221–230 of 452 posts
It's 78MB on Android (Pixel 6 Pro). That's one of the hidden advantages of Android: much smaller apps. Makes for faster downloads, less storage consumption, and maybe even better caching / performance. It's common for iOS apps to be 4-5x bigger than Android apps.
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?
Also, they typically store more personal info than, say, an e-commerce application because some of it is needed for travel. Things like date of birth, known traveler numbers, names/dob/etc of family members, passport numbers, etc.
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Isn't chat, meeting, etc all separate apps from Google (and not included in the core Gmail app). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-chat/id1163852619 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-meet/id1013231476
They've shoved all that functionality into the Gmail app. I actually uninstalled Gmail because it became the default app to open Google Meet video calls, even with Google Meet installed. I don't need my email app asking me for video and microphone permissions...
Picking a default handler for a given scheme seems like a problem best solved at the OS level, and I don't even know how an app developer would be able to fix that.
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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…
Gmail being a "hub app" makes some sense, actually (unless you're not using Chat or Meet, of course). What annoys me much more than that is that Docs, Sheets and Presentations all are multi-hundred megabyte standalone apps, of which I'm guessing 80%-90% of the code is identical/pulled in from some non-shared library.
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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.
That said, what assets does an email client need beyond what I use as well?
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…
Last week I came across some unminified JS on United's website[0]. I love the warning it starts with:
/* Minification failed. Returning unminified contents.
(5218,49-69): run-time error JS1300: Strict-mode does not allow assignment to
undefined variables: nearbySearchErrorMsg
*/
[0] https://www.united.com/ual/bundles/js/flightsearchresults
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…
Those seem to be the biggest consumer of storage for me.
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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.
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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…
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…