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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#371

Post by kijin »

habosa wrote: post #359

I am surprised at all of the app developer shaming in this thread. Is it really likely that every developer working on a popular BigCorp app is an idiot who imports 10MB libraries every time he/she faces the slightest challenge? It's much more likely that app developers are optimizing for many things, including app size, but reducing app size has a bad cost/benefit ratio. Here are some decisions that may bloat your a…

Every popular mobile OS has standard libraries for making HTTP requests and doing crypto.

I can forgive games for sacrificing size in favor of high-res animations and a blazing fast graphics stack, but I don't think LinkedIn, for example, is in need of particularly fast graphics.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#372

Post by pjmlp »

habosa wrote: post #359

I am surprised at all of the app developer shaming in this thread. Is it really likely that every developer working on a popular BigCorp app is an idiot who imports 10MB libraries every time he/she faces the slightest challenge? It's much more likely that app developers are optimizing for many things, including app size, but reducing app size has a bad cost/benefit ratio. Here are some decisions that may bloat your a…

For some reason reducing APK size talks have been a constant presence in the last three Google IO and WWDC as well.

If you need to advocate this, it tells a lot about how much app devs care about the issue.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#373

Post by ygra »

dungle6 wrote: post #355
verdy_p wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This huge wall of text but apparently you don't understand the subject matter all that deeply. Why wouldn't SVG need hinting? Truetype needs hinting and it's a vector format as well.

(Philippe always posts walls of text, even on the SVG mailing list; seems to be their thing.)

Hinting as done in TrueType is probably overkill for most purposes. But icons are often not displayed in arbitrary sizes, but rather in one of a few known-in-advance sizes. It's not hard to tweak the paths and shapes to fit to the pixel grid for all those. Also, as you approach higher pixel densities, it becomes much less important; basically you may just have to make sure that the smallest sizes fit on whole pixels and that's it.

Long ago I've automated asset generation in different sizes from SVG for an Android app I worked on and even without caring (much¹) about a pixel grid the results were good enough not to need tweaking.

_______________

¹ When hand-writing SVGs I tend to care about integer coordinates simply to not lose my mind.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#374

Post by cipriancaba »

Not sure that Apple has any interest into reporting smaller sizes.. They have interested in having lower download sizes (less strain on their servers) and users buying the bigger and better memory storage.. Along with the iCloud subscription of course..

Re: App sizes are out of control

#375

Post by toast0 »

kijin wrote: post #371
habosa wrote: post #359

I am surprised at all of the app developer shaming in this thread. Is it really likely that every developer working on a popular BigCorp app is an idiot who imports 10MB libraries every time he/she faces the slightest challenge? It's much more likely that app developers are optimizing for many things, including app size, but reducing app size has a bad cost/benefit ratio. Here are some decisions that may bloat your a…

Every popular mobile OS has standard libraries for making HTTP requests and doing crypto. I can forgive games for sacrificing size in favor of high-res animations and a blazing fast graphics stack, but I don't think LinkedIn, for example, is in need of particularly fast graphics.

If you've had to look at a pcap from what the android standard libraries do for https chunked upload, you would cry. One tls packet for the per chunk header, one for the chunk of data, and one for the carriage return newline. I've thankfully forgotten if these managed to also be separate tcp packets.

Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider using a library to do it better, although you have to weigh the increase in apk size. The standard crypto libraries on the phone are great if the features you need were released 5 years ago, but if you want consistent behavior across Android versions and manufacturers, you need to include that yourself too.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#376

Post by vbezhenar »

habosa wrote: post #359

I am surprised at all of the app developer shaming in this thread. Is it really likely that every developer working on a popular BigCorp app is an idiot who imports 10MB libraries every time he/she faces the slightest challenge? It's much more likely that app developers are optimizing for many things, including app size, but reducing app size has a bad cost/benefit ratio. Here are some decisions that may bloat your a…

Mobile platforms should really do something about vector graphics. Shipping raster image which has much larger size than vector image is stupid. Shipping 3-5 raster images is beyound stupid. Surely there could be a way to render images on demand or roll some simple vector format which would be fast to render (it's not like decompressing PNG is that easy, it takes processor time as well).

Re: App sizes are out of control

#377

Post by toast0 »

babesh wrote: post #194
mtl_usr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sec…

If Apple (or Google) wanted to make this work, it wouldn't be that hard. An app could list the dependencies, with a name perhaps, but definitely a hash. The developer would have to upload the dependencies, too. If the hash matched, the server would also do a byte by byte comparison, and if that matched, mark the dependencies as sharable. When downloading an app with a sharable dependency, the phone would check if it already had installed it, otherwise download it and install it at the same time as the app. Refcount the sharable dependencies at install/remove/upgrade time and rove unused dependencies after a reasonable time.

You would only get a benefit if two or more apps you installed used the exact same version of the dependency, but that seems like it might happen enough; especially once it's expected to be in the ecosystem.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#378

Post by vbezhenar »

TylerE wrote: post #266
Groxx wrote: post #261

Earlier 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.

I've made few apps and so far nobody cared about it. I thought that hand tweaking was about 16x16 icons, but now we are using 1024x1024 icons sometimes, there's no reason to tweak anything there, really. Actually it was the other way around: I wrote some scripts which rendered SVG into multiple PNGs and I think that almost everyone does the same.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#379

Post by vbezhenar »

kllrnohj wrote: post #289
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.

GPUs do not like SVGs. They don't handle them well at all. Most SVGs are CPU-rasterized as a result.

May be SVG is not the best vector format after all. May be we need something simpler, where every item directly maps to GPU graphics calls, also binary would help.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#380

Post by mfabbri77 »

Groxx wrote: post #261
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.

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…

You are lucky: I know one because I wrote it! Take a look at: http://www.amanithsvg.com
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