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

Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

threadreaderapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 205 posts

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#101

Post by LAC-Tech »

ninkendo wrote: post #86
rvba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) where are the architects? Arent they supposed to deal with such issues? 2) nobody measures such metrics: size, bloat, speed... 3) where are the code reviews? 4) nobody checks if the same library, same icon pack are not attached twice? 5) 1000 people? What do they even do? I suspect a lot of slides, politics and "high visibility projects" Meanwhile the product suffers. Companies sure talk a lot about ecology, then…

Speaking from experience in a similarly unhealthily large org: > 1) where are the architects? Arent they supposed to deal with such issues? The architects are the ones being told “we need these features, figure out how to do it”, and they build little box charts and sequence diagrams to sort out which systems are responsible for which. Never mind if a “feature” could just be a few functions somewhere. Architects thin…

This was incredibly well written and I really enjoyed it. Never worked for a large org but if I extrapolate stuff I've seen in smaller places I can see how this would be the end result.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#103

Post by danpalmer »

oferzelig wrote: post #87

The short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.

On the contrary, lack of storage is a huge limitation on installations. This may not be worth optimising 50MB to 30MB, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate.

People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#104

Post by jasode »

danpalmer wrote: post #103
oferzelig wrote: post #87

The short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.

On the contrary, lack of storage is a huge limitation on installations. This may not be worth optimising 50MB to 30MB, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline…

>, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. [...] It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis.

Does Apple send telemetry information back to developers about failed app installs due to users' device being out of space?

I don't have a current Apple Developer account to test this but the documentation doesn't have any obvious statistic concerning failed installs: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/view-app-....

EDIT reply to: >I don't think there's any special permissions required to get free disk space, so presumably he's getting it via telemetry from his app.

I was thinking of new users who didn't have the app at all.

E.g. hypothetical... "We're a brand new YC tech startup. Our app is 500 MB. This bloated size prevents 20% of potential new users from installing the app." <-- Does Apple provide enough stats to make that type of confident correlation?

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#105

Post by gruez »

jasode wrote: post #104
danpalmer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, lack of storage is a huge limitation on installations. This may not be worth optimising 50MB to 30MB, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline…

>, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. [...] It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis. Does Apple send telemetry information back to developers about failed app installs due to users' device being out of space? I don't have a current Apple Developer account to…

I don't think there's any special permissions required to get free disk space, so presumably he's getting it via telemetry from his app.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#106

Post by ako »

DanielHB wrote: post #74
usrusr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just PMs though: developers are forced into resume driven development by hiring practices. If they stick to the toolkit already established in the app they set themselves up for a career trajectory towards Uber driver. The risk of knowing only what was fashionable five years ago is just too big.

50% of the reason Kubernetes is getting so popular, devops people need k8 experience to move up in their careers and therefor your company is now using k8.

I think ai/llm have overtaken kubernetes in this regard, everything’s needs to be solved with AI, even if it doesn’t solve the problem in a better way. But I guess that’s also part of the learning process, trying it everywhere to learn from experience what doesn’t work.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#107

Post by gcr »

jasode wrote: post #104
danpalmer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, lack of storage is a huge limitation on installations. This may not be worth optimising 50MB to 30MB, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline…

>, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. [...] It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis. Does Apple send telemetry information back to developers about failed app installs due to users' device being out of space? I don't have a current Apple Developer account to…

When I’m low on space I don’t even install some apps that I see on the App Store or, more commonly, I install them just to try them out and remove shortly after.

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#108

Post by wildrhythms »

itsoktocry wrote: post #93
klabb3 wrote: post #26

This is a perfect example of why the problem isn’t the stack, native vs web, or programming languages. I’ve been saying this for ages when people bash JS for being slow, or the web for being bloated. Yes, you pay a bit for the sandboxing, GC, rendering, built in accessibility. But that’s a rounding error when businesses, especially large ones, go on a PM-centric feature frenzy. You get out exactly what you put in. Pe…

> go on a PM-centric feature frenzy Do developers have any agency whatsoever, or are they at the mercy of doing whatever their managers suggest (while always knowing the "right" answer, of course)? Does our industry attract people who avoid accountability? Fraud? It's the executive's fault. Business struggling? It's the MBA's fault. Bad product? It's the PM's fault. Must be nice!

Maybe when you tell your engineers you need X feature implemented in two weeks, leaving them no time to plan or refactor, and they're building on an already bloated, ancient spaghetti codebase because every deadline has been two weeks under a skeleton crew for the past decade...

Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

#109

Post by actionfromafar »

WJW wrote: post #96
actionfromafar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they know, though? If the download times out, does LinkedIn care or notice?

Surely they'd at least notice a decrease in installations of the new "too big to download" version?

And that department will take immediate action, communicate efficiently across corporate governance teams, all in perfect harmony, to address at the next sprint, as ever. /s
Post reply on HN