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Are App Sizes Out of Control?
In a blog post, Trevor Elkins points out the large sizes of common apps like LinkedIn and Facebook. "I went to update all my apps the other day when something caught my eye... since when does LinkedIn take up 275MB of space?!" Elkins wrote. "In fact, the six apps in this picture average roughly 230MB in size, 1387MB in total. That would take an 8Mbit internet connection 24 minutes to download, and I'd still be left with 27 additional apps to update! More and more companies are adopting shorter release cycles (two weeks or so) and it's becoming unsustainable as a consumer to update frequently."
Should Apple do something to solve this "systematic" problem? Elkins writes, "how does an app that occasionally sends me a connection request and recruiter spam take up 275MB?"
Further discussion via Hacker News.
Should Apple do something to solve this "systematic" problem? Elkins writes, "how does an app that occasionally sends me a connection request and recruiter spam take up 275MB?"
Further discussion via Hacker News.
I know you old perl grognards don't know anything about the size that graphical assets take up, but when you need a 2086x1080 image for every screen because iphone resolution is fuckhueg you get ballooning app sizes.
This is the natural consequence of choosing languages based on their library support. These languages were chosen for their ease of creating deployable solutions, not for the size of their executables.
Storage utilization is the user's problem, not the software engineer's.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Presumably since we have the source code to every app that runs on our devices, we can see what the problem on a case by case basis, is n'est pas?
What's this, LinkedIn doesn't offer this? Then no one should be using it, period.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Good job, guys.
On the one hand we have Bettridges law of headlines telling us that the answer is "no", and on the other the fact that it is rather obvious to pretty much anybody who owns a smart device that the answer is "yes".
Since you're on a roll, why don't you just spread butter on the back of a cat and drop it from the ceiling to watch it float?
Yes. Probably. Maybe not, once your start ruling out the apps that you probably shouldn't be using in the first place.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Nothing to see here...
Node.js apps are a dime a dozen these days, and they're all fat slugs of things. Sad.
https://developer.apple.com/li...
Technical Q&A QA1779
Reducing Download Size for iOS App Updates
Q: How can I reduce the downloaded size of my app update for users that already have the previous version installed?
A: This document is specific to app updates. See Technical Q&A QA1795: Reducing the size of my App for a collection of techniques to reduce the size of an app when it is downloaded and installed for the first time.
Starting with iOS 6, the app store will automatically produce an update package for all new versions of apps submitted to the store. When generating the update package, the app store compares one or more prior versions of your app to the new version and creates an optimized package for each that contains only the content that has changed between versions of your app, excluding any content that did not change. This comparison looks at everything in the application bundle, including the application executable, nibs, localizations, image files, video files, audio files, text files, and files containing data in a custom format.
Note: The ability to create update packages is not currently available to developers who do not distribute their apps through the app store, such as those distributing enterprise apps.
When used optimally, an update package is significantly smaller to download than the full package of the app and the update will install more quickly. Also, in many cases, this mechanism allows updates to large apps to be downloadable over cellular networks where app downloads are subject to a size limit.
In addition to new content, the update package contains instructions on how to transform the prior version of the app into the new version of the app. New files will be added, modified files will be replaced with their updated counterpart, and deleted files will be removed as part of this transformation. As far as the developer and user are concerned, this process is entirely transparent and the resulting updated app will be indistinguishable from a full download of the corresponding updated version of their app.
To optimize the size of your app updates, you should consider two tips:
Do not make unnecessary modifications to files. Compare the contents of the prior and new versions of your app with diff or another directory comparison tool and verify that you've only changed what you expect within your app bundle.
Content that you expect to change in an update should be stored in separate files from content that you don't expect to change. This reduces the size of the update package and increases its install speed.
For devices running iOS 6.x and iOS 7.0, the update package will include any file, in its entirety, that has changed in the new version of the app. For example, if you have a 10 MB file in your app and only change 1 KB of content within that file in the new version of the app, the update package for that new version will contain the full 10 MB file.
For devices running iOS 7.1 and later, the update package may include only the differences between the old and new versions of a changed file instead of the full file. This may significantly reduce the size of the update package in the case where only a small part of a large file changes, but will increase the update's installation time on the device. For this reason, the two tips above are still important even for updates on iOS 7.1 and later. Minimizing changed content and localizing it to many smaller files instead of one larger monolithic file will reduce the download size in all cases and will speed up installation on devices running iOS 7.1 and later.
This is just plain overkill on UI components. ost companies are more worried about bells and whistles then functionality right now. That's why tablets and phone apps became so popular. Everything was light, small, simple which desktops and laptops really aren't. That's also my Facebook offers a slim version of their application in countries that has slow network connections.
My guess is that the pendulum will switch away from native apps to something like Progressive Web Apps (God I hate that marketing term.) Light static websites that pull from RESTful service will become popular again. The base site will be 1 meg at most in size. Until thos ebecome as bloated as native apps. Then a new disruptive technology will come along and start the process all over again.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
There is a solution for Microsoft, and it's built in to Windows server. It's called Windows Server Update Services, and it does exactly what you're talking about for Windows.
Mac OS also has exactly the same thing, called Software Update services and it's included with Mac OS Server.
Neither of these are Unix based, but if you've already invested in 1000 clients, it's pretty likely you have at least one Windows/Mac OS server for all the other ancillary things they provide.
don't have LinkedIn and track running apps on your cell phone. Twitter and Uber are pretty damned useless, too, and FB is for parents with children.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
...on my Android phone. Except my phone is full, so every update... I have to delete another app, or clear the cache for it to download.
It's !#@$!ing pathetic.
I've got maybe 4 apps that aren't stock on my phone. It runs slow as piss compared to the two years ago when I bought it used. A freakin Samsung S5. You know... an "enterprise model / top-of-the-line" phone when it came out. No Facebook. Nothing. Just Google's, T-Mobile and Samsung's defaults.
"Maybe you just need to upgrade."
Bull. Shit. It's got a quad-core CPU and a GPU that would make my netbook cry, and yet... somehow... my Linux laptop sits there, every day, just as fast. And my phone keeps getting slower. Same websites. Same hardware (from purchase date). And yet... mysteriously... it keeps getting slower.
I would not be surprised at all if there's some planned obsolescence at play. I've seen countless stories of people "reseting to factory default" their phone or tablet, and then once it installed all the normal updates... it's slow as mud again. It shouldn't take me 7+ seconds to load my bloody GMAIL app on a quadcore ghz CPU. It's _e-mail_. It's practically a word processor without the word processing.
Then again, it's probably just a conspiracy theory. It's not like large corporations have ever colluded to bypass things like environmental regulations to increase profit.
And Mac OS X Server costs only $20. It's worth it for the update server and the ability to host remote Time Machine backups, even if you use nothing else.
... doesn't Apple use delta updates? Or is my phone somehow magically updating faster than my brand-new $1800 PC can download through a wired ethernet connection? Also: https://developer.apple.com/li... So yea, the initial download is huge, but the updates, specifically for Apple, are much, much smaller - depending on how much was changed in the update.
Yes, absolutely. I was just complaining to a fellow developer about this recently. As an "old school" software developer, who compiled code on an Amiga with two floppy disk drives (one for the compiler and libraries, and the other for my workspace), I am greatly annoyed by the bloat I see in apps. In my opinion, for an app to be 300 MB, it either is comprised of at least 1 trillion lines of source code, or contain a 298 MB video showing how to use the app. The latter of course being totally unnecessary. The FB app is over 300 MB. The images and icons it contains are most certainly not taking up the bulk of that space. Does it contain its own build of Linux or something? Does it contain translations for every known human language? Really, there is no reason for applications of that kind to be nearly that large.
Two things I know for sure are that iOS apps do not need to be that large - there are some really good games that are only around 5 MB. Second, and I haven't used Android in years so maybe it has changed, but a given Android app always seemed to be smaller than the iOS version.
Better known as 318230.
Don't let this guy see how big his HP printer driver, or Adobe reader, has become...
AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY. Sometimes you had to swap a floppy, then people got 10 MB hard drives and everybody started throwing around memory like it was free.
They just forgot to remove the printer driver that came bundled with the framework...
For LinkedIn, I don't even see the point in having a dedicated app, it provides no added value compared to the web site as seen in a browser.
Except that Apple don't provide any server hardware to run it on, so you'd end up having to buy a mac mini and some kind of stand so you could mount it in the rack, and it still has no lights out remote management capability.
For time machine all kinds of remote shares will work for hosting backups, most NAS devices include support.
It's also annoying having to buy a windows server license just to cache updates, but at least you can run that in any hypervisor.
If the updates were downloaded in a standard way, eg over http, then they would be much easier to cache. There's no reason not to download the large binary files in a standard way, and then verify the checksums/signatures afterwards to ensure the files haven't been tampered with.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Why would you install a LinkedIn App? Is your browser retarded?
0x or or snor perron?!
Microsoft's answer is to use SMS/MOM/SCCM/WSUS/whatever they call it nowadays, and run in a domain, and push the updates when you want. If you have 1000 users on your network, you likely have the domain infrastructure.
I run a network I dont run any Mac or windows machines they are clients of that network...
there are plenty of education facilities in the same boat, we pay for bandwidth and frankly the amount that updates take downloading the same thing is incredible
I cant run a WSUS server as the clients are not owned by us
doesnt anyone measure this ?
There are and you can (at least for Apple). I once wrote my own Apple update server since we moved away from Apple hardware for servers. All you do is download an XML, parse it and download the URL's that it's telling you to download. Then make them available with Apache or nginx.
Not sure about Windows, from what I understand you need Windows Server ($500-6000) and then set up WSUS and then have an Active Directory. Ever seen the WSUS interface? It's absolutely horrid and the organization of updates makes no sense.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
>> I went to update all my apps the other day when something caught my eye... since when does LinkedIn take up 275MB of space?!
Use the mobile web site instead. (Closed - Solved)
I've noticed this recently as well. Usually I have a 64GB sdcard in my phone, and it has 32GB internally so I normally don't notice/care. However recently the sdcard failed, and I had to make some room on my phone for music and things. So I actually spent the time to go through my apps, I was a bit appalled. I mean I got rid of a bunch that I never use, but there were a lot of apps that are very bloated for what they are. Many of which were a couple hundred MB, some of which are glorified mobile webpages.
However I guess one of the good things that might come about is that phone makers will actually start putting in reasonable amounts of internal storage as a result. I mean internal storage has been super cheap for many years, and restricting most users to 16GB (!!!) and 32GB seems a bit silly. I know many use that as a way to sell higher end versions of the exact same phone for pure profit, but perhaps this will signal the end of that due to demand. Or at least it will bump them all a step up to the next higher storage size...
$20 + $$$$ for mac... I dont have a mac to run it on that fits in a rack and apple stopped making those...
its closed source magic that I cant debug or change
all I want to do is cache the updates... admittedly Apple do a reasonable job and I can cache most of the HTTP objects its the microsoft updates that are crazy...
Should the Farmer's Market do something to solve the inadequate quantity or quality of the produce of its vendors?
We'll make great pets
> why are their no unix/proxy/gateway solutions ?
The Open Edge Content Distribution Network, TOECDN, has been developed for exactly this.
The whole purpose of TOECDN is that you, as a end user, can setup a cache server at your home, to be able to cache software updates like this. And its not just for software updates. Its for all static content.
The thing is, nobody care about this solution.
When the app surpassed 200MB i removed it, left a negative feedback and started using the browser. It does 99% of the job, it's faster and doesn't bother me with huge updated every two week. I also removed LinkedIN because it's just a spam deliverer, doesn't work and it's complete garbage.
Developers should have a push back on size. Applications in the store should have a visible end user rating based on the application size and the size of updates in the last 6 months. Rate it in elephants and Rhinos.
The bigger the memory foot print the more elephants. More elephants are not good.
The larger the 6month update foot print the more rhinos. More rhinos are not good.
Is it the app designers, or the spyware, adware, and tracking they are including to be able to monetize their applications?
The presumption would be that you have an existing Mac to run it on. For a large operation, the cost of buying hardware for this function is 'in the noise.' For a smaller operation that already has an investment in Macs, taking an older Mac, adding an external hard drive (if necessary) and running OS X Server on it for Software Updates is a wise use of existing resources.
As far as lights-out, Server comes with a remote manager that you can run on other machines (although you might have to pay $20 to get it on the machine you want to use to manage the otherwise headless server installations.) So that's not an issue. That being said, Minis do have some annoying issues rebooting when they're "headless". My Mini systems running Server get rebooted only when there's a Mac OS X update, that happens maybe 4 times/year. So screwing with the monitor and keyboard when rebooting the Mini is an acceptable cost for me.
I've been running OS X Server on low-end Minis since "Tiger", for at least 10 years, for file server, web server, internal DNS, LDAP, VPN for my small/home office. Earlier versions of Server were -expensive- (retail $1k!) and hard to configure. Over the years it's become a lot easier to configure (once you get DNS set up exactly right) and of course you can't complain about 2 orders of magnitude price decrease, particularly for what you get.
Now if you have the skill and the patience and the significant user base to justify a pure web-cache solution, go for it! But it's not quite clear to me that solution will understand some nuances on whether the currently cached software update (Mac OS or iOS) will work for all devices on your network.
It's the same thing that people said years ago about programs installed on your computer. Reason why? Why should a software company, worry about the size of the code for their program, when storage space is not at a premium? People routinely have 64gb or more space on their phones, so why spend the time to tighten the code, when the space is there? Lazy coders, and or bottom line pencil pushers don't care about the size of the program.
Didn't they have size limitations on apps a long time ago? Of course it makes sense(for them) not to have it.
Why would you buy a 256GB iPhone 7 if you store everything in their cloud?
To make room for apps of course!
The play store used to show you the app size before you installed it, now it doesn't. I would frequently look at an app and find the smallest one. Especially if it was something like a basic utility like a compass, specialized calculator. No need for an app like that to be more than 1 or 2 MB unless they've packed it full of junk.
I have a phone that's a year or two old which I don't really need more than 1-2 apps on because it's not my main personal phone. This phone has 4GB of total flash storage, of which 2.25GB is the Android system. What's very interesting is that when I set up this phone and my Google account, the built-in apps auto-updated and they have to use the remaining free space to do so.
It ran out of space halfway through.
What I had to do is turn off auto-updating, remove all the app updates for apps I didn't use, and now I have to constantly hand-pick updates. Just updating the Google Play {Newsstand,Music,Movies,Books,Games,KitchenSink} crap that almost no one actually uses is enough to kill off most of the phone's remaining storage. App bloat today is obscene. There is no valid excuse for triple-digit megabyte app sizes in all but a very small set of cases, especially for Web-centric stuff like LinkedIn.
All of this app bloat would easily explain why expensive 8-core Android devices today are far slower than the HTC Dream with Android 1.5 that I originally started with.
oh, but then you're asking Apple users to run Javascript.
As we saw from the post on PWAs last week, that's like asking Disney to give up its Copyrights.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Delete all apps that don't actually make your life easier.
Most of them are crap, malware or spyware anyway.
"Social Media" is our version of Huxley's "SOMA".
The only reason I can think of is they don't want to lose control of distributing the application, which can be a big deal if you get a bad actor between you and the proxy or god forbid he takes over the proxy. So added security, other than that???
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Don't download all those apps.
Seriously, do you REALLY need the LinkedIn app? Can't you just use their website to update your profile once in a while? Do you REALLY need a GPS tracker for when you're running? All those apps are essentially glorified web portals that you could do the same thing if you just went directly to their website instead, for less data usage.
You're the one downloading those bulky apps, don't question why they are so big in size, but why do you even need them in the first place.
Oh my god that's way too long! Whatever will someone do for a whole 24 minutes?
Maybe they could microwave something while they wait...
Oh no the burrito will take 6 minutes!
Why is life so cruel?
>> (REOPENED) then you're asking Apple users to run Javascript.
Toss Apple-branded Chinese cell phone, replace with Google-branded Chinese cell phone. (Re-Closed, Solved)
On my Android phone LinkedIn is only 108MB. Twitter - 81MB., Chrome - 131MB, Facebook - 397MB.
Yes, a "social" messaging app wouldn't need to be that complex. But these apps were made for surveillance, not for messaging.
It's like the super-highway effect. The larger you make the highways, the more drivers it attracts, causing drivers to change their driving patterns until it gets over-congested. Expand it again? It attracts even more. If you build it, they will come.
In this case, the more storage space the average phone has, the less app developers will care about size. When it comes to games, the artists will go nuts adding more and higher-res images/video/music/sound effects. I worked with a company on a few iPhone/Android games 5-7 years ago, and roughly 80% of the app sizes was for music and sound effects. Devs like me had to argue with the artists to keep the app from being 4 times the size.
You are the only person I have ever seen post about TOECDN on /.
Are you the dev? Also what happened to the toecdn.org site?
>TOECDN has been developed for exactly this
Your pet project homepage has no documentation, its archive.org version says it's a "concept", which sounds like "not runnable software".
There is zero need for that size.
There's no way that a Facebook app contains 200+Mbytes of code that are required to render a Facebook interface. It makes me wonder what ELSE it's doing.
Also, Facebook doesn't even contain messenger functionality, that's a separate app. A copy of Chromium, branded with the Facebook logo, with the titlebar removed, and locked to only accessing Facebook URL's, would be smaller and more featureful.
Facebook is the one app that I have had to advice my girlfriend to remove. Before we got new smartphones, the Facebook app filled her old one up with app and cached posts in a matter of days. Rather than transport that junk over to a newer phone when we got one, I told her to just use Chrome. At least then she can do all the same things, and do messenger too (alright, you have to click a bit, but it's there).
And what does the app add? Nothing. It's basically a copy of the website. Same for LinkedIn, etc.
Apps are the VRML fly-through, the MARQUEE tags, the pointless animated GIF, and the Flash-based swishy intro, of the modern age. "We have a website, we should have an app!"
But 200Mb just reeks of someone saying "Who cares?" and just lobbing everything into it rather than trying to actually make an app people want to use. My app for Google Drive is smaller than that and I yet it does a thousand times more.
Linked in and Facebook apps are complete crap written by no talent hacks. When the Mobile version of the site is significantly faster and has a better UI than your app? you fire your entire app developer team and hire some that understand efficient and fast.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Many apps are built with tools like Xamarin or Appcelerator which require a large run-time library. This is downloaded for each app and not shared.
I would be concerned if native apps were of this size.
Reaper, a highly sophisticated digital audio workstation for PC that is decades more advanced than any phone equivalent, weighs in at 10MB installed.
A lot of apps don't even need to be apps. They worked fine as a website, but the company wants you to use their app instead so they can better track you. Now multiply that by the 20-50 sites you frequently visit. One web browser with 20-50 bookmarks, vs. 20-50 apps at 5-300 MB each.
LinkedIn is a great example. Push content (notification of contact request) worked fine over email, and could even be sent as a SMS. Pull content works fine via their web portal. Web forums which try to get you to install their app with an annoying popup whenever you visit the site on a mobile device are another example. Sites like forums, where all the heavy lifting is done server-side, belong in a web browser. Unless there's something that needs to run locally on the phone/tablet, there is no reason for the app to exist.
Fix your website so it'll scale properly to the smaller screen space (but higher resolution) of a phone or tablet. Yes your web designer will probably cry, but it's their own damn fault. The whole purpose of the web was to transmit content but leave rendering up to the browser so it could display the content in a manner most suitable for the display device. It wasn't supposed to be a mechanism for designers to force their idea of a perfect graphic design (which doesn't even render properly in certain cases) onto everyone.
hmm... Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. still work fine through web browser on my phone. But I guess I still manage to live without checking either frequently.
I found the Facebook app annoying to use compared to website anyways.
Obviously your mileage varies...
For most sites, an app is unnecessary. The ordinary, mobile web page works just as well, takes up a fraction of the space, and is likely to have fewer security risks (since it is sandboxed within a browser).
More: if you install an app, as often as not you have just given them permission to lots of personal data. For example, it's pretty normal for every app out there to request access to your contact list. Usually this doesn't even make sense, but it helps them identify you, and gives them data to sell. And the number of people who actually check their apps security settings, and restrict them to the minimum? Near zero...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I have a shortcut to the facebook mobile site on my android home screen instead of the app. Much more space efficient. I just have to ignore all the requests to download the app instead. It works fine.
With the mobile push to India/Africa a couple of vendors have started to push "Lite" versions of their Android apps. Although not available via the Google Play store in the US/UK they still work fine and dandy if side-loaded. Highly recommended... Facebook Lite: 1.5mb - https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/... Linked In Lite: 0.64mb - https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/...
Facebook and LinkedIn are websites. Why are you installing their ads? Oops, I mean, why are you installing their apps?
The only storage those companies should be using on your computers are cookies, at the most.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
WSUS is an update management system, it is not (primarily) a cache/proxy, and it certainly isn't a transparent one (i.e. every computer connected to your network can and will use it).
> Are you the dev? Also what happened to the toecdn.org site?
Yes I am. The site hasn't been updated since I've got no feedback for TOECDN. You can access the site at https://www.toecdn.org/
There is no site at http://www.toecdn.org/ if that was you were trying to use.
Right now I'm currently rewriting my authority dns server from scratch, which has the required functionality for TOECDN as Lua scripts.
These script can be found at https://github.com/fredan/fDns under lua/toecdn directory. However, I have not been updated that for almost a year now.
No, very few "apps" have any business with assembly, for starters because they'll be in java or somethin similar. Even so, understanding that you don't need several gigabytes of "framework" for what can be done in but a few machine instructions helps enormously with increasing code quality and decreasing code size. In other words, as a developer you need to understand the nature of low-level details to fuel your intuition about what is a reasonable "app" and what isn't. So yes, having some experience with assembly is still pretty important for any "app developer", programmer, and so on.
This is not a new phenomenon, it's been going on in the desktop PC world since the beginnings, and it's been going on in the mobile world since day one. I absolutely hate the trend but there's not much one person can do about it. As I see it, especially in the mobile world, there are lots of coders who use and link large libraries even for small tasks, usually don't even try to implement it themselves, and usually don't even search for other solutions or smaller libs providing the same functionality, they just stick with the first they find, and never care for the size of the apps. This applies for average junk apps as well as for large company apps like linkedin or spotify or here maps, and I could just go on. Gone are the days when efficient and small coding was the norm. And most of young coders don't even, or can't even think about writing small and efficient code. Just a couple of months ago I was given a code to use for some task, handling images, at a speed of ~14s/image, which was unacceptable for the specific task. After a complete rewrite in about two weeks I got it to run at ~1s/image, which was still slow, but at least was good enough for a proof-of-concept. And everyone was looking at me like I was some alien.
Lots of coders prefer fast prototyping and quickly throwing together some app and spending very little time on making it small or as efficient as possible - upgrade your device/hw/PC is their mantra. Well, f*k that.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Phones are pretty intimate devices, so I understand why the owners of these apps would want to use them as hooks to extract as much out of their users as possible because there is money in information. I think I'm pretty fair when it comes to granting permissions, but Facebook and LinkedIn are examples of apps that go way too far. I get that a social network would want to access my address book and calendar, but I can't think of a good reason to give them that privilege. I use the mobile website for Facebook and Twitter, and generally only use LinkedIn on my desktop browser.
OK, the numbers are "real" in that "that is how much space the app is taking on Apple's server". It is not real in that "this is not the size of the files being moved to your device."
What those numbers include: Multiple assemblies for different architecture platforms. The whole 32/64 bit thing is rearing its ugly head. There are also shared assemblies, not all of which get sent to your device (because they might already be there).
Source: I'm an app developer who has had to explain this a few times as well.
Bad User. No biscuit!
Windows 10's "evil" P2P update mechanism might be an actual solution or perhaps even honest attempt to that problem?
Like everything good about Windows 10 the problem is you have to install and run Windows 10, and we don't want to because it's ugly crap.
Maybe they do have a domain infrastructure, but that's useless if you expect hundreds of laptops/desktops that belong to their users. (and even tablets with consumer Windows, and things must function whether on site or not)
If you control everything why not go thin client : a pile of 1U
machines that run Windows Server, with like 50 desktop users per machine.
For added fun, your entire user facing network is locked down in a fascistic way that only allows to run an RDP client (web or desktop based) :). I wonder though how do you reboot that for updates. Kick the users 50 at a time losing all their work and sessions while the PC reboots? (wasting most of the time at BIOS and RAID initialization. Or use a VM host with a single VM)
That way you only have to update 20 Windows PCs not 1000
This all started with HP Printer Drivers.
I just want to print a list on a Laser Jet should be 1-2 MB MAX.
But NO! I have to download a 100 MB+ PRINTING PHILOSOPHY!
> it's a "concept", which sounds like "not runnable software".
It is a concept! The required software to be able to run TOECDN is a authority dns server and a http cache server. My examples are with apache traffic server, which require no modification to their source code to be able to cache content with TOECDN.
For the authority dns server, my own fDns (https://github.com/fredan/fDns) has been developed with TOECDN in mind. Having sad that, other authority dns server(s) could be modified to be able to provide the required TOECDN functionality at dns level.
> The only reason I can think of is they don't want to lose control of distributing the application, which can be a big deal if you get a bad actor between you and the proxy or god forbid he takes over the proxy.
You can use this argument for Unix distribution which are using voluntary mirrors around the world. I do believe they work around this with the help of checksums, which they sign with a signature know to them within their software for updating the operating system.
Except that LinkedIn's website refuses to let mobile browsers connect to it and instead re-directs you to download their app. I had to change my browser's user agent string before it would even let me use it on my Android phone. Not exactly something that the average user knows how to do.
I don't really "get" apps in the FIRST place.
I mean sure, I get that you have an app for scanning barcodes or other phone/tablet functions. I'm talking about apps for Pandora, or Delta airlines, IMDB, Amazon, etc.
We have the internet.
We have the web atop the internet, to provide a flexible and consistent UI for access of internet content.
Why do I need to have separate apps for every bloody thing in 2017? It's like going back to the days of DOS where I had to have a separate program for anything I want to accomplish.
-Styopa
It's the natural progression of things. Personal computers started off with 38K or less, and now you can buy terabytes of hard drive storage for far less than a Commodore 64 and 1541 cost back in the day. As long as phone manufacturers keep adding CPU/RAM/Storage, developers will keep using it. IMHO It isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as hardware innovation keeps up.
(takes off Captain Obvious hat; hangs it up on a hook)
Write that shit in ML or GTFO!
zuckershit know artificial intelligence as I know how to make heart sugery. that ai shit they created is a bot that messes up with google translator
I don't see the problem. You all WANTED this. Its web 2.0. Some k0d3rz created appz. YOU wanted appz. Why the complaining? APPZ!
Even Apple who is the most overcharged of overchargers only took $100 to upgrade my iPhone SE from 16GB to 64GB, which makes app space a total non-issue
Except Apple isn't "the most overcharged of overchargers" next to U.S. ISPs. If you have to cut home Internet from your budget in order to afford your cell phone bill, you have to make the best use of a connection that may cost 5 to 10 per GB, and it's impractical for app updates to consume the majority of your monthly data transfer quota.
Developers weren't lazy and always looking for shortcuts. There are a lot of people who want to be developers for the cash-out but if skill = paycheck most would do better financially flipping hamburgers. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Why the hell do I need to sacrifice ANY space on my device (aside from maybe a few kb for cookies etc) to do something on my phone/tablet that I do from a browser on my desktop/laptop?
This may happen when a web application uses HTML5 features that Apple has deliberately left out of Apple WebKit, which is the only web browser engine allowed to run on iOS. On an iMac or MacBook, an affected user can switch to a browser that runs Gecko (such as Pale Moon, IceDragon, or Firefox) or Blink (such as Vivaldi, Dragon, or Google Chrome). On iOS, on the other hand, Firefox and Chrome are wrappers around Apple WebKit.
The first thing you are told in your first college programming class is that "resources are unlimited."
Problem is, this mantra continues all the way through graduation, and on through careers. Nobody gives a shit about resources because they have always been told to assume resources are unlimited.
Push content (notification of contact request) worked fine over email
Until major email services' spam blockers started treating them as unwanted by default.
and could even be sent as a SMS.
Which costs a lot more to send (as in cents per) than a push over the platform's notification server.
Sites like forums, where all the heavy lifting is done server-side, belong in a web browser.
Long-time users of Usenet would disagree with you. They want forums to be available through NNTP, a protocol specifically designed for threaded discussions that has been around since 1986.
Facebook is useless without an internet connection anyway
Whatever happened to the use case of downloading updates while connected to the Internet, reading and composing replies while offline, and submitting the replies the next time you connect? That's how AOL used to work in the dial-up era.
Sorry from images, libraries and Frameworks bloat app size. You want to use this one feature from my libraries, but you need to include the full several-MB jar file with all the stuff you don't use. Multiply by many.
How many people actually carry both an iPhone to run apps exclusive to iOS and an Android phone to run apps exclusive to Android?
what apps? I can't trust my phone to be secure even if I take extraordinary steps to secure it, and I can't trust the app makers to respect my privacy. So I don't download or install nearly anything on my phone, and I sure as hell don't use social media, access anything important, or by anything using my phone.
What exactly would you have Apple or Google or any other app distributor do?
The fact of the matter is modern day applications are *shit*. Todays average "developer" is a glorified script kiddy that slaps a bunch of components together, adds some glue, and calls it done. And the bits that developers write themselves are so shockingly bad, that bloat is inevitable.
I mean, seriously..... Look at Facebook for example. The Facebook App + the Messenger app takes a whopping 3/4 GIGABYTE on iOS. The Slack desktop application, as good as it is, takes up a stupid amount of resources.
This is what happens when you lower the bar to programming to the point where any John Doe can slap some crap together and think that they are now a professional developer. This is what happens, when you push a culture of "You don't need a degree to write code!", of "young and new is always better than old and previous".
The focus is now on slapping some crap together and shoving it out the door, than doing things properly. As long as it runs, everyone is happy. The end result is low quality, ridiculously bloated apps that are replete with security issues. This has been a steady hole that everyone has been reveling in digging deeper and deeper, and that's exacerbated by the attitude that people who have learned from their previous mistakes should be fired to make room for young people who are still deep in dunning-kruger territory.
App sizes are just a symptom of a much larger issue: Computing in general have gone to shit, and the tech industry is happily dancing a jig in their own filth because they've so completely drank the koolaid of their own marketing that they think that filth is full of rainbow sparkles, and they ostracize anyone willing to lift their head up and go, "Wait a sec here...."
I don't know what your problem is, using Internet 3 with a 100 Gbps port, that kind of file is easy to download.
I mean, don't you all have 128 core blade servers with 512 TB storage?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Back in the day where we had the C64 we would tweak and twist things so that space is saved. RAM was a premium, storage was in short supply, and load times were high. These days there are fat apps that include fat libraries of which only a fraction is used, and it all only works on really fat frameworks that run on fat operating systems. The exception here is Linux where a full OS with GUI and enterprise apps can fit on a dinky SD card that runs on an equally dinky 35$ Pi. The biggest kicker was the Windows app for WhatsApp which does not even allow to communicate with other WhatsApp users, but seemingly produces only a QR code that needs to get scanned with the phone...and that I could not get to work at all. The download package is about 80MB in size!! What the frack??
apps are approaching the realm of...
programs? who would have thought that?
apps were supposed to be small little programs that didn't do everything. or try to.
It's a JavaScript runtime. Is anyone using a JavaScript runtime for native client side apps that aren't just running in a browser? I'm not sure I see the point of complaining about server side apps. You trade performance and size for programmer hours.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When the vast majority of your users are non-technical people, you don't have to worry about things like file sizes. You just tell people to get a newer/bigger/faster phone, and they do it, because, you know...keeping up with the Joneses or something. Pretty pathetic.;
This is why we need to get away from native apps as much as possible. They do have their place, but that place is a very narrow niche and getting smaller every day. Regular apps like Facebook and LinkedIn are literally just interfaces to these websites. Mobile web APIs are sufficient for pretty much everything these apps do. There is just no excuse for these massive mobile apps.
I highly encourage the use of mobile websites (or wrappers for them to bridge the gap), and "light" versions of apps like Facebook and Messenger Lite. (Download size: 1.53M) Apps like these just prove that it *can* be done right. We just need to get the plebs to demand it.
BECAUSE YOU WERE DUMB ENOUGH TO INSTALL IT!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Step 1: Developers write app for iOS because that's cool. It's 2010 and smartphones are new and hot.
Step 2: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up for Android.
Step 3: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up a third time for Windows Phone.
Step 4: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up for iOS because Apple required it.
Step 5: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up for Android to mirror newer best-practices.
Step 6: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up for iOS because Apple required it again.
Step 7: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up for iOS because Apple required it another time.
Step 8: Developers rewrite app from the ground-up for Android in Android Studio because no one uses Eclipse any more.
Step 9: Developers (finally) get tired of rewriting the same application over and over again from the ground-up every single damn year and start using frameworks that cross-compile for all platforms and libraries like the Android support library so that they can stay semi-current without too much effort. They also stop caring how big the final executable is. "Screw you Apple and Google and Microsoft. Get your act together already" is the common thought.
Step 10: Blogger writes an article about app size bloat and Slashdot picks it up. "Screw you blogger. You try writing software for these mobile devices and see how far you get" is the common thought. It's also 2017 and smartphones and app development are mostly normalized.
I was looking at app development frameworks a couple of years ago. What struck me was the sad logic of framework choice. If you wanted a cross platform app, the choice was a HTML based framework. HTML apps can be as tiny as web pages. Except the problem was, not all system browsers (across OS versions, across platforms) behaved the same way. So the devs are encouraged to bundle an entire browser runtime with even the simplest app. Modern browsers are very large applications.
Another problem here is that mobile operating systems do not have really have package management. So every app keeps repeating some very large runtimes.
It used to be that in 2003, when I wrote mobile apps, one considered desktop apps as resource free-for-alls and mobile apps as something where you carefully optimized for size, memory, performance etc. Mobile devices are much more powerful now, but they are still meant for efficient programming since the battery life is not a solved problem. Other resources are not that cheap either. I am always strapped for space on devices where a microsd expansion slot is not available. Yet, we are now behaving as if these problems have disappeared.
This is an example of: "Code will expand to fill all available RAM space."
If users don't complain then coders won't care.
There are very few "software Engineers", but those that exist should care because the largest app gets deleted first. And word spreads fast, particularly these days.
Fight back, check out apps before installing them. Particularly size and speed! ;-)
internet has become more ubiquitous.
Closer to ubiquitous, yes, but not quite. Wi-Fi isn't available on city buses in my home town, for instance, and I imagine that many aren't willing to pay for subscriptions to a both high-volume wired broadband ISP for use at home and a cellular ISP for use on the bus. Some choose to give up cellular Internet and are offline while riding the bus; others choose to give up home Internet and constantly worry about hitting their cap.
Under previous versions of Windows they had the "branch cache" service in the Enterprise edition. This would locally cache WSUS content if configured properly. Note that "configured properly" means having accurate records in Active Directory Sites and Services.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The required software to be able to run TOECDN is a authority dns server and a http cache server.
With web browsers deprecating cleartext HTTP in favor of HTTPS, how long will this remain relevant?
Storage is cheap so stop crying about it.
I will make my apps as large as I need to, and you have no say in the issue. It's not subject to your "control".
My full IOS game Rocket Shark came in at 32 megs. It's absolutely insane how big these "mega corp" apps are. Is it all just packed with spyware or something?
Last time I downloaded that monstrosity on my iPhone 4S, it was a 113MB download. Seriously? 113MB for something that checks email? Last time I fired up my C64, I was running Skyfox in under 64K RAM (probably less, unless you bank-switched that 6510 you had 38K free RAM)...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
OK, the numbers are "real" in that "that is how much space the app is taking on Apple's server". It is not real in that "this is not the size of the files being moved to your device."
What those numbers include: Multiple assemblies for different architecture platforms. The whole 32/64 bit thing is rearing its ugly head. There are also shared assemblies, not all of which get sent to your device (because they might already be there).
Source: I'm an app developer who has had to explain this a few times as well.
Sure that increases the size some but how exactly do you explain a 478.8MB Facebook install? 2 years of health-kit data doesn't even take up half that much space, including the health-kit app itself. And if you add in the cached data that my Facebook app has saved right now? It's almost a gig. Ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
delete linked in from your phone. thats what I did.
It would be interesting to compare this to android. The Uber app's apk is 30mb courtesy of https://apps.evozi.com/apk-dow... . Unzipping that dumps 97 megs of stuff.
60 MB of java class dex files,
18.2 MB of pseudo XML binary files in \res
11 MB in \lib
5 MB in \assets, half of which is a timezone database
and the rest in yada yada.
Can someone reply or PM a download link for the iUber package so I can compare it?
So scrolling down I noticed most of the messages are about how bad programmers are nowdays (while discussing facebook, linkedin, etc. apps).
That's just silly. These apps are not huge because nobody at facebook knows how to develop an application... such an assertion is stupid, and it's not true.
Reality is often a lot different than what we (geeks) want it to be. It is not 1998 anymore, and modern requirements are forcing developers to make compromises that usually affect size and resource usage, and most geeks don't care about those compromises, but most users do.
So you might be fine with a webpage that uses no JS, no CSS, just a couple of sprites and text and looks like it's been made in 1997, but common people (that companies generate money from) do care about site being sleek, modern and functional; something that just cannot be accomplished without using some kind of libraries that make life easier under pressure.
Now carry on thinking how everybody else is stupid because they don't develop web sites in ASM.
> With web browsers deprecating cleartext HTTP in favor of HTTPS, how long will this remain relevant?
Web browsers should and shall prefer HTTPS over HTTP. Have in mind that you don't know if the content served via HTTPS is secure or not. The protection that we get from HTTPS is that (hopefully) no one is listening to our communication between ourself and the server.
If you would like to have HTTPS for TOECDN you will be required to distribute our private key to every single person on this planet! And that is just for one web site. And if you are re-newing your certificate, distribute that once more to everybody. The reason for this is that every house hold around the world is allowed to run their own http cache server. That's why you can't use HTTPS with TOECDN.
If the web browsers had the capability to load for example a image file from a external host with the known checksum of that file, you
can load that file from a HTTP host (read; over TOECDN) and you will know if the content match or not. If it does, well, treat it like you would if the content was served via HTTPS.
Apps could be a lot lighter if they depended on standard web browsers to accomplish the view and then used web services to provide the browser with data.
Watch Jonathan Blow's presentation about application bloat on youtube. Well worth the time and quite funny. The guy makes some valid points.
Unless the executable files are provided by the OS, they are going to be completely duplicated per install to the point where instead of installing an app you really are installing an OS update and an app. Code is very well factored and elaborate today, so these libraries aren't going to be tiny. It's just that a long time ago everyone would copy their libraries to System32 or w/e instead of the app folder so they only existed in one place per system.
That's right. That's why I can do a 150Mb app update in a few seconds - do people not look at this part?
Our old macs are all laptops, which are awkward and messy to put in the racks. Sure they work, and even have a built in UPS (which doesnt last very long anymore as the batteries are old), but they attract complaints from the datacenter staff as they look out of place.
And i'm not talking about remote management once the OS is running, that's simple enough. I mean remote lights out management for when the OS isn't booted for whatever reason. Most server grade hardware has this facility, and its extremely useful especially when you have servers colocated in remote locations. Apple don't offer any hardware with this capability anymore.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
it's because those apps are full of spyware and other bs. there was research done which found a popular weather app to contain more then 300 spyware links, no wonder it was big. Just write an app yourself, or check out those app sizes on f-droid, they are not that big, because they don't cary all that extra weight that you don't need (but the companies that make those apps sure do).
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
That Android phones are "years behind" because you have to use the Vendor's app to get all camera features? Srsly?
Not only are Apps getting pretty thick around the waist, program sizes are out of control these days.
If you've ever looked at the size of a lot of popular games these days, they are also stupidly big.
Most devs simply don't care for optimization because they assume everyone has a decent device to run it because they have a decent device to run it.
That's the problem right there, they don't care to test their stuff on anything but their own hardware, and maybe a couple friends at best. Once that bit is done, they NEVER test it again because they automatically assume that everything else they will do to it will still run fine on the same specs.
Great example of this is Minecraft, a fairly simplistic voxel blockworld.
It used to run on netbooks very quickly. Fast-forward a few years, lucky if you got 5FPS. Now? Literally can't run.
Relatively speaking, the most demanding things updated were pathfinding, amount of resources actively loaded and a new (still pretty basic) lighting system, and the back-end chunk-loading system. That last one is what killed it.
The new chunk-loading system is atrocious. Better than the McRegion chunk loading system, but still pretty damn awful.
A technically more advanced game engine than Minecraft DOES run on them, however. (Minetest)