn't it possible to bundle some dynamically loaded libraries that can be shared by multiple apps

Yes, there is one: the standard library, provided by Apple. However, many apps eschew this to use their own libraries and frameworks for whatever reason, be it ease of use or feature enhancements, and these cannot be shared.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#198

Post by richardwhiuk »

jayd16 wrote: post #192
kutkloon7 wrote: post #16

I 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…

>Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what compression ratios you get on 'apps'), and it should be possible to cut it down to a few MB. This is pretty tone def. The bulk of apps are audio and ui assets and the compression rates on those are quite good. That said, the compression rate for iOS apps is horrible as Apple decides to encrypt and then compress the binaries, completely blowing apart the compress…

Compress then encrypt is continually a source of vulnerabilities.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#199

Post by richardwhiuk »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #195
Azkar wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to move fast and have a well engineered product.

Then don't move fast. It's as simple as that. Move at the pace that you can sustain a reasonably engineered app.

At which point everyone who moves fast will beat you.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#200

Post by richardwhiuk »

mschuster91 wrote: post #142
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?

> Are there any examples of well-known apps from large organizations that aren't excessively large in size? This is nothing new. Look how much memory your typical Java desktop app, or worse, your average Java server app, uses. As soon as you have enterprises involved where it's regular occurrence for devs to be outfitted with the shiniest and beefiest (as perks or per standard company policy) developers won't care ab…

It's not that Devs don't care. It's because every metric anyone has ever gathered says that users don't care.
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