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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

#421

Post by fennecfoxen »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #151
throw10920 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

... It looks like this link died a short while after I posted it so have the non-holiday equivalent: https://www.sugarfina.com/design-your-own-9-piece-mini-candy...

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

#423

Post by tluyben2 »

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…

Yes, binary size, deployment size, deployment time, LoC, source code zipped size, number of directories in GitHub, number of repositories in GitHub. I have heard all kind of VC metrics to increase ‘success’ of being believable by partners, clients and VCs. Small and lean is something ‘they’ generally do not believe anymore.

In a rather successful business I had, I had a product of a few 100kb which installed easily on servers; just ./install.sh. Someone told me that this was really not smart. The script downloaded it’s dependencies (just rpm install; nothing proprietary) and then it copied the binary to /use/local/bin. I figured I could fix 2 issues at once; people running other distros complained that it did (obviously) not work; in our target audience, well over 90% ran rpm based distros, mostly centos. This was before Docker etc so I changed the install to apt-get and included a zipped chrooted Debian with everything already installed in it. Suddenly install.sh was over 100s of mbs and worked on any x86 Linux. It indeed made sales jump with people saying in forums that ours was bigger than even the largest competitor install download so it must be better. It is lame but true; especially when people pay for stuff, they want to get bang for their buck.

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

#425

Post by vmception »

tluyben2 wrote: post #423
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…

Yes, binary size, deployment size, deployment time, LoC, source code zipped size, number of directories in GitHub, number of repositories in GitHub. I have heard all kind of VC metrics to increase ‘success’ of being believable by partners, clients and VCs. Small and lean is something ‘they’ generally do not believe anymore. In a rather successful business I had, I had a product of a few 100kb which installed easily o…

Yeah, the same concept applies to airline and hotel sites and apps

Their server returns results instantly but found that if they showed a loading animation (even fancy ones like an animated svg or gif of a cartoon passenger in an airplane) that people trusted the results more

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

#426

Post by db48x »

asdff wrote: post #371
godshatter wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing. What happened? I started programming on machines with 16K of memory or less. It was a point of pride for developers to make programs that did the most with less, like the whole demoscene movement. It's like the contest changed from who can make the leanest code to who can get away with packaging the most bloat in one app without causing the device to break. We went from shaving off indi…

What happened is that hardware got orders of magnitude more powerful, user expectations for performance stayed the same, and developers got lazy.

I don’t think that’s entirely it. All of our programs got significantly more powerful at the same time. Your email program, for example, can handle email in hundreds of encodings plus several varieties of Unicode. Properly handling Unicode text requires detailed information about each character. Just the Unicode data tables are multiple megabytes, though the exact size will vary depending on exactly which properties you need. Figure on at least a megabyte just to handle bidirectional text rendering, and add a bit more so that you can distinguish between word characters and punctuation well enough that double–clicking can reliably select a whole word. And then there are emoji!

Most people just see text, and not the complexity that supporting all of that text requires. Most computers from 20 years ago could barely handle it, and you can forget about doing it on the computers from 40 years ago.

There are plenty of other features that have invisible complexity too.

The article we’re all discussing talks about the symbols as if they are completely unnecessary, but that may not entirely be true. They are certainly unnecessary to _run_ the app, but it is probable that all of the error reporting and logging done by the app uses those symbols to explain where the errors and log messages came from. This makes it possible for the developers to actually fix problems. Granted, they could strip those symbols from the distributed app while still keeping them available to developers, but unfortunately that’s easier said than done.

One of the few ways that developing on Windows is better than on other platforms is that MSVC makes it very, very easy to build a symbol server that collects all of the symbols from all of the applications you have released. If you get a minidump from one of your programs crashing, it will automatically load the correct symbols from the symbol server, as well as the correct version of the source code. It will even download symbols for Windows itself, to make those dump files as easy to debug as possible. Linux is only very gradually gaining similar features. and I have no idea about Android or ios.

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

#427

Post by bobbles »

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…

It seems like multimillion $ companies everywhere can simultaneously declare widely that mobile is their future, point to stats like 75%+ usage of their services is through the app interface, and then basically their entire dev/maintenance crew is one person stretched across multiple projects already.

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

#428

Post by asdff »

tyingq wrote: post #402
asdff wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that rate why not also ip ban any general purpose compute device from accessing their servers? I can't believe a major airline has programmers who think blocking jailbroken cellphones would do anything at all to thwart a hack. It makes me think twice about flying United certainly if these are the incompetent hands I'm placing my trust in.

Not that I agree with it, but the usual line of reasoning is that they have laxer rules on a native app. Like no captchas, much longer session timeouts, etc. So they aren't comfortable with the looser rules on a rooted phone.

Once again, things that are trivially bypassed by people who are active in this space, and their programmers should know better than using this line of reasoning that must just be ancient procedure at this point, especially considering the cargo they are tasked to ensure is safe.

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

#429

Post by [deleted] »

wodenokoto wrote: post #157
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.

[deleted]

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

#430

Post by oblio »

acchow wrote: post #254
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.

I wonder when iOS will allow for dynamically linked shared libraries from the same Developer account.

Never. Storage space is getting cheaper and Apple has been nickel and diming users for ever.

The iPhone 11 Pro Max, a $1100 phone from late 2019, still had 64gb as base storage...

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