I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by PascLeRasc » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

jshchnz wrote: post #108

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/…

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…

For some reason it's really funny to see how much room Fastmail's notification sound takes up. Your analysis for Spark also has a send sound bundled but it's one of the stock Apple ones (Blow). Is there a reason why they have to include their own copy instead of relying on a system sound file?

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

#292

Post by stevep98 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 8:49 PM UTC

iamcreasy wrote: post #201

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?

Likely a DRM requirement so you can’t pirate their movies

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

#293

Post by nicksaroha » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

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/…

Outlook makes sense because they use React Native in their app. If you look at their License sections they are using a ton of libraries which is common.

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

#294

Post by ben_w » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

bmicraft wrote: post #255

yuliyp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

United Airlines is not a luxury product.

Flying often enough to justify even installing the app/getting any benefits from it surely does count as luxury flying though?

Ideally an app is sufficient low friction that even a really minor quality of life improvement justifies it.

Not being an American I have no reason to even be a UA customer let alone install the app, and therefore I don’t know if they’ve achieved this or not.

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

#295

Post by dylan604 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

bmicraft wrote: post #255

yuliyp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

United Airlines is not a luxury product.

Flying often enough to justify even installing the app/getting any benefits from it surely does count as luxury flying though?

Flying that much in anything less than first class is no where near luxury.

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

#296

Post by nhoughto » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

187MB of symbols seems like alot! Kind of funny that this bloat could be reduced by X% just by having a shorter path in the CI pipeline and not even stripping, also surprising that xcode doesn't strip swift symbols by default for a release build? Some low hanging fruit right there

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

#297

Post by sond813 » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

newman314 wrote: post #228

jshchnz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks! This is very interesting to see all the low hanging fruit. Out of curiosity, could you run Emerge on a few other common apps: the United app as well as Yelp, Twitter and TikTok? Those seem to be the biggest consumer of storage for me.

I tried it out with Yelp and Twitter, both had a lot of bloat due to not stripping binaries. You can see this in the large "String Table" in both screenshots.

Yelp also has a large exports section for the main app binary, that's usually a sign of a problem because the main binary doesn't need to export any symbols, only frameworks do that.

Twitter has a handful of 4MB images, much bigger than images you'd expect in an app. I took a look at a few of these and they are just gradient background images that could have been drawn with something like core graphics to completely eliminate the need for an image.

Twitter: https://emergeassets.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screen+Shot+...

Yelp: https://emergeassets.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screen+Shot+...

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

#298

Post by lupire » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

uoaei wrote: post #286

vmception wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been judged by prospective employers based on reported app size being seen as correlated to complexity. VC backed startup I worked at for 18 months with a 12 megabyte app size due to efficient design choices? Must be a joke So now I just add a 150 megabyte dummy file at everyone else’s expense I’m sure there is a lot of that going on given how long some job roles were open, I have to imagine that every mobile de…

Well it may not be correlated to complexity but it certainly is correlated to end user satisfaction. If their device prompts a "device cleanup" operation and your app is near the top of the list that doesn't do much good for retention. Not to mention the billions of devices in the world which are running old OS versions with scant memory capacity.

> billions of devices in the world which are running old OS versions with scant memory capacity.

are not the rich or loose-walleted people that app sellers and advertisers care about.

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

#299

Post by lupire » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

samhw wrote: post #241

kroltan wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That game was famous for how bad it was, except that it miraculously fit in a tiny package.

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

#300

Post by ben_w » Wed, Feb 23, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

aledalgrande wrote: post #181

dymk wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying anywhere, period, is a luxury

Flying in NA, with covid, is a luxury. Europe is a different story. Edit: why the downvotes? You can get flights for 50 bucks to go to different countries in Europe.

I’ve been on a flight between Berlin and London that cost less than an Amtrak return ticket from Davis to Sacramento, and I’ve also been on a multi-day road trip from Davis to Salt Lake City that, while fun, was only a good financial choice due to four people squeezing into a Prius.

While I enjoyed camping and seeing bits of the US that foreigners like me don’t normally see, it’s not entirely clear that the difference between that and flying makes flying the luxury.