161–170 of 452 posts
Does iOS not have code splitting? I thought most of iOS app bloat comes from the multiscreen assets. I surprised compiled code takes up so much space.
Do iOS apps still use bitmap graphics?
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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.
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 h…
My biggest is the UI only considers one half of a RT “trip” a trip.
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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?
At least the airlines I've worked with prefer native code and UIs for any flow that's either revenue-producing, or likely to create issues on day-of-travel. They tend to use webviews only for things that don't have to be working to sell a ticket or board the aircraft.
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…
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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.
But it wouldn't move the sales needle. Nobody is going to switch from Android because they were waiting for smaller download sizes.
> less RAM can still do fine
That's bad for Apple because it discourages upgrading.
The same ninja-optimized app can be less than 1kb. All the useless space is taken by libraries, features "just in case" like login and assets, and more runtime generic things.
Supposedly all that generic stuff should help for more complex apps, so for a very simple app the ratio used/unused is very high, but for more advanced apps it is low which means that the size of apps should not be linear with complexity
...yet they are, because the more complex an app is the more useless libraries are included.
BTW: The last couple times I've run into this, they say use the app, but there has been a plex/etc like http video server on the onboard Wifi network which can just stream to random browsers/PCs/etc. I've yet to have any DRM/etc issues, although I suspect that might be part of why they want to push people to dedicated apps. A large number of people though just use their locked down work laptops/etc so they will have a problem when they cut off that path.
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/…
Used Emerge Tools size analysis to analyze the binaries, here's some quick findings to answer some questions: [0] Fastmail: smallest of the apps but still could have room for improvement, could save almost 20% of the app size by optimizing their audio files. 71% of the app is the binary. Check out the X-ray here: https://emergeassets.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screen+Shot+... [1] Gmail: looks like most of their bloat…
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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?
Other than that, there’s unlikely to be a reason.