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Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?

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

#121

Post by ninkendo »

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’m imagining a lot of users find themselves low on space, go to Settings, find what apps are using a lot of it, and delete them. “I’ll re-download LinkedIn if I need it again” they’ll think to themselves. This is terrifying to LinkedIn because it means push notifications no longer deliver, and how are you gonna increase engagement now?

For all I complain about OKR’s, this is a super simple one for LinkedIn to understand: Every MB your app takes up can probably be shown to decrease user stickiness by some percentage. Fix it!

Ah who am I kidding, they’ll probably switch to moving the assets out of the app bundle and making them live-download on first run and stored in the Caches folder somewhere, which will make the app “smaller”. Problem solved on their end, app-size OKR accomplished. The fact that it makes the app slower due to asset fetching is next quarter’s problem.

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

#122

Post by DanielHB »

signaru wrote: post #79
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…

Some of my friends who work in similar situations call this "job security".

You joke but when something is really bad I make a point of saying it is "job security" for myself in front of my tech lead (and my teach lead's manager). It triggers something in their heads that "oh, if he quits we are screwed". Those things tend to get addressed.

There other bad things I don't refer like that, like something that is bad but if I quit and they get a new guy he can probably figure it out in a few weeks tops.

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

#123

Post by iggldiggl »

RyanHamilton wrote: post #77
ungreased0675 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobile web version is intentionally feature degraded, with occasional pop-up nags pushing the app. For that reason, I’d guess a lot of people are using the mobile app.

If you use firefox mobile, there's a toggle switch under the menu to set "Desktop Version", I have found it prevents these intentional mobile degraded sites.

Although "Desktop version" is also tied to a desktop viewport, so you have to deal with either too tiny font sizes or lots of scrolling.

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

#124

Post by DanielHB »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #59

One of the products my company offers is an SDK and we are happy and proud to shave away 10s of kilobytes on it whenever possible, as large SDK sizes seem to lead to loss of opportunities with potential new customers. and then there is this. What I want to say is: Some companies DO care how big their apps are.

I once looked at Zendesk (the thing that powers most of those little customer support chat buttons on the bottom right of web pages), I was appalled at the size of bloat they push down to the browser. I don't remember exact numbers but I think it was ~2mb gzipped. I couldn't removed it from our app but I at least added a 5 second delay before loading it.

Had similar (although not as bad) with the Okta login libraries as well. I eventually created a separate application just for the login page so I wouldn't need to bundle those libs with the main app.

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

#126

Post by paxys »

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…

Apple doesn't incentivize developers to build smaller apps. Instead they push users to throw away their phone and buy one with more storage (at a cost of $100 per 128 GB) and/or buy iCloud subscriptions.

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

#127

Post by paxys »

infomaniac wrote: post #15

Galaxy brain business model: shame the app developers and offer a tool to help them fix their mistakes.

Actual business model: shame users for having 2 year old phones and push them towards throwing it away and buying one with more storage (for a premium, of course).

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

#128

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

eptcyka wrote: post #84
marticode wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Uber, the service they provide is highly dependent on where you are.

Whats the point? I will still want to know the price in both my and the local currency in the language I know.

In India, for example, you can call a tuktuk or a scooter, which you cannot do in the States. Not to mention all the different localized taxes, fees, regulations etc

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

#129

Post by sotix »

usrusr wrote: post #36
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…

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.

> It's not just PMs though: developers are forced into resume driven development by hiring practices

I was laid off from my last gig in January because the company was running out of money. Last week I saw a former coworker share how excited they were to turn a perfectly functional and internal website built with html and css into a react app with redux and nextjs. I couldn’t believe a company running out of money would have a developer do that when it doesn’t affect revenue generation whatsoever. And I can’t believe the dev didn’t stop to think that the previous website was already perfect. There were never any complaints. Their LinkedIn post had tons of likes. I’m happy that they were happy, but I was left a little concerned.

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

#130

Post by foobarxyzzy »

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!

On balance, devs have more agency than ever before, but they choose to use it to load in every daft technology imaginable that makes their resume look good. IMO developers are less and less inclined to act like professionals that bring data to the decision table, so as to create meaningful business solutions.

Take scaling for instance: there is such a thing as unnecessary scaling. I've seen junior devs in AWS shops insist on embedding insane levels of serverless AWS tech, all to serve minimal systems with minimal data and bandwidth and minimal customers. When questioned about the drivers for all of this scaling, they have no reply - its all fairly obvious that they feel that they do not have a career without all of the latest TLAs on their resume.

Apart from creating billions for Jeff Bezos, this is creating bloat on staggering levels. PMs are often unable (or unwilling) to push back, because who wants to questions devs these days?

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