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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

#321

Post by tinus_hn »

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.

You’d think the right way would involve Apple refusing your app if it is wasting users storage because you couldn’t be bothered to strip your binaries.

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

#322

Post by dont__panic »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #122
dont__panic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB. I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.

Thanks for recommending Hyperweb, you've just saved me a ton of space.

Keep in mind that even on the free version, you can add (unlimited?) adlists. I've added some of the most popular uBlock Origin default lists to mine to make the ad blocking even better. It is absolutely insane how many apps Hyperweb replaced for me, too!

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

#324

Post by vel0city »

xmprt wrote: post #311
vel0city wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The door closes when it seems like there's no more passengers so they can hurry up and start working on the checklist. They do this so they can potentially get going sooner in case there are delays elsewhere in the many steps that goes from passenger boarding to plane in the air. Theoretically they could be more rigid about having a time for the door closing, but that could potentially mean there are more actual delays as now they no longer have a chance to gain some time in their schedule to make up for potential delays elsewhere.

If the door closed at flight time then the plane wouldn't be leaving at flight time, it would be leaving at flight time + the time it takes to go from boarding to getting in the air. Flight time is the time the plane is scheduled to take off, which means the flight time would diverge from the boarding time, and then you'd once again be asking why the boarding time is different from the flight time and why they don't let you board until the flight time, rinse and repeat.

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

#325

Post by dont__panic »

pgalvin wrote: post #53
dont__panic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB. I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.

I have AdGuard on my phone at ~60MB, you might want to check that.

Strange, the download from the app store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...) is 100 MB, but my install somehow crept up to ~400 (logs, maybe?) over a couple of years of use. I don't have it installed any more, but it's wild how much this varies across devices. What phone do you use? I use a 2016 SE, I wonder if there's a bug that's consume extra space on a device as old (and likely untested by AdGuard) as mine?

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

#326

Post by boredumb »

I recently bought a 100$ android waiting for my phone to be repaired and the size of modern apps on older hardware render them completely unusable. It's a shame that the amount of bloat creeping into everything in the name of "developer productivity". Do we have to wait until we hit some limitation in storage size before we decide that it's simply dog shit software? Samsungs "notes" application is almost 100mb in order for me to keep track of a few kb of grocery lists and restaurant suggestions.

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

#327

Post by jnovek »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #96
throw10920 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. The smallest iPhone sold now is 128 GB. The iPhone 5C, sold in 2015, had 8 GB internal storage with no expansion options. 439 MiB is a full 5% of the total storage capacity of the iPhone 5C, completely ignoring the amount reserved for the OS that's completely unusable to the user. The logic used here hurts lower-income people and contributes to climate change by encouraging poo…

People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.

The iPhone is not a luxury product; not in America, anyway.

More than half of American smartphones in 2021 were iPhones. The iPhone is price-comparable to its Android contemporaries. The Android downmarket in the U.S. is a minority by a wide margin.

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

#328

Post by vmception »

rixed wrote: post #307
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…

> I’ve been judged by prospective employers based on reported app size being seen as correlated to complexity. This judges the prospective employer more than it judges the candidate, doesn't it? This is actually nothing new. Back when I was at uni some students claimed to do the same, adding code that served no purpose to inflate the resulting program executable size. And if my memory serves me well, at this time whe…

> This judges the prospective employer more than it judges the candidate, doesn't it?

Easy to say, rhetorically suggesting that its revealing a toxic mangement environment, but no, not really. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive with great teammates and great managers, and a hiring decision maker that was otherwise completely hands off of what I was doing for the rest of the project. A hiring decision maker that probably left within 3 - 6 months of me joining, or who was randomly called to do an interview last minute and had arbitrary evaluation metrics. Maybe that is what you mean, but it had nothing to do with the day to day experience, once on board I found every place to be very similar with the mobile team pretty much on autopilot, which is the desired experience. Even quicker paths to leadership roles and higher compensation.

They all have interesting-enough projects at the time, or fulfilled some other interest of mine, or money without being a bad environment. Interview gaffs really don't carry as much weight as people think, it requires a special kind of privilege to think it matters that not all of us have or had.

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

#329

Post by addaon »

Symbiote wrote: post #279
aledalgrande wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe people don't believe it. The cheapest flight I can see on SouthWest.com is $60, for a 1 hour journey from Atlanta to South Carolina. The cheapest flight with Ryanair from Copenhagen is $9, though it doesn't include checked luggage. It's also an hour. An even cheaper one is Kraków to Eindhoven, 2 hours, $6. There are fewer dates for this price though.

Southwest is not really the equivalent of Ryan. Spirit airlines has plenty of $22.22 flights (for two's-day, I guess), glancing at their page today. This includes e.g. Chicago to Tampa, Texas to NJ, and other flights longer than most European flights.

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

#330

Post by addaon »

acchow wrote: post #273
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…

> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB You can buy a brand new, unlocked iPhone 12 from Apple. It starts at 64GB for $729 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-12

The iPhone 11 and iPhone SE are also both available, new, with 64GB.
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