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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

#241

Post by samhw »

kroltan wrote: post #204
squeaky-clean wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

But that's entirely fair: of course caching data uses up storage. But it's my choice - I can pay for what I use. The crucial part is that I don't need to download an app which is hundreds of megabytes large just in order to hypothetically support caching.

No one can tell me that our species can write 1K ZX Chess (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess) – an entire chess game with intelligent opponents which only takes up 672 bytes – and yet we can't write an email client which isn't a million times that size.

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

#242

Post by Bilal_io »

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 checked on Android. Gmail's app size is 113mb, while Tutanota is 4.58mb

I wonder why the Gmail app is almost 4x the size on iOS.

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

#243

Post by retrac »

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…

> So, if app size is a problem, and over time, the problem is fixed by itself, why would you invest engineering resources into that ?

You are assuming apps won't scale larger over time. The old addage about software expanding to consume all available resources comes to mind. I remember thinking I'd never be able to fill my first 1 GB hard drive with software. And now it takes half that for the simplest things. As the bytes get cheaper we ration them less.

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

#244

Post by arcticbull »

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.

The shame, lol. Your feedback is well deserved.

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

#245

Post by Arrath »

account-5 wrote: post #120

Out of interest having never been on an airline that forced you to install an app to get what is now a basic customer service, what happens if you don't have a phone that supports their app? Do you get a discount?

You know the answer.

In fact it's quite the opposite, as another poster mentioned: they will offer to rent you an airline ipad for the flight so you can enjoy their content at a little extra fee.

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

#246

Post by mojuba »

Bilal_io wrote: post #242
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 checked on Android. Gmail's app size is 113mb, while Tutanota is 4.58mb I wonder why the Gmail app is almost 4x the size on iOS.

Probably because on Android it already has most of the frameworks (including tracking ones) it needs pre-installed with the OS.

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

#247

Post by agar »

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.

This was probably a response to a hack that occurred in 2014. It wouldn't surprise me if it was mandated by the FAA or similar regulatory body.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer...

> During FBI interviews in February and March, the document says, Roberts told investigators he hacked into in-flight entertainment systems aboard aircraft. He claimed to have done so 15 to 20 times from 2011 to 2014.

> He also said, according to the document, that once he had hacked into the systems and then overwrote code, enabling him to issue a “CLB,” or climb, command.

> “He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” the document says.

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

#248

Post by hoten »

ajconway wrote: post #109
abotsis wrote: post #21

I wonder what effect stripping has on crash dump reports though. I don’t know enough about how the App Store manages those, like (if a user opts in to “share information with the developer”), does the developer get less nice dumps as a result of stripping? Surely this can be worked around so long as someone has a symbol table (which they likely do), but the infrastructure might not be in place to do that automaticall…

Debug symbols are stored separately on the developer’s computer (and may be uploaded to Apple, but that’s optional). Including symbols in the App Store binary is practically useless.

Is there any reason Apple couldn't just strip the code binaries themselves?
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