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

Post by bluedino » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #24

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.

Interesting, I've found Delta's app to be usable (above average?). Sort of funny that a usable app is my above average rating but I've found Delta's app just doesn't get in the way. I'm looking forward to trying United.

Post by PascLeRasc » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

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/…

Post by Friday_ » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

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.

Post by bluedino » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

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"

Post by RussianCow » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #48

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…

I strongly suspect the bulk of this 500MB is DRM frameworks for their in-flight video playback that they can't or don't want to support in-browser. Safari kicks video playback over to the United app each time you select something to watch and it does what appears to be a multi-stage hand-off dance.