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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

#51

Post by ChrisKingWebDev »

MattGaiser wrote: post #42
ForHackernews wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a non-feature for 99% of users. The fact that Uber devotes engineering resources to serving the tiny 1% slice of users who care about having an app that works seamlessly across dozens of countries, at the expense of the much larger number of users with limited space on their outdated devices, is really emblematic of the Valley's out-of-whack priorities.

> This is such a non-feature for 99% of users. I would imagine that travellers are an outsized percentage of high spenders, even if they are a small portion of users.

I would agree with this. At home I walk, ride my bike, get on transit, rent a carshare etc. When I'm travelling, I'm walking or calling an Uber/Lyft. I'll take a train or bus only if it's super easy to navigate.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#52

Post by ohiovr »

doggodaddo78 wrote: post #45
ohiovr wrote: post #2

I'd take a sledge hammer to it. The app doesn't have to be an app at all. It could simply be a stream with an os interactive overlay that intercepts touches. Like a thin client for phones.

That's called a web browser and a web app. And then there wouldn't be anything to hog-up 1/3 of a GiB on every customer's phone, and it would always be up-to-date. Just don't ever lose internet access.

Especially getting lost in a cell dead zone.

Its not exactly a web app but it could be made that way with WebRTC.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#53

Post by jandrese »

user5994461 wrote: post #43
jandrese wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that this would be the perfect use case for loadable modules. The Uber app could download the payment module you need on the first use and leave the dozens of other APIs off your device. This could also significantly cut down on the number of updates (300MB downloads each time!) that the app needs, since NA or European users won't have to re-download the app because some Indian payment API changed. Unfo…

>>> The Uber app could download the payment module you need on the first use When I'm opening Uber at 1am in the cold to get a ride home, this is not the time to download a payment SDK update.

It's like 5MB and you have to be connected to the Internet to use Uber in the first place.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#54

Post by novok »

ketralnis wrote: post #8

Can someone help me understand this? They blame the source of the large bundle size on: > The choice of Swift as our primary programming language, our fast-paced development environment and feature additions, layered software and its dependencies, and statically linked platform libraries result in large app binaries but can somebody familiar with iOS development explain what makes app bundles so big? Actual CPU instr…

The same equivalent code in objective-c is significantly smaller than the same code with swift. Swift has a lot of implicit specializing templates which really bloats code size, like it would in C++. If you compare binary sizes of apps from the pre-swift era, you'll notice many are far smaller. Like I remember tweetbot being 4.5mb in the pre ios 6 days.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#55

Post by MattGaiser »

ChrisKingWebDev wrote: post #51
MattGaiser wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is such a non-feature for 99% of users. I would imagine that travellers are an outsized percentage of high spenders, even if they are a small portion of users.

I would agree with this. At home I walk, ride my bike, get on transit, rent a carshare etc. When I'm travelling, I'm walking or calling an Uber/Lyft. I'll take a train or bus only if it's super easy to navigate.

I spent a lot of 2018/2019 travelling around North America. It was wonderful to never have to consider a taxi.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#56

Post by novok »

danpalmer wrote: post #36

I'd like to see Apple expose more control over their app thinning technologies. Currently they only deliver the binary for the device's CPU, and only the assets for the device's asset class. There's then some tech targeted at game devs for on-demand assets for things like game levels that you don't need all of on device at one time. I suspect the limitations of this are around the binary not being subject to this, bu…

Well since on demand resources were made for games (lua is specifically called out as 'ok'), I could imagine many games also making their initial size far smaller if they used binary code to make new levels or regions. Games are very large chunk of the app store and it's revenue.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#57

Post by ssdspoimdsjvv »

ForHackernews wrote: post #34
spoonjim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that it’s one app. I remember landing in Delhi from San Francisco and the Uber app worked perfectly and I was so astonished. Effectively nothing else translates seamlessly like that. Combined with the incredible quality control on the vehicles side (every car I got in India had a seatbelt, where close to 0 taxis you’d get on the street would), I knew it was a very high functioning company to execute like this.

This is such a non-feature for 99% of users. The fact that Uber devotes engineering resources to serving the tiny 1% slice of users who care about having an app that works seamlessly across dozens of countries, at the expense of the much larger number of users with limited space on their outdated devices, is really emblematic of the Valley's out-of-whack priorities.

I don't have any numbers, but I would guess that a good part of Uber's user base consists of people that travel often. Not having to download a new app or update every time you go to a different country is a huge advantage.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#58

Post by [deleted] »

sond813 wrote: post #48

I’m the founder of a YC company in the current batch focused on solving this exact problem! https://www.emergetools.com We parse Obj-C and Swift runtime metadata to determine size contributions of individual types and functions in your app. We use this analysis to post PR comments with granular size diffs to help devs write smaller, better code. I tried it out on the Uber app and immediately noticed a disproportionat…

[deleted]

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#59

Post by sond813 »

jandrese wrote: post #35
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

It strikes me that this would be the perfect use case for loadable modules. The Uber app could download the payment module you need on the first use and leave the dozens of other APIs off your device. This could also significantly cut down on the number of updates (300MB downloads each time!) that the app needs, since NA or European users won't have to re-download the app because some Indian payment API changed. Unfo…

Google encourages this with feature modules and app bundles. Apple doesn't allow it because they've always been against downloading executable code that doesn't go through app review. Same reason they don't like game streaming or downloading react native at runtime.

I'd like to see them open up this possibility in a controlled way one day. Something like a review process for feature modules that could be updated in a similar process to full apps.

Re: How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size

#60

Post by sond813 »

bhupy wrote: post #18
jedberg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The summary of that comment is "we have to include a ton of stuff that will never be relevant to most users like payments APIs that only work in India." This is why some global apps have different apps for different countries. It's a trade off. Would you rather have a single fat Uber app, or have to download Uber India when you arrive there?

> This is why some global apps have different apps for different countries Do you have some examples? Genuinely curious. To my knowledge, most of the major FAANG apps are single-binary.

Starbucks has a separate China app. I suspect a part of this is due to app size because there are regions specific SDKs. Another is likely security. Regulations in some countries require data to be shared with the government and they don't want SDKs that collect this data to be included in more privacy focused regions.
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