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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.
Image compression exists for a reason. If you neglect to optimize your images, the best compression in the world won't help. Check out PNGQuant; it can often achieve perceptually lossless compression through careful palette selection and dithering. Vector graphics are also a thing; you can create your bitmaps at runtime.
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.
Wrong, it's the software engineers problem. Most of these apps are huge because the decision was made to go with a framework which would make it easier to build for all relevant platforms without specifically catering for that platform (except maybe UI). Just before my last phone upgrade I was seriously hunting for space, and guess what apps got nuked first?
The largest that I don't use often or can live without. {{{ That makes it a software engineers problem, not the users.
If no one is using your application because they consider your flash light app that clocks in at 70mb too big to bother with, then you may as well not have written the software at all.
Xamarin is a prime example of this, a hello world app is over 16mb (the last time I looked) the same app in native Java is a couple kb.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Total bullshit. LinkedIn, for example, is 247 mb uncompressed of frameworks and 1.6 mb of images, 14.9 mb of language localizations for the 25 languages it supports.