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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

#91

Post by bombcar »

ryandrake wrote: post #72
dont__panic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one I like is that the Finder icon on macOS is larger than the entire system on the original Mac.

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

#92

Post by PascLeRasc »

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…

There's no app as valuable to me as 2-3 albums or 400 photos.

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

#93

Post by _3u10 »

galad87 wrote: post #85
lulzury wrote: post #17

What is the purpose of having those framework symbols there in the first place? What was the original intent/use?

No purpose. Even without those, you can resymbolicate a crash log later.

You are very incorrect sir. I encourage you to strip the frameworks in your /System folder and then reboot your system.

You can strip the main executable but stripping frameworks is a VERY VERY bad idea.

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

#94

Post by blah_humbug »

ngoel36 wrote: post #11

File size aside, I can confidently say - United hands down has the best app of any major airline in the world. It's better than their website and often-times even better than calling customer service on their 1K (top loyalty status) line. Many ways to make it better, but if we're comparing it to airlines & hotels, it's extremely well done.

I've found that true of other everyday things (eg, booking a session my local gym), and find it incredibly depressing. Not only have we devised a world where impersonal, digital communication is the way things get done, but we must also buy a smartphone to even start accessing it.

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

#95

Post by kitsunesoba »

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/…

I haven’t analyzed their binaries or anything like that, but I’d wager that a significant chunk of the heft of the Gmail and Outlook iOS apps are Google/Microsoft’s custom UI frameworks.

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

#96

Post by tut-urut-utut »

throw10920 wrote: post #66
rvnx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. The smallest iPhone sold now is 128 GB. The iPhone 5C, sold in 2015, had 8 GB internal storage with no expansion options. 439 MiB is a full 5% of the total storage capacity of the iPhone 5C, completely ignoring the amount reserved for the OS that's completely unusable to the user. The logic used here hurts lower-income people and contributes to climate change by encouraging poo…

People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.

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

#97

Post by nouveaux »

sneak wrote: post #78
nouveaux wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I completely agree. I'm just sharing my experience. I wish web apps were better so we don't have to download so many apps.

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

#98

Post by Krustopolis »

andai wrote: post #58
arcticbull wrote: post #47

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. 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.

Windows 95 required 4MB of RAM and 50-55MB of disk space.

And sucked.

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

#100

Post by tyingq »

arcticbull wrote: post #56
tyingq wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the Stripe app is a good comparison. Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. Typically with broad support for different currencies, languages, etc, etc. 439mb is obviously not right, but I would expect the app to be fairly large.

> Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. All of that happens online.

That may be true for some airlines (webviews vs native), but it is not true for many. Boarding passes are probably a good example. It's very typical for that functionality to use something like Apple Wallet integration, and also native widgets to upsell cross-sell boarding/seat upgrades, etc.
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