Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

telkins.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 452 posts

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

#341

Post by wrggwwr »

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…

Luckily, common air carriers do not run on anarchy and made-up rules. United, like every airline, has a Contract of Carriage, which clearly requires being at the gate only 15 minutes before a scheduled domestic flight:

> All Passengers must be present at the loading gate for boarding at least 15 minutes prior to scheduled departure.

The OP was clearly involuntarily denied boarding even if it was an international flight, and is eligible for that compensation.

https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/contract-of-carriage.html#r...

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

#342

Post by mvid »

mojuba wrote: post #5

But even the stripped version is way way too much for an app like this. I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions.

It is especially frustrating because half the time it dumps you into a webview anyway

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

#343

Post by raydev »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #212
thaway2839 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that maybe the developers of the app were optimizing for the right things. Usability, performance, etc., as opposed to disk space.

In this case, shipping symbols with the app is almost certainly an oversight. Stripping symbols of shipped binaries is standard good practice. That said, I don't think the difference between a 40MB app and a 400MB app is all that critical these days. Optimizing for development speed and user experience over an absolutely minimal download size is a reasonable choice.

Not just good practice, it's default with Xcode. Someone must have messed up some configuration/flags while they were breaking the frameworks up maybe?

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

#344

Post by sodality2 »

MH15 wrote: post #278
bluedino wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Spirit app installs a bitcoin miner.

I usually fly Spirit right now (college student) so I'd love to see a source for this.

It's a joke about how absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel terrible Spirit is, I think.

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

#345

Post by vel0city »

IshKebab wrote: post #334
vel0city wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's a time at which the gates close

And there's a time in the US as well, that's called the boarding time. Those there at the boarding time get on the plane, those aren't there at the boarding time missed their flight. Banking on getting on 5-10 minutes after boarding time is gambling that they're running behind schedule.

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

#346

Post by selfmodruntime »

kuschku wrote: post #171
anthk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the whole 9front weights less than those apps. When I was a Windows user, a video player install of more than 80MB would be slightly bloated. Today my OpenBSD install uses less than 3GB and it has far more stuff than a phone install. Golang binaries are like 5-15x the size of a dinamically linked C binary, yes, but at least they provide everything and run everywhere.

I’ve built a full android IRC client in 4.1MiB. Most UI elements are custom, no web view for anything, lots of custom libraries etc. That’s > 200kLOC. I can’t fathom what you’d have to do to get to 100x that.

The answer is assets. A lot of assets. Unused assets. Fonts. Gifs. Assets for every device size. Future assets.

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

#347

Post by xmprt »

vel0city wrote: post #345
IshKebab wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's a time at which the gates close And there's a time in the US as well, that's called the boarding time. Those there at the boarding time get on the plane, those aren't there at the boarding time missed their flight. Banking on getting on 5-10 minutes after boarding time is gambling that they're running behind schedule.

In that case, every single airline in the US doesn't care about their passengers' time because I can't remember the first time that boarding actually started at boarding time. And when it does, I'm stuck waiting an extra 15 minutes so all the priority and higher class passengers can board first.

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

#350

Post by preinheimer »

chrisseaton wrote: post #320
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…

I usually fly Air Canada (AC), where these have been more common than the us carriers i've been on for a while. I use it _every time_.

Do I also have a phone? Sure, but the screen is smaller and I have to hold it. Do I also have a laptop? Sure, but if the person in front of me reclines quickly I don't want to hear a crunch.

In economy I'll use the in-seat thing to watch something, and leave my laptop in my bag. In economy-plus or higher I'll put a movie on the screen and write some code on my laptop.

On the AC flights I've taken I'd estimate something like 80% plus of the folks on the plane are using the in-seat stuff to watch something. The rest are asleep or reading a book.

Post reply on HN