Our app downloaded is just under 100MB. Biggest part? Google Maps For Business at 30MB. Why do we use this monstrosity? We signed some marketing deal with Google. We have a replacement using Apple Maps thats about 2MB. But the beancounters won't let us use it because of the $. Not every size problem is some programmers fault.
App sizes are out of control
291–300 of 455 posts
Re: App sizes are out of control
#292Re: App sizes are out of control
#293Re: App sizes are out of control
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuzzy reasons abound, but you do occasionally see this. One major often-complete-blocker that I've seen though has been ungood rendering, so results aren't always identical on all devices. You can't really rely on the device's possibly-weird implementation (who knows what the OEM did to it)(except on iThings probably), so you're forced to bundle an svg renderer that works reliably on all devices and has consistent be…
Hand tweaking for specific resolutions is an art. You can't expect to just render SVG and get equivalent results.
even if you provide one svg for each range, you still gets massive size savings for 99.9% of icons
Re: App sizes are out of control
#295Folks: there's a built-in technology on your phone that allows you to load and run an app on-demand over the internet without dedicating any internal storage at all! It allows clean integration with many of the "native" features you expect like camera and notification and timers and stuff. And it's based on completely open standards with multiple, competing open source implementations. No, seriously: uninstall that j…
Facebook in particular likes to break their web apps to push you to use the native one. If you ever need to use Facebook in the browser try mbasic.facebook.com(it even includes their messenger).
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1367/
Re: App sizes are out of control
#296Earlier 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 can bet that those companies' infrastructure is optimized to hell and back. You'd be surprised. (Source: I work at a unicorn.)
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Re: App sizes are out of control
#297Don't download them? Out of those apps the only one you actually need is Uber, everything else can be replaced with a web browser. I don't download anything larger than 5MB unless I absolutely need it.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 do…
Thanks for indicating lyon, that looks very nice. I mentioned Pathfinder because path rendering on GPU is important on mobile devices (battery and heat concerns).
Re: App sizes are out of control
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, so that's one. How many people even look? I have no idea what size the applications on my phone are.
Do you have a lot of space on your phone, or just not use a lot of apps or media? People might not have the same situation as you.
I have a 64 GB phone with a fair amount of apps and media. I don't know if it's more or less than average.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java byte code is generally much smaller than equivalent machine code. If you use something like Multi-OS engine which statically compiles Java bytecode to native code for iOS it's fairly typical to see an order of magnitude difference in binary size. This actually affects Android 5+ too (Multi-OS engine uses Android's AOT compiler) but since it happens on the device it doesn't affect download sizes.
Really? I've never heard that before. I'd guess it would be bigger if anything. Any idea why that is?
It's true, Java bytecode was basically designed for small size. The goal was to transmit java apps quickly over the internet, a hope which mostly died off as JS took over, but which in some ways has been reborn with android (dalvik bytecode is somewhat different but is definitely small). The main tradeoff for the small size is a total lack of optimization until the JIT compilation stage.
But there's no way it's anything like a 10x difference. There's definitely something else going on here, like some quirk about how the app store is calculating the sizes of assets.