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Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
41–50 of 205 posts
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#42This 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…
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Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#43This 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…
> This is a perfect example of why the problem isn’t... Depends on how you frame the problem. If you declare the problem is that although batteries became way more efficient you don't get out more hours because they are wasted, then the story is a different one. Same when you don't have an abundance in RAM but are forced to use certain programs and applications. I have 64GB Ram these days, colleagues at clients of mi…
It goes opposite way as well.
I have workstation with 128GB ram with a few terabytes of storage, I can run full stack with everything in single machine. I also have VM snapshots, versioning etc... There is simple script that installs all deps and setup dev machine.
My colleagues have tiny Macs with 16GB. To accommodate them, we had to split mono dev setup into separate K8S cluster.
On single machine I could easily split test build process. Now we have spaghetti of dependencies. And spinning up secondary dev instances is not permitted due to high AWS cost.
So investing result binary (like this blog post) is now impossible.
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#44This 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…
> the grumpy ones You know, grumpiness really is a thing. I wonder if it should be treated as a symptom like left arm tingling before a heart attack. A call to make some serious changes.
Meh, developers are people too. They are right and they are wrong. I've seen some guys who are proud of having the grumpy persona, which is really just a nice word for "I know better than the other people I work with" and it's not a great attitude. Engineering choices all have trade-offs yet the grumpy guys always frame it as "my way or everything will collapse later".
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I only ever use a single locale on my phone, why isn't there a way to avoid needing to download all of the extra info that my phone will never use?
In Ubers case, the app works well when you travel. Not sure why LinkedIn would need that, if that is your question.
I still get a few ads and configuration settings in Spanish I believe because I created an Uber account at an airport in Mexico.
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#46TL;DR: There're few global incentives for a LinkedIn app developer to make an overall good app, as opposed to making their PM happy. In detail: This is how death by a thousand papercuts looks like. I've had the (dubious) pleasure of observing a roughly similar BigTech app project. There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app, and they are likely under immense pressure to Just Ship Alread…
> There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app I don't understand why you'd need 1000 or even 100 developers to produce such app. It's a CRUD frontend for a backend that already exists. What am I missing? Are you counting the developers of all the third party libs they integrate?
Furthermore, I would like to see some stats how much of their traffic is via the app and how much is via the website. Of course many people have LinkedIn profiles, but are there really so many "hardcore" users who install the app? So maybe the app just isn't that important for them in the grand scheme of things, and the bloat is more the result of neglect than of hundreds of developers working (specifically) on the app?
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber actually had a pretty reasonable explanation for their app being huge when their rather large app size made the rounds several years ago. Turns out localization takes a lot of space. I wonder how much of LinkedIn’s insane size can be attributed to that vs just lazy coding
If I only ever use a single locale on my phone, why isn't there a way to avoid needing to download all of the extra info that my phone will never use?
I think App Store's app thinning doesn't care about locales, so any such attempt should download an additional localization file from Uber's servers. While not technically impossible, it will mean that downloading an app is no longer sufficient to use the app; it should also go through the initial (or incremental) download, which was significant in the case of Uber's case (1 MB per locale according to the blog AFAIK), so it won't be as optimal.
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#48I remember, like, three years ago looking at the LI app and wondering, why was it almost 200MB. Bloat breeds bloat.
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who calls who like that?
Hacker News has a lot of people who swear up and down that phrases nobody has said before ever are actually standard lingo
Technically that's how you start trends - you claim that others are doing it, so your target group does, and now you have an example to point to!
Re: Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
#50Why does the web page presenting this complaint take 140 requests to serve and transfer 10Mb? Same reasons - bloat over time, developers with powerful machines and network connections who don't notice the impact, users with huge devices that don't care about 500M space for an app and management and corporate culture that don't care much about optimisation.
Uber actually had a pretty reasonable explanation for their app being huge when their rather large app size made the rounds several years ago. Turns out localization takes a lot of space. I wonder how much of LinkedIn’s insane size can be attributed to that vs just lazy coding
> Turns out localization takes a lot of space.
Does localization involve more than a few hundred strings per locale, all of which should compress really well? Maybe add in some localized icon sets, but much fewer than the number of supported locales.
I'm not saying you're (or they're) wrong, I'm genuinely curious.