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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

#121

Post by _hhkc »

azalemeth wrote: post #70

I once flew United and, like the author, didn't realise this until I was on the plane for a ten hour flight. Downloaded the app for Android. I opened it. I was immediately ip-blocked for having a rooted phone, which was then kicked off the network and couldn't get an IP address. United cabin crew then started trying to sell me an iPad loan for the duration. I read a book and vowed never to fly with them again.

They had a similar check for jailbroken iPhones. The last time I flew with them they seem to have fixed it.

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

#122

Post by PascLeRasc »

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.

Thanks for recommending Hyperweb, you've just saved me a ton of space.

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

#123

Post by yuliyp »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #96
throw10920 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

United Airlines is not a luxury product.

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

#124

Post by srvmshr »

tantalor wrote: post #67
mwcampbell wrote: post #57

I think the most effective way to fix this systemic problem would be for app stores to start charging developers for app size, both for storage and outbound transfer. And for desktop apps downloaded from websites, all hosting providers and CDNs should start charging for egress like the big cloud providers do, in acknowledgement of the fact that bandwidth isn't free. Yes, I recently migrated some of my company's infra…

If app sizes trend down, it might serve the users well, but it would depress iPhone sales as fewer users would need to upgrade storage. Which one do you think Apple cares more about?

If App sizes go down, its a win for Apple as well:

1. Faster update downloaded to devices compared to before & to Google/Android. That's a big PR win.

2. Most badly behaving apps have tons of unnecessary process & their binaries. Also storage is taken up by UI assets. If these are streamlined & reusable, the footprint goes down. That means less RAM can still do fine.

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

#125

Post by coldcode »

I spent the last ten years of my career building iOS apps, all but one you would likely known at the time, and whoever in charge of this app is an idiot. Shipping an app to the general public with symbols intact? Really? If they didn't know/didn't care, it tells me no one there likely cared about any other quality issue either. It's highly likely that any relevant lead person probably screamed about this daily, but higher ups don't give a shit.

At my last job our legal team would have had a cow shipping labels. Our apps are gleaned by blogs looking for scoops on upcoming features.

I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight. Their app was a POS and they had hired someone to write a new one -- the same company. Now they had no idea why it was so delayed so they wanted to hire someone to embed in the other company to spy on what was going on. Of course I wanted nothing to do with this travesty. This was years ago, no idea what happened.

You'd be amazed at how pathetic mobile development can be even at big companies. Mobile doesn't have to be hard, but if management tries hard enough, can make crap at scale.

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

#126

Post by gingericha »

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.

It's likely to also be one of the first apps I decide to uninstall when my phone's storage becomes somewhat limited.

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

#127

Post by hammock »

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.

As a frequent and mostly non-loyal flier, I can say despite all its faults the United app is far and away the best airline app in the US: fast, easy to navigate, powerful, useful and often pleasantly surprising. American is the only other app that compares, I can't stand to use any other airlines' apps.

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

#128

Post by anthk »

petters wrote: post #102
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/…

It's ridiculous. The complete size of Mario 64 with all assets is 6MB.

And the whole 9front weights less than those apps.

When I was a Windows user, a video player install of more than 80MB would be slightly bloated.

Today my OpenBSD install uses less than 3GB and it has far more stuff than a phone install.

Golang binaries are like 5-15x the size of a dinamically linked C binary, yes, but at least they provide everything and run everywhere.

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

#129

Post by thorncorona »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #96
throw10920 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Perhaps not but everyone saying this is what kills accessibility for those who need it. This is the same argument made by companies to not support deaf/blind people.

Requirements are often above average in some dimensions and below average in others.

If we optimize for people who are wealthy, always in high bandwidth areas with new phones, etc etc soon we will have left most people behind.

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

#130

Post by thaway2839 »

hammock wrote: post #127
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.

As a frequent and mostly non-loyal flier, I can say despite all its faults the United app is far and away the best airline app in the US: fast, easy to navigate, powerful, useful and often pleasantly surprising. American is the only other app that compares, I can't stand to use any other airlines' apps.

One could argue that maybe the developers of the app were optimizing for the right things. Usability, performance, etc., as opposed to disk space.
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