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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

#331

Post by ratww »

eppsilon wrote: post #270
tschwimmer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the most relevant tradeoff. The United App is the only way to watch in-flight entertainment on many United Flights (esp. on newer planes without seatback screens). Every time I fly United, they make an announcement that says "Make sure to download the app before we take off because you can't do it once we're in the air!" and then I see everyone whip out their phones and tablets. Usually that's 10m or so b…

Maybe Apple could provide some way to cache apps on a local network without needing a Mac. (macOS has a content caching option in the Sharing prefpane.) They could add the same thing to iOS/tvOS to make it cheaper and more widely available. Ideally there would be a containerized version of the service that could run on any Linux-ish device...can't imagine Apple doing that though.

But this company can't even be bothered to even strip symbols. Having Apple allow caching + putting this in every single airplane is a way more difficult (and certainly more costly than spending 5 minutes stripping symbols and other things).

Maybe we as an industry should start doing the boring parts instead of jumping into shiny tasks that take 10x, 100x, 1000x the time it would take to solve the original issue...

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

#332

Post by hrrsn »

engmgrmgr wrote: post #158
psanford wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of the app is hurting their on-boarding funnel, they just can't see it. The most likely place you are going to download the United App is in the airport just before your flight, on mediocre free wifi. United really wants that download to be fast, so customers can get the app before getting on the plane. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of grumpy people your that your flight attendants have to deal with.

I’ve been able to download the app over plane WiFi for free. It used to be a little-known hack for free internet once upon a time.

That'd probably work a whole lot better if the app wasn't 439MB.

I've been on a few budget carrier flights that have skipped the headrest display for an airline app. They haven't had external Internet access, as it's just served over a local WiFi connection from an onboard server, so you must install the app before you take off.

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

#333

Post by ratww »

athorax wrote: post #63
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 kind of bloat doesn't just affect storage usage, for people with capped data plans these kind of apps are a nightmare

It's especially worse for people who are traveling.

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

#334

Post by IshKebab »

vel0city wrote: post #324
xmprt wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dela…

Sounds like you're describing some impossible system but that is how it works in the rest of the world. There's a time at which the gates close, and if you're at the gate before then then you can go on the flight. If not then they might wait for you for a bit if you've already checked in but nothing is guaranteed.

They can still go early if all of the passengers have boarded.

I got to Dublin airport once at the time that the gates were supposed to close and they said they would wait for us if we were fast... Got to the concourse and it was the furthest gate possible - the sign said to allow a 15 minute walk! Had to run all the way but we made it.

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

#335

Post by hogrider »

coldcode wrote: post #125

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…

It's an airline. Of course they dgaf.

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

#336

Post by ironmagma »

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…

There’s probably an observability bias here. It could be that the app sizes would be 3x worse, if no one ever tried. You would never know, because you only see the app sizes after people have done the work.

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

#337

Post by [deleted] »

dceddia wrote: post #191
stingraycharles wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that in case of app crashes, having debug symbols makes debugging them much easier. Other than that, there’s unlikely to be a reason.

This is maybe part of it, but having shipped a macOS app that’s stripped of symbols, crashes can still be debugged as long as I’ve got the dSYM file that was made at build time, so I don’t think it’s a super strong argument. Tools like Sentry will catch the crashes and symbolicate them for you, if you’ve provided them with the dSYM. It can be done on the local machine too.

[deleted]

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

#338

Post by godshatter »

cout wrote: post #316
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.

I was thinking the same thing. What happened? I started programming on machines with 16K of memory or less. It was a point of pride for developers to make programs that did the most with less, like the whole demoscene movement. It's like the contest changed from who can make the leanest code to who can get away with packaging the most bloat in one app without causing the device to break. We went from shaving off individual machine instructions to packaging entire browsers with super-simple apps.

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

#339

Post by coldcode »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #288
squeaky-clean wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight Oh it goes deeper than that. Almost every airline (Southwest is the only exception coming to mins at the moment) also outsources their web design, their pricing structure, and their availability tracking. I've worked with several airlines that leg…

I like what Duffel is doing as far as creating a nice, consistent airline booking API goes: https://duffel.com/ Maybe some carriers should integrate with Duffel and build their apps on top of the Duffel API instead of shipping all the logic off to accenture or whatever

Duffel is interesting, I wonder what they use on their back end. I've written airline booking API when I was at an OTA (now sadly gone like so many) on top of our parent company's res system. It can be complex, made more in my case so by the pathetic res system itself and its limitations. In fact at the time we had no way to do test bookings without real money (and mostly un-refundable except for a single route).

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

#340

Post by notahacker »

ratww wrote: post #333
athorax wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of bloat doesn't just affect storage usage, for people with capped data plans these kind of apps are a nightmare

It's especially worse for people who are traveling.

Yep. Airlines are one of the few brand apps where there probably is a significant business case for spending developer time optimising an app for download size, since customers who make the decision to try to download United's app on slow or metered connections at the airport or overseas are probably customers ready to be upsold stuff via the app.
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