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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

#281

Post by vel0city »

sb057 wrote: post #215
_fat_santa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to their inflight entertainment, United pulled this stunt on me the other day. - Flight at 11AM, boarding at 10:20. - Show up at 10:25, boarding doors are closed. - "Didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago" - "Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up, sorry, you should show up when boarding starts" - "Yeah but didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago, how was I to know" - "You should have known, sorry"

>Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up So they are essentially scamming 5% of passengers out of their tickets?

I mean, you're supposed to be at the gate when boarding starts. For all practical purposes if you miss boarding you've missed your flight even if the plane hasn't left the ground due to safety rules about letting passengers go after the door is considered closed.

There's a bit of a checklist of things that need to be completed after the door gets closed and the gate pulls away. They're often incentivized to try and speed things up, so if there's nobody at the gate anymore to board they might assume those passengers decided not to go on the flight. Especially with people now checking into flights the day before, the airline may not even know if the passenger is even at the airport and would realistically show up to the gate anytime soon as checking in means pretty much nothing these days.

They're not scamming anyone. Your ticket said you were supposed to be at the gate to board at a certain time. You weren't there, so you missed the flight.

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

#282

Post by lxgr »

stefan_ wrote: post #262
lxgr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail being a "hub app" makes some sense, actually (unless you're not using Chat or Meet, of course). What annoys me much more than that is that Docs, Sheets and Presentations all are multi-hundred megabyte standalone apps, of which I'm guessing 80%-90% of the code is identical/pulled in from some non-shared library.

Does it make sense? Every time I click a link in GMail it opens some weirdly broken browser imitation instead of opening it in my chosen browser. This is supremely weird.

That's also a common iOS app annoyance, but a different one than either of these I'd argue.

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

#284

Post by snovv_crash »

mlindner wrote: post #35
abotsis wrote: post #21

I wonder what effect stripping has on crash dump reports though. I don’t know enough about how the App Store manages those, like (if a user opts in to “share information with the developer”), does the developer get less nice dumps as a result of stripping? Surely this can be worked around so long as someone has a symbol table (which they likely do), but the infrastructure might not be in place to do that automaticall…

A good crash dump doesn't need symbols at all. The symbols come from the stored symbols from when the author originally compiled it. As long as the builds are reproducible you can even produce the symbols at a later date for an old version if you still have the source code.

Even if the builds aren't reproducible, rebuilding on the same machine with the same settings usually gives you something a crash dump will work with.

But, make your builds reproducible and/or save your debug symbols as part of your release process, it will be something you wish you did otherwise when you're not quite sure if the stack trace you have is correct.

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

#285

Post by kroltan »

samhw wrote: post #241
kroltan wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the 3mb is just the wrapper, I bet if you delete the hundred-ish megabytes of cache, it won't work offline anymore :)

But that's entirely fair: of course caching data uses up storage. But it's my choice - I can pay for what I use. The crucial part is that I don't need to download an app which is hundreds of megabytes large just in order to hypothetically support caching. No one can tell me that our species can write 1K ZX Chess ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess ) – an entire chess game with intelligent opponents which only…

I agree if cached data was actually proportional to usage.

But a lot of these webview kind of apps just download the whole thing anyways, so it's literally just a matter of if the bytes are classified under "application size" or "cache" by the OS.

(Precisely so they have the whole thing available for when you need to use it offline)

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

#286

Post by uoaei »

vmception wrote: post #240
winrid wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding offline access would indeed be nice, but that wouldn't even add 2mb of code. I have entire native mobile games with multiplayer under 3mb. EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh

I’ve been judged by prospective employers based on reported app size being seen as correlated to complexity. VC backed startup I worked at for 18 months with a 12 megabyte app size due to efficient design choices? Must be a joke So now I just add a 150 megabyte dummy file at everyone else’s expense I’m sure there is a lot of that going on given how long some job roles were open, I have to imagine that every mobile de…

Well it may not be correlated to complexity but it certainly is correlated to end user satisfaction. If their device prompts a "device cleanup" operation and your app is near the top of the list that doesn't do much good for retention.

Not to mention the billions of devices in the world which are running old OS versions with scant memory capacity.

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

#287

Post by vbezhenar »

vmception wrote: post #240
winrid wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding offline access would indeed be nice, but that wouldn't even add 2mb of code. I have entire native mobile games with multiplayer under 3mb. EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh

I’ve been judged by prospective employers based on reported app size being seen as correlated to complexity. VC backed startup I worked at for 18 months with a 12 megabyte app size due to efficient design choices? Must be a joke So now I just add a 150 megabyte dummy file at everyone else’s expense I’m sure there is a lot of that going on given how long some job roles were open, I have to imagine that every mobile de…

Release lite version without that file.

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

#288

Post by kylehotchkiss »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #210
coldcode wrote: post #125

I spent the last ten years of my career building iOS apps, all but one you would likely known at the time, and whoever in charge of this app is an idiot. Shipping an app to the general public with symbols intact? Really? If they didn't know/didn't care, it tells me no one there likely cared about any other quality issue either. It's highly likely that any relevant lead person probably screamed about this daily, but h…

> I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight Oh it goes deeper than that. Almost every airline (Southwest is the only exception coming to mins at the moment) also outsources their web design, their pricing structure, and their availability tracking. I've worked with several airlines that leg…

I like what Duffel is doing as far as creating a nice, consistent airline booking API goes: https://duffel.com/

Maybe some carriers should integrate with Duffel and build their apps on top of the Duffel API instead of shipping all the logic off to accenture or whatever

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

#289

Post by vmception »

klodolph wrote: post #260
vmception wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been judged by prospective employers based on reported app size being seen as correlated to complexity. VC backed startup I worked at for 18 months with a 12 megabyte app size due to efficient design choices? Must be a joke So now I just add a 150 megabyte dummy file at everyone else’s expense I’m sure there is a lot of that going on given how long some job roles were open, I have to imagine that every mobile de…

On the other hand, when your app is actually functional at 12 MB, you'll find users from more parts of the world using it.

Yes when I ever make an app for my own project

But for most employers they just need presence, almost nobody was breaking even on apps they just needed the presence on the app stores. Big waste of money for most, and for most projects I was pitched

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

#290

Post by cush »

stingraycharles wrote: post #31
mojuba wrote: post #5

But even the stripped version is way way too much for an app like this. I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions.

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…

Who are most people? Most people in the world are data-restrained in one way or another. Depending on the market, this can have serious user impact.
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