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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

#311

Post by xmprt »

vel0city wrote: post #281
sb057 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up So they are essentially scamming 5% of passengers out of their tickets?

I mean, you're supposed to be at the gate when boarding starts. For all practical purposes if you miss boarding you've missed your flight even if the plane hasn't left the ground due to safety rules about letting passengers go after the door is considered closed. There's a bit of a checklist of things that need to be completed after the door gets closed and the gate pulls away. They're often incentivized to try and s…

I get that rule. But why does the door close at boarding time and not at the flight time or some predetermined time like 10 minutes before flight time or when boarding completes, whichever is later.

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

#312

Post by trelliscoded »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #263
_fat_santa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to their inflight entertainment, United pulled this stunt on me the other day. - Flight at 11AM, boarding at 10:20. - Show up at 10:25, boarding doors are closed. - "Didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago" - "Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up, sorry, you should show up when boarding starts" - "Yeah but didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago, how was I to know" - "You should have known, sorry"

They managed to board all the other passengers in less than 5 minutes? In my experience boarding takes at least half an hour just for everybody to sit down. Was the flight exceptionally empty?

They may be queued up in the jet bridge. I've been stuck inside one after the doors closed while we waited for everyone to get into the plane.

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

#313

Post by morpheuskafka »

> It’s becoming somewhat of a popular trend in the airline industry to cut costs by having the passenger bring the hardware,

I mean, there's virtually no one taking a flight without at least a phone if not a laptop/tablet with them, and most of them probably have a much better screen and headphone support then whatever outdated stuff would be built in to the plane.

The only thing I really miss on flights that don't have the seat backs is the thing that shows the altitude and progress on the map.

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

#314

Post by xmprt »

agar wrote: post #247
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…

I hate when apps lock out rooted Android phones for "security purposes" when it's so simple to get around it by just directly accessing the API or spoofing. It's even dumber when the app/website can be accessed through a laptop which is much more permissive than a rooted phone. I've never heard a reason for why companies do this.

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

#315

Post by rixed »

Banana699 wrote: post #261
rvnx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bizarre reasoning puzzles and infuriates me so much. The linked post shaves more than 40% of an app's size in 5 minutes, by doing nothing but being curious about the half-gigabyte app and knowing how to use a couple of tools. This is not a case of "I have plenty of water so let the kids splash some in the playground to have fun", this is a case of "I have plenty of water so I will load 10000 liters in a truck an…

I share your feeling. Day by day I feel more guilty of belonging to that industry because of the laziness, sloppiness, negligence, acceptance of spying, of dark patterns, etc, and I do not disclose what I'm doing for a living more readily than I would if I worked for some mafia.

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

#316

Post by cout »

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'm not sure whether to find it amusing or concerning that 20MB now qualifies as a reasonable size for an email client. My first PC that ran Linux had only 8MB of RAM and an 850MB disk, and it felt like a lot at the time.

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

#317

Post by bspammer »

jandrese wrote: post #173
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…

"The Right Way" involves running the strip command before sending the app off to Apple for publishing. It's 5 seconds of effort and saves almost 200MB for literally thousands of users.

I'm willing to bet that the devs who made this app have never worked with a decompiler and have no idea what "symbols" are. Source: I am one of those people (well I have a vague idea, but certainly wouldn't think to check if that was causing bloat in my iOS app).

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

#318

Post by indrora »

sidlls wrote: post #12

Reminds me of Facebook’s (in?)famous “Apple can’t handle our scale” thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... There was an HN thread about it, too, but I can’t find it.

When Windows 10 Mobile was a thing, Microsoft had written a very competent Facebook application to go along with it.

The original version was 18MB. The official Facebook-written version was nearly 300MB, with the bonus that it disabled the old app.

I wrote about it then: https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-not-to-transition-an-app-b...

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

#319

Post by pianoben »

nicksaroha wrote: post #293
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.

React Native is one cause. Another is that they ship a tremendous amount of cross-platform c++ Office code, which is not small.

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

#320

Post by chrisseaton »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #313

> It’s becoming somewhat of a popular trend in the airline industry to cut costs by having the passenger bring the hardware, I mean, there's virtually no one taking a flight without at least a phone if not a laptop/tablet with them, and most of them probably have a much better screen and headphone support then whatever outdated stuff would be built in to the plane. The only thing I really miss on flights that don't h…

> The only thing I really miss on flights that don't have the seat backs is the thing that shows the altitude and progress on the map.

But you can get that on their app as well.

I think flights should do-away with in-seat entertainment. I very rarely see anyone using them, and if you are unfortunate enough to be in economy, they actually take up quite a lot of your personal space.

All the screens must weigh a ton as well - bad for the environment.

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