The Apps are Too Damn Big • Hacker News Board

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#11

Post by high5ths » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:21 AM UTC

michael_miller wrote: post #4

I think this is a bigger question of backwards compatibility. Surely Apple could find a technical solution to downloading Retina assets to non-Retina devices, but at the end of the day, what does this accomplish? It means that users of older devices will have a slightly better experience, at the expense of a nontrivial amount of work. Were such a scheme to be implemented, the developer would likely have to mark Retin…

I don't think we're talking about a "slightly better experience" -- this is the difference between having 20 apps and 40 apps (for example). Space is at a premium on these devices...

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#12

Post by mcguire » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:23 AM UTC

michael_miller wrote: post #4

I think this is a bigger question of backwards compatibility. Surely Apple could find a technical solution to downloading Retina assets to non-Retina devices, but at the end of the day, what does this accomplish? It means that users of older devices will have a slightly better experience, at the expense of a nontrivial amount of work. Were such a scheme to be implemented, the developer would likely have to mark Retin…

In other words, last month's devices are legacy.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#13

Post by sehugg » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:27 AM UTC

cbsmith wrote: post #9

sumukh1 wrote: post #5

One possible solution is having apps ship with 1x graphics with an optional download to have 2x. That solution, however, is not something I would like as a developer or as an user. Over the next few years, we'll probably go back to having just two screen sizes (Retina iPhone + iPad). This is just a side effect of the transition to retina, and it will go away soon. Though from Apple's perspective it would make more fi…

If only things were done with vector graphics...

Might not be so easy. http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#14

Post by jonnyba » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:27 AM UTC

I think if they did this app developers would need to sign and submit four different binaries (iphone, iphone_2x, ipad, ipad_2x). Technically you can already do this. I guess if it's a paid app, the user would have to pay for each device type.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#15

Post by vicapow » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:30 AM UTC

anyone who does HTML5 / PhoneGap style development have a solution? I'd imagine one would be able to have the app detect which resources it required and have them be downloaded and cached during runtime.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#16

Post by joeld42 » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:34 AM UTC

There's a standard naming convention, iOS load image@2x.png on retina and image.png on non-retina but it's not strictly enforced so apple couldn't delete all the @2x images on a non-retina device. Plenty of universal apps use the @2x iphone target images for the iPad display, for example, and this suggestion would break those apps.

As a developer, I've been more and more often leaning towards using tools like paintCode or just writing code for custom widgets instead of trying to make the 4 different images for iphone/ipad/iphone@2x/ipad@2x. This is a win/win because it looks better (except at very low res) and keeps the size of the app down.

Having the app store serve different apps for different target devices opens a can of worms. For example, if you backed up on one device and restored on another, you could get the wrong one. I think Apple made the right choice in preferring to make sure your apps work everywhere rather than save storage at the cost of complexity. And if that means they're nudging the consumer to upgrade to the lastest and greatest, I can't blame them for going that route.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#17

Post by kenrikm » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:35 AM UTC

michael_miller wrote: post #4

I think this is a bigger question of backwards compatibility. Surely Apple could find a technical solution to downloading Retina assets to non-Retina devices, but at the end of the day, what does this accomplish? It means that users of older devices will have a slightly better experience, at the expense of a nontrivial amount of work. Were such a scheme to be implemented, the developer would likely have to mark Retin…

Retina graphics are already marked @2x. They could have implemented split bundles however Apple has never been one to maintain complete backwards compatibility. And I do agree Garage Band is obese, same as the OSX version which I had to uninstall from my MacBook Air because it took up way to much of the very limited SSD space.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#18

Post by SeoxyS » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:45 AM UTC

Also, don't forget that on-the-fly changes to the .app bundle would break its code signature.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#19

Post by kumarm » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:51 AM UTC

This is also ONE of the MAIN reasons why iPhone users use WIFI from often than Android Users. This is also ONE of the MAIN reasons why Network is chocked because of iPhone.

Apple to save a penny, costed heavily for everyone else involved.

Re: The Apps are Too Damn Big

#20

Post by taylorbuley » Sun, Apr 08, 2012, 4:51 AM UTC

Given the evidence presented here, the courteous thing to do would seem to be to host the images remotely. However it makes sense why developers would default to frontloading the image loads as there's per access latency and overhead associated with hosting the images remotely vs. a one time hit for downloading the images from the App Store.

Instead of using a CDN and eating the bandwidth cost of retina display-ready assets, it sounds like apps companies are publishing the cost onto users for increasingly resolute image assets.

That or people should buy Apple's larger models if they expect to do serious computing on the iPad.