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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#311

Post by voltagex_ »

CaptSpify wrote: post #228
chubot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's your answer to your question. You forgot to optimize the images, because with your test environment, you don't notice it. If you were testing over a dial-up connection, you would notice it. Same with app writers. They forgot to optimize their app because they're testing it on the latest and greatest phones on their home network (or a corporate network which is blazing fast). If they tested on a low-end ph…

I used to work at a shop that ran a 1.5 mbps dsl line, and a ~5 year old, cheap, slow computer. If their code worked on that, it would work on any of our customer's machines. I wish devs would still test like that. Sure, your app works fine in downtown SF on the newest phone, but try using it in Nowherseville, TN, on a phone that is more than a couple years old. I bet a lot of user frustration comes from dealing with…

The Spotify app is dog slow on a Samsung S8+. Do you know how ridiculously overspecced this phone is and it can't load a Winamp clone with a terrible UI!

Hell, all of Android is far, far slower than it should be. I won't move to iOS but what Apple can do with a dual core phone is pretty amazing (and yes, I know that newer OS builds get slower).

Re: App sizes are out of control

#312

Post by verdy_p »

mahyarm wrote: post #229
mfabbri77 wrote: post #180

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.

Raster images are still faster and often you can make your png images very small and do stretching. OTOH, people do vector stuff for many things, it's just they typically don't use SVG but something more efficient. XML parsing is not lightweight compared to a binary format or some sort of vector -> code translator speed wise.

The XML parser is not much a problem: the time to parse it is insignificant compared to the waste of resources to store and transport bitmap graphics.

Bitmaps will also never be able to adapt their content gracefully to user preferences and constraints. Bitmaps have no intelligence; they are only suitable for photography, but even in this case they lack information for proper rendering, so you will nver same twice the same bitmap across devices and rendering supports

Just compare what we had in the past with bitmap fonts (now almost abandoned except for text consoles) and how we appreciate now to have scalable vector fonts.

Bitmaps are extremely complicate to adapt to any layout, whereas SVG graphics can be now self-adaptative, to render only what is needed.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#313

Post by johncolanduoni »

unholiness wrote: post #300
MBCook wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyth…

I'm talking about the binaries themselves as they are output from dex2oat. The 10x difference is I suspect a product of needing to compile parts of the standard library in addition to the app's code.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#315

Post by tylersmith »

rlv-dan wrote: post #26
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…

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 exactly it. If you start vendoring dependencies you begin to notice how much of other's people's code your software is really using.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#316

Post by cakedoggie »

fireflash38 wrote: post #102
DamnInteresting wrote: post #92

One of my first jobs was as a technician at a tech support call center. For a while around 1997-1998, a good 1/3 of our calls were customers who ordered a new system with a hard drive over 2.1GB, but Windows/DOS could only make partitions as large as 2.1GB. Customers wondered why they got a smaller hard disk than they ordered, not realizing the extra space was that Drive D under My Computer. Fast forward to today, wh…

This misses a large point of the article: It's not the storage size that is problematic as much as the transfer size. Websites and developers really need to be aware how long it will take for someone to even get your product. If a website doesn't load in X seconds, you're losing Y customers. If your app takes an hour to download, your customer has probably already moved on in frustration.

Yes, this guy doesn't seem to care at all about it, beyond writing a blog post. If he did, he would remove those huge apps and find alternatives.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#317

Post by verdy_p »

LocalH wrote: post #210
mfabbri77 wrote: post #180

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.

Because the experience is subpar when that is done. It is impossible to create a vector image that will result in clean, unblurred strokes at arbitrary small pixel sizes. Don't even suggest using TrueType-style hinting, I don't think any designer would want to touch that with a 10 foot pole.

I would have said exactly the opposite: blurred strokes belong to bitmaps, you are still thinking that pixels are square over a regular area that can opnly be rotated by multiples of 90 degrees.

SVG graphics are clean, result in NO blur at all. They don't even need any Truetype-style hinting. You've probably looked only at early non-conforming implementations using bad approximations. But precise rendering algorithms for SVG are specified and fully tested (this is not the case for bitmaps whose support is much more problementic: see what happens to photos and videos when editing them! Never twice the same result, and lot of losses and artefacts everywhere, including bad undesired effects, and notably the moiré effects which are much worse and do not reproduce what natural scaling would do in your eyes, that are not fitted to a perfect rectangular grid).

So no, it's perfectly possible to create a vector image that results in unblurred strokes at arbitrary pixel sizes. What you want is a geometric transform to exhibit more some details: it is in fact impossible to do that with bitmaps except by sending variants tuned for multiple resolutions: you do that for a limited number of resolution and assume it is enough, but this is not the case, so you add more, and finally you have enormous images that are widely redundant with each other, and better represented by converting their 2D model to 3D and an adaptive 3D-to2D projection. you'll do that easily with vector graphics, not with bitmaps (or their extensions called "mipmaps" which are only approximations not really scalable because they're still all based on discretely sampled planes).

Re: App sizes are out of control

#318

Post by wittedhaddock »

jstimpfle wrote: post #222
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.

For those who don't know, this is Parkinson's law :-)

yes! Do you remember where you learned of it by name?

(It came up for me in Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society :)

Re: App sizes are out of control

#319

Post by CaptSpify »

voltagex_ wrote: post #311
CaptSpify wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at a shop that ran a 1.5 mbps dsl line, and a ~5 year old, cheap, slow computer. If their code worked on that, it would work on any of our customer's machines. I wish devs would still test like that. Sure, your app works fine in downtown SF on the newest phone, but try using it in Nowherseville, TN, on a phone that is more than a couple years old. I bet a lot of user frustration comes from dealing with…

The Spotify app is dog slow on a Samsung S8+. Do you know how ridiculously overspecced this phone is and it can't load a Winamp clone with a terrible UI! Hell, all of Android is far, far slower than it should be. I won't move to iOS but what Apple can do with a dual core phone is pretty amazing (and yes, I know that newer OS builds get slower).

I really wish android came with better tools to let you know what is bogging down the machine. If only they hadn't gutted the linux part of it, we could have much better tools at our fingertips....

Does anyone know of a good process-viewer/resource watcher for android?

Re: App sizes are out of control

#320

Post by syrrim »

dapreja wrote: post #285
GuB-42 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern smartphones have quite competent GPUs. They can run 3D games at 1080p/60fps. They could raymarch circles around an svg icon. And if it wasn't enough, the renderings could be cached for later use.

TBH not many people consider SVG format worth the effort unless the graphic is made from scratch. 1) an organization rarely rationalizes having a UI dev spend 6 something hours either transforming an existing PNG to an SVG, or spending 12 hours compleitly replicate an existing design in photoshop only for it to be exportable as an SVG. I could be far fe5ching things but sometimes business or upper management get shor…

>replicate an existing design in photoshop

AFAIK, the majority of designs are created in photoshop or illustrator. No conversion nessecary. In any case, I would consider it a liability if I didn't have my designs in an editable format. What if tommorow I realized I wanted a variant in a different color? Or I decided I wanted to use a different background? If all I had was a bitmap logo, I would consider it worthwhile to have someone change it into a scalable format anyways, even if I wanted to transfer them as PNGs.

Also, numerous free tool exist to convert bitmaps to SVG. Using one of these, plus some manual smoothing and correction, I'm sure the conversion would take no more than half an hour.

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