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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

#131

Post by testplzignore »

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…

DOOM2.WAD has always been my measuring stick for software size, as I remember how frustrating it was to download such a huge file (15MB!) in the dial-up days. I never did get it to complete - I couldn't justify to my parents that the phone line would be busy for a whole day :)

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

#134

Post by bitwize »

bluedino wrote: post #116
jeffbee wrote: post #3

This is the kind of thing the App Store review process should be flagging.

They'll introduce it as a feature at the next WWDC. The best App Store yet!

You joke, but really, if anyone can change the economics of development to dissuade app cruft, only Apple can. Apple routinely achieves with a wave of the hand things that years or decades of concerted effort from industry professionals couldn't do. Things like remove and deprecate DRM from music.

This is Apple's industry, we're just allowed to play in it.

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

#135

Post by meibo »

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/…

To add some context, Gmail also includes a lot of the core workspace apps(chat, meetings, etc) if you do have a workspace account, which most users will likely never see.

All of that isn't needed on regular accounts, I guess, but it's probably easier for them to ship it as one app because people might get confused/are able to switch between their workspace and regular accounts in the app. Gmail is also supposed to be the "hub" to workspace on their new Desktop UI.

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

#136

Post by colechristensen »

stingraycharles wrote: post #31
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’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…

There's an opposite direction to look at it.

Taking the shortest path to achieve a goal often seems like the good idea, but it leads to bloat and inefficiency. It'd take longer to "do it right" so you never do it right.

But you ignore the fact that all that bloat actually costs you to maintain it. "Not fixing it" is always faster and will always be the shortest path to the next feature... but that next feature gets harder and harder to achieve as the bloat grows. The bloat makes the fastest thing slower and slower while the fastest thing is always ignoring the bloat.

When you appropriately choose when to fix, when to focus on efficiency, everything becomes faster.

The concept is slowing down to move faster.

There's avoiding premature optimization and then there's ignoring optimization forever except for extreme emergencies.

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

#137

Post by arcticbull »

tyingq wrote: post #100
arcticbull wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While broadly fair, one minor quip, I believe all Wallet passes have to come down from the server. Apps can't make their own, can they?

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

#139

Post by bnycum »

I really thought that app size would be a hinderance because of the cellular download limits (at least because I only remember to download these apps while at the airport). So I had to look it up and it appears there isn't a size limit anymore from Apple as of 2019, just a popup asking you to allow a download over 200MB.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/03/ios-13-removes-200-mb-file-si...

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

#140

Post by throwawaylinux »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #95
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.

That's terrible.
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