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I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

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Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#71

Post by kitsunesoba »

And here I am feeling unsatisfied about the ~20MB size of the app I’m responsible for. I haven’t seriously tried to cut its size down yet, but aspirationally I’d like to cut that in half.

Probably doesn’t make that much of a difference in the long run, but I have a theory that smaller binary sizes increase chances of any given user being up-to-date, thus increasing the percentage of the userbase that’s running the latest version at any point in time. iOS tends to pull updates while charging, and so an app that’s 10MB is more likely to get updated during a brief charging period than an app 50x as large, especially if the user in question has a slower connection.

It also makes for smoother troubleshooting when the user can pop into the App Store page for your app and have the app updated almost instantly.

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#72

Post by ryandrake »

dont__panic wrote: post #43
MikeCapone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Stripe app is like 20 megs, Overcast even smaller than that.

Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB. I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.

Just for some perspective, the entire installer package for the Shareware version Doom took up about 2.39MB of space. This included the EXE and all art assets. The installer for WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) was about 3.6MB. The full on-disk footprint of Microsoft Office 95 was less than 100MB, including all documentation, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

I'm not entirely convinced value-per-byte is a measure of software quality that a lot of users care about, but it undeniably trends down every year.

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#73

Post by jshchnz »

This is awesome to hear! I'm actually one of the founders of Emerge Tools (mentioned in the blog post), we work on helping teams just like United fix problems like this. I had actually tweeted at United in April of last year letting them know about these issues: https://twitter.com/jshchnz/status/1379154466872549377

If anyone at United wants help, happy to chat! josh@emergetools.com

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#74

Post by throw10920 »

arcticbull wrote: post #47
stingraycharles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to approach this differently, and think about what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them. I’m the first to say that this utter bloat is terrible, but most people aren’t really bothered by it. And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low. From that perspective, it’s probably much more pragmatic t…

> I’d like to approach this differently, and think about what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them. For a 5-screen 50MB app, sure. For a 5-screen 500MB app that falls pretty flat. [edit] You could fit all of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 or Final Fantasy VII for PS2 in the same amount of space.

Exactly - badness of waste is non-linear. An application that's 4x as large as necessary is more than twice as bad as one that's 2x as large as necessary.

A candy bar which is 5% packaging and 95% candy by mass is alright. A candy bar which is 50% packaging and 50% candy is horrifying.

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#75

Post by marcellus23 »

alberth wrote: post #65

You know what also have huge app sizes, it's various iOS email app. Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB) [0]. - Gmail (397MB) [1] - Outlook (328MB) [2] - Hey (69MB) [3] - Protonmail (128MB) [4] [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmail-email-calendar/id9313... [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-by-google/id422689... [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-outlook/…

Fastmail is also mostly a wrapper around web views (but then again, so is Hey)

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#76

Post by sitzkrieg »

rvnx wrote: post #51
stingraycharles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to approach this differently, and think about what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them. I’m the first to say that this utter bloat is terrible, but most people aren’t really bothered by it. And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low. From that perspective, it’s probably much more pragmatic t…

Contrarian opinion here; I understand their logic. It looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done. Increase developer productivity at the expense of hardware. In this case, engineering is more expensive than hardware (because hardware is at the cost of the user). The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. This means the application takes 500/128000 blocks: 0.4% of the total device storage. Over time, the…

you didnt factor in the mobilw bandwidth to download this oversized crap constantly. with 1gb plans in mind how many downloads a month do you get to instagib a plan like that? and for what, no actual patch notes ever?! at least most apps dont hard lock you out when they detect being behind

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#77

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

chrisseaton wrote: post #36
mojuba wrote: post #5

But even the stripped version is way way too much for an app like this. I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions.

> I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions. Or are they trade-offs? Do these 'bad decisions' actually impact their business or are they manageable, allowing them to achieve their mission, focusing on other things that are more important?

Without diving into specifics we'll never know of course. But consider the opposite: would good decisions positively or negatively impact their business? Would they prevent them from achieving their mission or focusing on other things?

I can think of how bad decisions could negatively impact their mission and focus:

- App is slow and buggy, pressuring users to choose a different service altogether

- A much larger support staff is required to handle customer issues

- Bugs are painful to address and require weeks or months to resolve

- Developers spend more time fixing bugs and less time working on features, resulting in delayed features and an increased team size to allow more parallel development

Re: I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

#78

Post by sneak »

nouveaux wrote: post #69
sneak wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple would allow web notifications, most apps wouldn't need to be apps at all, but could simply be webpages that get bookmarked to the launcher. The UX for the user would be, for most non-game apps, identical. The problem is that purchases would no longer be subject to Apple's 10x industry standard (30% instead of 3%) captive credit card payment processing service (for apps), so no web notifications in MobileSafa…

"The UX for the user would be, for most non-game apps, identical." In theory, this is true. In practice, it's just hit or miss. I think it's just hard to maintain web across all the different platform and screen sizes. It's probably due to the fact that an iOS developer specializes in one platform and most web development shops will have to support all platforms. "If Apple would allow web notifications" I do not use…

It's also hard to maintain two entirely separate apps in two entirely different languages for two entirely different platforms/APIs, all while giving up nearly a third of your CLV to a rentseeking middleman.
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