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App sizes are out of control

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Re: App sizes are out of control

#91

Post by gue5t »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #17

Things will only get worse. The application paradigm is unsustainable. https://medium.com/@miguelrochefort/the-application-paradigm...

You're entirely right, but "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" certainly applies to the entire "tech" industry, and the app factory in particular.

I expect this realization will only become widespread when open-source folks actually fix their software's deep-seated usability problems. The way to do that is not by hiring UX designers or appifying it; it's by thinking deeply about how humans interact with computers and blowing away the conventions that make computers and software unforgiving, hard to explore, and opaque to the uninitiated.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#92

Post by DamnInteresting »

One of my first jobs was as a technician at a tech support call center. For a while around 1997-1998, a good 1/3 of our calls were customers who ordered a new system with a hard drive over 2.1GB, but Windows/DOS could only make partitions as large as 2.1GB. Customers wondered why they got a smaller hard disk than they ordered, not realizing the extra space was that Drive D under My Computer.

Fast forward to today, where my MacBook keeps nagging me that my "hard disk" (actually an SSD) is "full" because I only have 3GB of free space. In 20 years, what was once considered the maximum is now considered negligible.

Optimization is important, but regardless, software size is going to keep growing. Wringing hands over it doesn't help much.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#94

Post by Retric »

mikeash wrote: post #73
ryandrake wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thing…

You could use static analysis to find out if anything calls objects dynamically by name at run time which could be a useful optimization. To be safe this would be one bool value for the entire code base, but with some care it would help. A larger issue is size is simply not considered a significant issue.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#95

Post by silassales »

masklinn wrote: post #49
silassales wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large factor is the ever increasing need to have different display sizes for different pixel densities, developers essentially have to create and package a couple versions of the same application into one package and that is alot of waste.

If the application is properly packaged, the appstore should be able to generate configuration-specific variants which only include the assets relevant to your device class ( https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/ID... )

This makes sense, a much better way to do things.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#96

Post by s73ver »

laurencei wrote: post #74

The problem is it's not really in Apples interest to get app sizes smaller. Larger apps means you have more "need" to upgrade your phone to the latest version with more space, power, speed etc.

Except they have been working on it, by repackaging apps to strip out unneeded assets.

And it is in Apple's interest to have smaller apps, because then people will be able to download more apps. They'll be willing to try more apps, because there will be less of a barrier between seeing the download button and being up and running.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#97

Post by mavhc »

lbebber wrote: post #48
colanderman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, you can still access messages by selecting "Request desktop version" from the Chrome menu.

Or http://mbasic.facebook.com

This is faster than the app for me. My main problems with the app are a) it was pre installed so can't be moved to SD card, b) not only does the app include a snapchat clone I don't use, but it stores 100s MBs of user data too, c) it tells me I have messages, but that requires more 100s MBs to read in another app with another 100 features I don't use.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#98

Post by dom0 »

potatolicious wrote: post #40
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.

I think this is likely the biggest culprit. Another user pointed out an analysis of the Facebook app: http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707 Most of it is actual code - not assets. For some types of apps (see: games) assets do take up a significant portion of total size, but for most everyday apps bloat by code over-inclusion is likely a bigger problem than asset-bloat. I wonder if it's possible to get major open-source libs…

Many C++ libraries follow this approach.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#99

Post by s73ver »

amelius wrote: post #69
noahmbarr wrote: post #7

Short a major customer outcry, Apple is largely incentivized to not fix this— (1) They substantial profits from memory upsells on their product lines (2) Larger apps take more horsepower to run— so older models become less effective sooner!

But if Android apps are smaller and faster, people will switch over to Android.

I highly doubt that. Few people actually know how big any given app is. Plus, there are more compelling things keeping people on their platform of choice, like iMessage or the sunken cost of apps that they've already purchased.

Re: App sizes are out of control

#100

Post by iamben »

As someone with 16gb of space on my phone (before the OS), this has become really noticeable. It's a breath of fresh air when you install an app (like the habit tracker I installed the other day) and it's only 2mb...

It's worse knowing something like Facebook will cache a whole bunch of images, friend pictures and everything else.

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