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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

#81

Post by IggleSniggle »

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…

Yeah no, clearly false, because my iPhone has 8 GB and that ought to be plenty. Hope your web app works on my phone, ‘cause I’m not installing a bullshit app with that much bloat.

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

#82

Post by PascLeRasc »

psanford wrote: post #33
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

> it is fair to say this area of app development is complicated to understand. Not really, but it's also actively suppressed. If they can make as much money with a 439MB app as they can with a 10MB app, why would they waste any time or effort trying to save you a few minutes of download time? If anything, I expect this to get worse, as management is constantly pushing for adoption of frameworks that (in their imagina…

The size of the app is hurting their on-boarding funnel, they just can't see it. The most likely place you are going to download the United App is in the airport just before your flight, on mediocre free wifi. United really wants that download to be fast, so customers can get the app before getting on the plane. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of grumpy people your that your flight attendants have to deal with.

Flight attendants don't report to software engineering managers though.

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

#83

Post by paxys »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #9

> While the United dev team should have noticed this much earlier I suspect it's more that their devs are either junior and don't know any better, or more likely that they just don't care. I've also met some devs who believe whatever comments they read on HN, like "file/memory size don't matter"

They will care if they are paid to care. It's as simple as that.

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

#84

Post by tschwimmer »

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…

This is not the most relevant tradeoff. The United App is the only way to watch in-flight entertainment on many United Flights (esp. on newer planes without seatback screens). Every time I fly United, they make an announcement that says "Make sure to download the app before we take off because you can't do it once we're in the air!" and then I see everyone whip out their phones and tablets. Usually that's 10m or so before we lose cell reception and it's often not enough time to fully download the app.

I've often thought that they either need to cache the app locally on the plane itself or provide a special free passthrough on the in-flight wifi, but so far they haven't provided either. In any case, app size is crucially important for the key use case that many (most?) people use the United App.

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

#86

Post by Scoundreller »

App, OS and other file sizes are big deals in bandwidth-constrained environments. Canada has a number of remote communities with satellite uplinks, so every update means the whole town needs to download them independently.

While some cos have “appliances” that ISPs can install that’ll dramatically reduce back haul bandwidth usage, I’m unaware of any that make any that work for a small community or aircraft. SSL really impacted the use of general-purpose proxies to save bandwidth. Maybe more torrent-based schemes for app stores and others could fill this gap.

> Apple also supports incremental downloads, meaning you can download a “diff” of app binaries in some cases (also amazing!), but this is even harder to measure on an actual device. In my case I was trying to download the United app for the first time on a runway before my flight took off.

What would be interesting is if Apple did this diff between apps, since I’m sure a lot share frameworks and other bits.

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

#88

Post by scandinavian »

sidlls wrote: post #12

Reminds me of Facebook’s (in?)famous “Apple can’t handle our scale” thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... There was an HN thread about it, too, but I can’t find it.

I found the PDF if anyone is curious.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16lDaCfEjT7Z72EEDFBo5r3lTDCV...

I'm not sure what I just read though.

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

#89

Post by password4321 »

sidlls wrote: post #12

Reminds me of Facebook’s (in?)famous “Apple can’t handle our scale” thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... There was an HN thread about it, too, but I can’t find it.

2014 (Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342

2015 (scale) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338

2018 (491MB) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995954

2020 (Messenger) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466462

2020 (SDK) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23790207

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