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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

#141

Post by spookthesunset »

digikata wrote: post #26
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…

They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.

Don’t these airplane steaming services have a local copy of all the movies on some storage device inside the plane?

I wonder how crazy it would be to cache the iOS app… like maybe they run a caching transparent proxy on the plane… or some crazy relationship with a CDN that treats each plane as an edge node.

I dunno, it would probably be pretty be way to expensive to set up something like that to be worthwhile.

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

#142

Post by tempnow987 »

meibo wrote: post #135
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…

They also have an authentication option they are building in (ie, sign in with the app to web properties). I've noticed a bunch of stuff seems to be migrating into gmail.

My own view is they burnt people out install allo, hangouts etc, and people DO install gmail / have gmail accounts -> so they are going to try to leverage that for distribution a bit more.

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

#143

Post by aserafini »

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…

But the problem is not only storage but also bandwidth (on a runway).

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

#144

Post by psanford »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #82
psanford wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, its an organizational problem, but one that a healthy company should be able to figure out.

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

#145

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

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.

Why would you ever want to discourage someone from buying what you are selling?

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

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/…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by bouke »

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…

And even 2 of those 8 GiB were taken up by the OS. So that leaves just 6 GiB. Now we’re already at 7%. That’s valuable storage that you cannot use to fill with holiday pictures.

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

#148

Post by selfhoster11 »

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.

The assumption here is that a luxury-oriented audience would always want the latest phone. I disagree with that. If I'm rich, I might just not care about upgrading because I have better things to do. Or I like this particular 7 year old phone, so I keep it.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by eithed »

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…

I'm no mobile developer, but why wouldn't stripping out symbols be default behaviour that publishing process performs?
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