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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

#371

Post by asdff »

godshatter wrote: post #338
cout wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indi…

What happened is that hardware got orders of magnitude more powerful, user expectations for performance stayed the same, and developers got lazy.

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

#372

Post by tyingq »

stevep98 wrote: post #292
iamcreasy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

You don't need the United App to buy and use WiFi on their planes, so this seems unlikely to me.

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

#373

Post by Symbiote »

addaon wrote: post #329
Symbiote wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Spirit.

They look very much in the style of Ryanair with the garish website. $22 for three hours (Boston-Miami) is priced between the two Ryanair flights, so I expect the "service" is similar.

I'm sure the average distance of a flight within Europe is lower than in the USA, since the USA is a bit empty in the middle and Europe has more water in the way, but routes like Scandinavia to the Mediterranean (Stockholm to Zagreb is 3½ hours and $14), or Britain to eastern Europe (London - Cluj, 3 hours $13) aren't far off, and the budget airlines also have flights to tourist destinations in Egypt, Israel, Jordan etc, which are as long as a US coast-to-coast flight.

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

#374

Post by asdff »

varenc wrote: post #218
tyingq wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised there would be that kind of integration between the United app and their on-board WiFi, which appears to be run by Panasonic. It sounds like you're saying the United app noticed your phone was rooted, and somehow it notified the on-board WiFi to block your ip/mac? Or am I not reading this right?

That's also how I read it, which astounds me. Would be technically impressive if it worked like that. And extra vindictive since even if they don't allow rooted devices to play DRM'd video, there's no good reason why they should also be prevented from buying in-flight internet. (one solution if that's really how it works: rotate your mac address, reconnect, and then never open up the United app again so it can't sque…

This is pretty common, as stupid as it is. Snapchat would do this too for jailbroken phones, only they'd also permanently ban your account. It was an arms race between snapchat and tweak developers masking jailbreak detection methods for years at least, maybe still ongoing.

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

#375

Post by happybuy »

Small app size is one of the KPIs that I track for the app I develop.

Obviously there are user benefits to smaller apps, but as a developer I feel that the app size is a proxy for app complexity and dependencies. The smaller the app, the less third party dependencies and the less maintenance required to keep it up to date and running on the latest OS releases.

As a comparison, the biggest competitor to my app AdGuard is a 450MB download on the Mac versus a less than 10MB download for my app (Magic Lasso Adblock).

Do most users notice? Not sure but overtime I've actually made my app size smaller simply by replacing unnecessary third party libraries with in-built, simpler functionality and it's become a more pleasant app to maintain.

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

#376

Post by ironmagma »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #366
ironmagma wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would mean they did the 3 minute cleanup and then declared their work done. That's not a sufficient amount of trying.

This is in response to someone who’s clearly infuriated by a wide variety of inefficiencies they see. The point is, no one is praising the people who do optimize their because you would never know it was even an issue that got solved.

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

#377

Post by asdff »

tyingq wrote: post #222
iamcreasy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was immediately ip-blocked for having a rooted phone What is wrong with using their app on a rooted phone?

Not saying it's the right decision, but probably because they don't want the liability if a rooted device allows some 3rd party app to hack theirs. Airlines can be somewhat like a small bank in this respect, as being logged in gives you access to things like accumulated loyalty points, not-flown-tickets that can be exchanged/refunded, past flight credit from earlier refunds that were eligible for credit but not a cas…

At that rate why not also ip ban any general purpose compute device from accessing their servers? I can't believe a major airline has programmers who think blocking jailbroken cellphones would do anything at all to thwart a hack. It makes me think twice about flying United certainly if these are the incompetent hands I'm placing my trust in.

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

#378

Post by ricardobeat »

wrggwwr wrote: post #341
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…

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 flig…

There is a boarding time on every ticket. Anyone who has flown more than once knows this is not optional - closing the gate and departing early is at the airline’s discretion.

Once they started boarding and the queue is empty, they will continue with the procedures for the flight, they have an incentive to keep their on-time stats. It’s not like a train where you can simply step in a minute before it leaves.

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

#379

Post by fomine3 »

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.

I don't know why this downvoted. Apple dropped latest iOS support for 5c in 2017.

But 5c is most unloved device so not a good sample. It was released at the same time as 5s that introduced ARMv8 by A7. It was the worst time to release it with old chip.

I'd pick iPhone SE 16GB in 2017 that's still in support.

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

#380

Post by aiisjustanif »

stingraycharles wrote: post #31
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.

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…

> And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low.

From my experience being on a mobile development team for a competitor. Last time I checked like most major airlines their team is in house and I’d be in shock if that changed.

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