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App sizes are out of control

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251–260 of 455 posts

Re: App sizes are out of control

#251
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because different graphics are shown are different resolutions, rather than purely scaling a highly detailed 1024x1024 SVG down to 128x128.

>1024x1024 SVG Vectors don't have pixels.

The point is still valid. An SVG designed for a high DPI screen will most likely look bad on a low DPI screen.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#252
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the customers are the ones who are paying for that inefficiency, not the company. You can bet that those companies' infrastructure is optimized to hell and back.

You know, I'm not currently an Uber customer because their app is too big and I don't have enough spare space on my phone. There were a few times already that I thought about using them, but couldn't install it right at the time.

OK, so that's one. How many people even look? I have no idea what size the applications on my phone are.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#253
post #91

Things will only get worse. The application paradigm is unsustainable. https://medium.com/@miguelrochefort/the-application-paradigm...

You're entirely right, but "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" certainly applies to the entire "tech" industry, and the app factory in particular. I expect this realization will only become widespread when open-source folks actually fix their software's deep-seated usability problems. The way to do that is not by hiring UX designers or appifying…

...So by hiring / lucking into someone whose job it is to look at UX. Like a designer.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It's because every metric anyone has ever gathered says that users don't care. A lot of people go to wal-mart. Doesn't mean that it's a good thing overall for mankind

If you're looking for apps to be developed "for the good of mankind," without consideration of profitability, then you're going to have to have a different model than the pursuit of profit.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#255
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because different graphics are shown are different resolutions, rather than purely scaling a highly detailed 1024x1024 SVG down to 128x128.

>1024x1024 SVG Vectors don't have pixels.

But they do generally have a nominal size at which the artist considers the render to be optimal... no need to be so short.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#256
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because different graphics are shown are different resolutions, rather than purely scaling a highly detailed 1024x1024 SVG down to 128x128.

>1024x1024 SVG Vectors don't have pixels.

However, they usually are designed around a target size. And it's quite possible that, scaled too small, much of the detail is lost. Hence why you'd still want different vector files for different resolutions.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#257
I have a limited understanding of how this works, but could it be that app devs are leaving debug stuff in the builds, and not removing that when it gets pushed to production?

Please, educate me. I'm all ears. :)

Re: App sizes are out of control

#258

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…

A simple solution to this would be for Apple (or the developer, via Apple) to distribute different builds based on the device installing the app. That is, developers could compile a different copy of the IPA for all target devices. Using variables like CPU architecture, screen size, and other feature flags, a smart compiler could cut a lot of code and assets that never run or display on certain devices. (Granted, thi…

I think they already do that with bitcode. You upload the LLVM bitcode and it will generate the code for the appropriate architecture as needed. It's standard when you upload your app to iTunes. They don't use your source code for that.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

pcwalton's project Pathfinder ( https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder ) may eventually lead to an efficient GPU-based vector renderer, which would make this feasible.

I mean, it's feasible now; plenty of folks use vector rendering: Caching the result makes the CPU rendering much easier to deal with. The GPU would really help more with animations and dynamically constructed vectors.

In any case, I suspect something like lyon (https://github.com/nical/lyon) would be a better fit than pathfinder, which is both a) not super portable and b) very focused on rendering text, which it does very well.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#260

I remember when apps used to take less than 4k of memory, because 4k was all the RAM in your computer. Then I remember downloading a 3 MB mp3 on my 9600 baud modem and being amazed at how much space was taken up by music that sounded realistic and not like just a bunch of beeps out of speakers that could only make beeps. Then came the old joke about EMACS standing for "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping". Then I reme…

Right? I just got a new phone that has 128 Gb of internal storage. 334 Mb app? no problem.
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