181–190 of 452 posts
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/…
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…
This is not a contrarian opinion. This is the default attitude in web, cloud hosted, and mobile app development.
>looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done
What are your back-of-the-envelope numbers? Or are you just shrugging and assuming that performance has zero impact on the development loop, so therefore no development effort should be expended on it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> big PR win 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.
Size and RAM (and indirectly a modest battery life gain) will be a win for whoever uses, regardless of our personal views on this matter. When developers throw in big frameworks mindlessly, they assume best case use. Minimalist and efficient coding will actually win across the board whichever way you look.
As far as Apple devices go, they are getting support way longer than Android flagships. Apple is devious possibly in many ways, but they don't get to win by 'planned obsolescence'. Much rather the opposite: as new generations of devices come in with newer hardware, they don't have to crazily support a lot of firmware and instruction sets. Only the ones which satisfies the newer frameworks. If they did, they will turn out as another Intel (which famously supported a lot of opcodes all the way back to 386). Their fanbase has some (valid) strength based on a lot of older generation devices still getting OS upgrades which they might normally wouldn't have.
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…
> 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. For a 5-screen 50MB app, sure. For a 5-screen 500MB app that falls pretty flat. [edit] You could fit all of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 or Final Fantasy VII for PS2 in the same amount of space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB) It's because it doesn't contain anything. You can't even see any UI, let alone emails without being connected to the internet.
Adding offline access would indeed be nice, but that wouldn't even add 2mb of code. I have entire native mobile games with multiplayer under 3mb. EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh
What is the Android size? Google play store tells me it varies with device, and I don’t have any android devices.
TBH I see this as a positive - less weight on the plane, less fuel consumed, less waste when these screens are junked, etc. I personally always take a ton of videos with me and just watch my own stuff, I would never trust that the in-flight stuff is working (although I admit I overprepare and it's still important to provide this). And when you're flying - having the app installed is a net positive, it has maps of the airports (with great directions, which is super helpful when you're making a connection), can manage your ticket, etc - the videos are a bonus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No purpose. Even without those, you can resymbolicate a crash log later.
You are very incorrect sir. I encourage you to strip the frameworks in your /System folder and then reboot your system. You can strip the main executable but stripping frameworks is a VERY VERY bad idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager. How does this factor into this year's bonus?