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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

#411

Post by tyingq »

asdff wrote: post #374
varenc wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The odd part is tying the airline's app to a wholly separate thing run by Panasonic (the onboard wifi). The United app isn't required, involved, etc, in purchasing and using wifi on the aircraft. No app is required at all...just the browser on the phone. That's why we're confused about the integration that would be needed to accomplish this. The United app would have to be detecting the jailbreak and then sending some unique identifier to the third party via some separate channel.

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

#413

Post by incanus77 »

WatchDog wrote: post #412

Not an IOS or mobile developer, but doesn't preserving symbols help with telemetry error reporting and stack traces?

When you build the app, you can set aside the symbols for a given version and, either manually or with tools that allow symbol upload, symbolicate things later for debug purposes.

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

#415

Post by chakkepolja »

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.

200KLOC for IRC client? Where does the majority of code come from?

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

#416

Post by Uptrenda »

vmception wrote: post #240
winrid wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding offline access would indeed be nice, but that wouldn't even add 2mb of code. I have entire native mobile games with multiplayer under 3mb. EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh

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…

If your app is too fast you should also make sure to add a sleep() to it so the customer knows that its 'working.' I read a humorous story about a contractor who did that to satisfy a customers complaint that it was too fast.

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

#418

Post by stereo »

Apple could and should run this as part of their compression routine. They should also optimise images - it's very common for apps to bundle images that can be shrunk without any quality loss. ImageOptim is a decent tool to throw your images at: https://imageoptim.com/mac

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

#419

Post by larrybud »

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.

Um, no. Read the thread about 2-4 parents up. United’s contract of carriage says 15 min before departure for domestic flights.

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

#420

Post by jsjohnst »

samhw wrote: post #241
kroltan wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the 3mb is just the wrapper, I bet if you delete the hundred-ish megabytes of cache, it won't work offline anymore :)

But that's entirely fair: of course caching data uses up storage. But it's my choice - I can pay for what I use. The crucial part is that I don't need to download an app which is hundreds of megabytes large just in order to hypothetically support caching. No one can tell me that our species can write 1K ZX Chess ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess ) – an entire chess game with intelligent opponents which only…

> and yet we can't write an email client which isn't a million times that size.

The issue is that the Gmail app isn’t just an email client, it does way more than that. That doesn’t excuse the abusive behavior, but it does explain it.

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