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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#331

Post by [deleted] »

jamescostian wrote: post #127
cyphar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the right solution to the problem. Nobody wants libleftpad.so, and as someone who works on a distribution the very concept is horrific (making distribution packages for every three-line package does not make anyone happy). What I think GP was arguing for is that you have libstring.so which you can strip down to just having leftpad or w/e with Kconfig or similar configurations (preferably at link…

JavaScript people do not create libleftpad.so, they create libleftpad.o (metaphorically speaking), which will not clutter up your distribution, it will just clutter up some apps. I'd rather see 50 little files like libleftpad.o than 5 gigantic libraries. But I agree with what you're saying in the second paragraph, which actually sounds just like what my GP meant by using "Webpack to throw away what isn't used". Havin…

[deleted]

Re: App sizes are out of control

#332

Post by chii »

marcosdumay wrote: post #239
richardwhiuk wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At which point everyone who moves fast will beat you.

Will them? Amazon differential is not the quality of their app. Unless they create something really impressive some day, they can only lose customers by moving faster there. Besides, none of those are small startups anymore. All of them have something to lose.

There might be countless number of failed chat/social apps that failed due to their time spent engineering something like size reduction or code quality. You probably just never hear about them, since you know they failed to get traction.

So size being a problem seems only true for engineers. A normal user don't care as long as their device still works. And apple won't care since they can use this as an opportunity to up sell larger devices.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#333

Post by johncolanduoni »

MBCook wrote: post #288
johncolanduoni wrote: post #283

Earlier 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?

Many things that Java does with a single instruction take much more than that in the target architecture. For example, virtual calls (which are used almost everywhere in Java) take several instructions on x86 and ARM while only one in Java or Dalvik bytecode.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#334

Post by kalleboo »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #203
gregoriol wrote: post #178

I tweeted some frustation about this a few days ago ( https://twitter.com/GregoryOriol/status/889859849353383937 ). What is surprising me, is that in the Facebook iOS app, there is a "FBSharedFramework.framework" that has a binary file of 215MB. What the fuck is this? How a single binary can get that big?

Facebook is THE mother lode of terrible engineering. They have turned it into an "art". You can see it across their end user offerings, as well as their open source ones. What is perplexing is that they have some of the most talented engineers out there. I'm guessing those people are using the resources of the company to research and do what is interesting to them, while clowns run the actual projects.

And here's a source to prove it: http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...

> "In the case of the Facebook application, there are more than 18,000 classses in the application"

18,000 classes. Absolutely ridiculous.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#335

Post by chii »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #325
flukus wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that users don't care, they just don't know it's an issue or who to blame. When they're out of space on their phone the blame whatever company logo appears on the phone, they don't blame the authors of a dozen bloated apps they installed.

This. People blamed Apple for them running out of space on a 16 GB phone. I agree photos, videos, and music take up space, but the first iPhone had 4 GB of storage. The iPod Shuffle had 500 MB. Not exactly apples to apples comparison, but Snapchat used to be about 5 MB, and now it’s over 100!

Could Snap have made the current app using only 6mb of space?

I'm sure they could, but i suspect the engineering effort would've been much greater. That's money down the drain if it turns out users don't care, or their competitors released earlier and grabbed more market share.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#336

Post by throwaway7645 »

magnetic wrote: post #258
chatmasta wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mean "bytecode" or is "bitcode" a thing?

Re: App sizes are out of control

#337

Post by chii »

cakedoggie wrote: post #316
fireflash38 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps the lament is that because nobody else cares, you can't actually find an app that is small to replace with!

Re: App sizes are out of control

#338

Post by chii »

cprecioso wrote: post #35
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 it also adds to their bandwidth and storage bills

Which they can easily price into the cost of the device, or into the cost of the app.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#339

Post by cakedoggie »

chii wrote: post #337
cakedoggie wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps the lament is that because nobody else cares, you can't actually find an app that is small to replace with!

There are lots of apps smaller and better than some of these. Consider the running app? Or using facebook in Safari.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#340

Post by sitharus »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #336
magnetic wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you mean "bytecode" or is "bitcode" a thing?

bitcode is indeed a thing, its a file format for LLVM IR https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/

It's not really a bytecode as it's not interpreted, but that's debatable.

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