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How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

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Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#201

Post by bangara »

whoisburbansky wrote: post #16

> While power law and fractal patterns have revealed themselves in several physical, biological, and man-made phenomena, to our knowledge we are the first to identify their presence in machine-code sequences in computer executable code. Presumably, machine code is a human expression of instructions to a computer and it is well established that all human languages show a power-law in the frequency of the words. Made m…

It is an over claim to attribute the findings in the blog here to the "Power Laws in Software" paper published in 2008 at ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. The ACM paper is casting a wide net on many places where distributions show power law in software and is focused on software modules/libraries/classes and their dependencies. There is a mention of CPU ISA using instruction frequency in CISC architectures but no in-depth treatment of the subject. This blog focuses on the machine instructions and analyzes just not instruction frequency but a whole sequence of instructions and their frequencies plus their lengths in an exhaustive manner.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#203

Post by ThankYouBernard »

pjmlp wrote: post #194
spoonjim wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber India isn’t like Uber New York but it’s a million times more reliable and predictable than almost any other commercial service you can get in India.

Reliable as IT offshoring commercial services? You said any.

As reliable as someone like you on HN deliberately misunderstanding a comment and being a racist douche on top of it.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#204

Post by mrmonkeyman »

spoonjim wrote: post #172
jawzz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Seems like it’d be more reliable and a lot faster to just hop in one of the hundred rickshaws on every street. Besides the fact that they’ll overcharge you if you’re a tourist.

Have you seen those things in an accident? I can easily afford the Uber with seatbelts and I am not going to trust my life to a three wheeler.

They drive like maniacs but they drive at 10mph. You won't die.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#206

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

908B64B197 wrote: post #66
Scoundreller wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally? A single fat app. Less fumbling around when I land somewhere to get their localized app, which will presumably only be available from that country’s App Store that’s inaccessible before I land there. If I have to deal with the airport’s wifi... I don’t want to depend on downloading a 100mb binary over it. Maybe they could have a local and global version available, but that’s already making it more complic…

> If I have to deal with the airport’s wifi... I don’t want to depend on downloading a 100mb binary over it. That pretty much doomed all these "local Uber competitors". Nobody would start looking for a local competitor, set up an account, get 2FA, register their payment method and then have the privilege of getting a "starting up" screen telling them how and where they can get a ride. Instead they just open Uber and…

> doomed

Uber lost in pretty much every market where they had local competition. Are there any counterexamples?

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#207

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bhupy wrote: post #7

An old (but fantastic) comment from the previous discussion about Uber's app size that addresses why the Uber app is so big: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346

> And then you have the binary size bloat with Swift that OP takes about.

Hopefully, swift ABI stability will reduce that. The new bytecode stuff will help to reduce bloat, as well, but he notes that a lot of SDKs are used. In my experience, SDKs and dependencies often won’t work, compiled with bytecode. Hopefully, that’s changing.

That code repetition thing also happens when a lot of dependencies are used; which often reinvent the wheel. That just comes with the territory. It can be addressed by using highly granular dependencies, but that sort of flies in the face of why we use dependencies. One advantage that Uber has, is they are an 800-lb gorilla. They could contract for specific configurations of dependencies.

I’m not a big Uber user (but I’ve used it a few times). I think it’s a fairly well-done app, as a user.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#210

Post by jakub_g »

jbverschoor wrote: post #196
jakub_g wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice check. I guess they relaxed a bit since Apple raised the app size limits :) (sorry for the snark in the previous post)

Well it’s easy to assume that big companies do the work you’d expect. But I think the bigger the team, the less they care about all aspects. Especially with A/B tests, because they are just temporarily

Curiously, they've also had that issue and wrote a dedicated tool to clean up unreachable code after old A/B tests:

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/04/uber-piranha-unreachable-...

I also know it first-hand as just last week I've been doing a mega-cleanup of years-old A/B test flags in our own code.

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