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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

#201

Post by iamcreasy »

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.

> I was immediately ip-blocked for having a rooted phone

What is wrong with using their app on a rooted phone?

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

#202

Post by achandlerwhite »

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've heard that some of them include their own network stack so that only they can track your data. I think that was in reference to Facebook's app originally but I wouldn't be surprised.

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

#203

Post by jakub_g »

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…

> what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them

It may depend on the app, but Uber noticed that the bigger the app, the fewer people install it, unsurprisingly.

I also had friends who wouldn't install Signal because they don't have any space left on the device, and they stick to Whatsapp/Messenger which they already have.

https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/

> App-download-size restriction means first-time users cannot download the app ... when they are not on Wi-Fi.

> We established a correlation between the Uber Rider app size and customer engagement — when the app size crosses the download size limit, and it leads to a 10% reduction in app installations, 12% reduction in sign-ups, and 20% reduction in first-time bookings, resulting in revenue loss.

> Over the past three years, the Uber Rider app’s size has often approached the App store’s over-the-air download limit, and staying below it is a clear priority.

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

#204

Post by kroltan »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #198
nindalf wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was literally what the previous comment was trying to tell you.

Web view apps can still work offline if they're designed for it.

Yes, but the 3mb is just the wrapper, I bet if you delete the hundred-ish megabytes of cache, it won't work offline anymore :)

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

#205

Post by squeaky-clean »

Not that it excuses it, but having worked at a place that did contractual web design for airlines, I'd bet money that the app wasn't developed by any employees at United and instead was developed by the lowest bidding external company they could find.

Based on some of the names of packages I don't recognize (CYFDCTEncoder) and some googling I'm going to guess the company was CYFuture.

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

#206

Post by anthk »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #185
arcticbull wrote: post #47

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. 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.

Ahem, FFVII and THPS2 are Playstation One (PSX) games.

You could fit a good chunk of N64 zipped ROMs under a 700MB (a CD).

An emulator and Mario 64, Zelda OOT, ISS and 40 games more could be placed under a CD and yet you could fit a good bunch of MP3's in between.

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

#207

Post by antihero »

kuschku wrote: post #171
anthk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve built a full android IRC client in 4.1MiB. Most UI elements are custom, no web view for anything, lots of custom libraries etc. That’s > 200kLOC. I can’t fathom what you’d have to do to get to 100x that.

Can’t imagine an IRC client has many high resolution assets.

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

#208

Post by TillE »

dymk wrote: post #159
yuliyp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

United Airlines is not a luxury product.

Flying anywhere, period, is a luxury

I don't know if you're trying to make a point about global living standards (irrelevant) or the non-necessity of air travel (true, but also irrelevant), but the fact is that budget airlines have existed for decades, and are often comparable in price to a bus trip.

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

#209

Post by mdoms »

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.

Not defending the blocking of rooted devices, but I think it's excellent that airlines are relying on people bringing their own hardware. I think you'd struggle to find a single person in an airport who isn't carrying a screen with them today, so seat-back screens feel very redundant to me.

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

#210

Post by squeaky-clean »

coldcode wrote: post #125

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…

> 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

Oh it goes deeper than that. Almost every airline (Southwest is the only exception coming to mins at the moment) also outsources their web design, their pricing structure, and their availability tracking. I've worked with several airlines that legitimately could not give us a list of all their current routes. Some of them actually paid us to scrape their website and tell them where they're currently flying and how much it cost on average.

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