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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#71

Post by linopolus »

ajross wrote: post #34

Folks: there's a built-in technology on your phone that allows you to load and run an app on-demand over the internet without dedicating any internal storage at all! It allows clean integration with many of the "native" features you expect like camera and notification and timers and stuff. And it's based on completely open standards with multiple, competing open source implementations. No, seriously: uninstall that j…

the biggest annoyance being that these are even less integrated and fine tuned to the environment than all those bloaty corporate apps. The best apps still are made by small indy developers, feeling right at home in their OS. Take for example Instapaper, Fantastical, Outbank, Due, Reeder.. You just can't make web apps so polished, so well integrated into the OS..

Re: App sizes are out of control

#72

Post by teamhappy »

ryandrake wrote: post #63
rlv-dan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that whenever coders today need some fairly trivial functionality, they tend to go out and find a library that contains it. So you end up with lots and lots of libraries where only a tiny bits of them are used. Just a hypothesis though.

This would be true if the entirety of the library was used by the application. Wouldn't the linker throw out anything unused?

> Wouldn't the linker throw out anything unused?

There (usually) is no dead code elimination for libraries.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#73

Post by mikeash »

ryandrake wrote: post #63
rlv-dan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be that whenever coders today need some fairly trivial functionality, they tend to go out and find a library that contains it. So you end up with lots and lots of libraries where only a tiny bits of them are used. Just a hypothesis though.

This would be true if the entirety of the library was used by the application. Wouldn't the linker throw out anything unused?

Depends on the language. If you're using something like C++, you can probably remove a lot of dead code. But with more dynamic languages, like Objective-C or Ruby or JavaScript, it becomes difficult or impossible to prove that a given chunk of code is never used. In Objective-C (which I'm most familiar with), the linker will keep all Objective-C classes and methods because it has no idea if you might be looking things up by name at runtime and invoking them that way.

Even if you can throw away dead code, you can run into bloat because a library has a massive set of foundational APIs that the rest is built on, and using one little feature of the library ends up bringing in half the library code because it's used everywhere.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#75

Post by mikeash »

ajross wrote: post #34

Folks: there's a built-in technology on your phone that allows you to load and run an app on-demand over the internet without dedicating any internal storage at all! It allows clean integration with many of the "native" features you expect like camera and notification and timers and stuff. And it's based on completely open standards with multiple, competing open source implementations. No, seriously: uninstall that j…

I'm afraid it's exactly as bad as I think. I use web sites instead of apps whenever I reasonably can, but most stuff I use frequently is much better as an app.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#76

Post by saosebastiao »

sidlls wrote: post #21
jamix wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook did flirt with HTML5 but ditched it in the end. So that's not really true.

They went off the deep end with their "engineering" of the app (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... ). It's really amusing to me when "engineers" start talking about the "scale" of the UI. It's a client. Thin vs. Fat aside, if it's that fat it's almost certainly a bloated mess of redundancy and what is called "overengineering" (which is actually underengineering--that is, a deficiency…

I had a friend who quit working for Facebook about a month before that slideshow was published, and it was hilarious to see her mock it so mercilessly. She estimated a good 40% was completely dead code, and another 20% was partially dead code (e.g. code for notifying people of "pokes" without any mechanism to view them). She also had some choice words for the engineer who published the slides, but those can mainly be pieced together from the general mockery on Reddit and hacker news.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#77

Post by mikeash »

msoad wrote: post #44

One word: Swift It's making app bundle sizes explode in size

The lack of a stable ABI means that the Swift runtime libraries have to be bundled into the apps, which accounts for around 10MB of bloat. Unfortunately, 10MB is almost unnoticeable on the scale of bloated apps these days. Does Swift do anything else to make apps bigger?

Re: App sizes are out of control

#78

Post by chubot »

trevor-e wrote: post #64
gok wrote: post #38

Awesomely, this blog post of less than 200 words and one screenshot loads over 1.41 MB for me. Software expands to fill all available resources.

Sorry for the extra bandwidth, forgot to optimize the images.

Well that's your answer to your question. You forgot to optimize the images, because with your test environment, you don't notice it.

If you were testing over a dial-up connection, you would notice it.

Same with app writers. They forgot to optimize their app because they're testing it on the latest and greatest phones on their home network (or a corporate network which is blazing fast). If they tested on a low-end phone, and actually performed the update themselves over a slow cell network, they'd probably notice it.

Many common tools aren't set up for common-sense optimization. Ideally resizing images would be an automatic step, and you wouldn't have to remember. But that's not the case.

I'm sure that there are plenty of iPhone apps with 2 MB images from a camera, when a 256 KB image would do.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#79

Post by jbverschoor »

cybrjoe wrote: post #14

I was comparison shopping something this week and wanted to check Best Buy, so I went to the app store. 100+ MB and needed to be on wifi to download. What in the Best Buy app could be over 100 MB? On another note, I just went to check some of my apps and iOS 11 got rid of the size from that view. You now need to dive into each app to see the size.

cordova, debugging info, unscaled and uncompressed images.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#80

Post by mikeash »

post_break wrote: post #31

Pretty soon these will start to hit Apple's limit on downloads over cellular (something I still can't believe exists in 2017).

It should definitely exist, but Apple's one-size-fits-all approach is pretty dumb. It ought to be configurable. The 100MB limit is way too big for someone on a really limited cellular plan, and way too small for someone on a high-end plan.
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