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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

#151

Post by fennecfoxen »

throw10920 wrote: post #74
arcticbull wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For a 5-screen 50MB app, sure. For a 5-screen 500MB app that falls pretty flat. [edit] You could fit all of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 or Final Fantasy VII for PS2 in the same amount of space.

Exactly - badness of waste is non-linear . An application that's 4x as large as necessary is more than twice as bad as one that's 2x as large as necessary. A candy bar which is 5% packaging and 95% candy by mass is alright. A candy bar which is 50% packaging and 50% candy is horrifying.

It's not that scary.

https://www.sugarfina.com/valentines-day-mini-candy-trunk

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

#152

Post by engmgrmgr »

colechristensen wrote: post #136
stingraycharles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's an opposite direction to look at it. Taking the shortest path to achieve a goal often seems like the good idea, but it leads to bloat and inefficiency. It'd take longer to "do it right" so you never do it right. But you ignore the fact that all that bloat actually costs you to maintain it. "Not fixing it" is always faster and will always be the shortest path to the next feature... but that next feature gets h…

The “right way” also needs to be maintained and refactored over time. That gets increasingly expensive the more in-house or low-level things are.

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

#153

Post by astrobe_ »

rvnx wrote: post #51
stingraycharles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contrarian opinion here; I understand their logic. It looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done. Increase developer productivity at the expense of hardware. In this case, engineering is more expensive than hardware (because hardware is at the cost of the user). The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. This means the application takes 500/128000 blocks: 0.4% of the total device storage. Over time, the…

Here is today's car analogy : well sure, they pollute, but if nobody complains why would car makers invest in cleaner, more efficient motors? Oil is cheap anyway and will be cheaper in the future (that's probably what they thought in the '60). Oh, wait...

A friend of mine told me their company is trying to downsize their flash storage in order to come back to the unit prices of before the shortages.

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

#154

Post by pgwhalen »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #145
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.

Why would you ever want to discourage someone from buying what you are selling?

When the cost of selling to such a niche group outweighs the revenue, that’s the premise of this thread.

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

#155

Post by Kon-Peki »

spookthesunset wrote: post #141
digikata wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.

Don’t these airplane steaming services have a local copy of all the movies on some storage device inside the plane? I wonder how crazy it would be to cache the iOS app… like maybe they run a caching transparent proxy on the plane… or some crazy relationship with a CDN that treats each plane as an edge node. I dunno, it would probably be pretty be way to expensive to set up something like that to be worthwhile.

Apple content caching is built into MacOS. A Mac mini connected to the in-plane wifi would likely do the trick.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204675

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

#156

Post by jamra »

tempnow987 wrote: post #142
meibo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add some context, Gmail also includes a lot of the core workspace apps(chat, meetings, etc) if you do have a workspace account, which most users will likely never see. All of that isn't needed on regular accounts, I guess, but it's probably easier for them to ship it as one app because people might get confused/are able to switch between their workspace and regular accounts in the app. Gmail is also supposed to be…

They also have an authentication option they are building in (ie, sign in with the app to web properties). I've noticed a bunch of stuff seems to be migrating into gmail. My own view is they burnt people out install allo, hangouts etc, and people DO install gmail / have gmail accounts -> so they are going to try to leverage that for distribution a bit more.

That sounds like a reasonable point of view. But it could be that they are just trying to up sale their other services and can more easily do so if it’s bundled in an already used app.

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

#157

Post by wodenokoto »

alberth wrote: post #65

You know what also have huge app sizes, it's various iOS email app. Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB) [0]. - Gmail (397MB) [1] - Outlook (328MB) [2] - Hey (69MB) [3] - Protonmail (128MB) [4] [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmail-email-calendar/id9313... [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-by-google/id422689... [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-outlook/…

> Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB)

It's because it doesn't contain anything. You can't even see any UI, let alone emails without being connected to the internet.

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

#158

Post by engmgrmgr »

psanford wrote: post #33
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

> it is fair to say this area of app development is complicated to understand. Not really, but it's also actively suppressed. If they can make as much money with a 439MB app as they can with a 10MB app, why would they waste any time or effort trying to save you a few minutes of download time? If anything, I expect this to get worse, as management is constantly pushing for adoption of frameworks that (in their imagina…

The size of the app is hurting their on-boarding funnel, they just can't see it. The most likely place you are going to download the United App is in the airport just before your flight, on mediocre free wifi. United really wants that download to be fast, so customers can get the app before getting on the plane. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of grumpy people your that your flight attendants have to deal with.

I’ve been able to download the app over plane WiFi for free. It used to be a little-known hack for free internet once upon a time.

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

#159

Post by dymk »

yuliyp wrote: post #123
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.

United Airlines is not a luxury product.

Flying anywhere, period, is a luxury

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

#160

Post by jacobr1 »

nouveaux wrote: post #97
sneak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also hard to maintain two entirely separate apps in two entirely different languages for two entirely different platforms/APIs, all while giving up nearly a third of your CLV to a rentseeking middleman.

I completely agree. I'm just sharing my experience. I wish web apps were better so we don't have to download so many apps.

What we need is better support "native hybrid" apps.

For example, you can create "app" that is just a link to browser. There are plenty of action you don't want random web-apps to perform due to security/sandboxing issues, but if you can grant explicit permissions that issue goes away. It is one of the reasons think like election exist. But could apple/goog provide a better electron that was built into the OS?

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