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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.
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.
Node.js apps are a dime a dozen these days, and they're all fat slugs of things. Sad.
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?
Bullshit. Image sizes for simplistic apps like that would never consume that much space. The actual reason these apps are ballooning is size is because developers nowadays are complete shit and don't understand code reuse, optimisation or assembly language.
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.
Developers develop their apps on emulators, not on the phones themselves. When they do use phones, they are the latest high-performance ones. They never see the slowness, or if they ever do, it is handwaved away with "upgrade your damn phone, Luddite."
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Okay, no app developer is going to use assembly, because their app will be on a range of hardware from different manufacturers. Portability is mandatory in the app world.
How code re-use works on a real linux distro:
1) application A wants to perform operation B
2) application A depends on libB
3) A bug in libB is discovered that prevents Application C from using it
4) Application C embeds a fixed version of libB
5) libB eventually gets upgraded while maintaining ABI compatibility
6) Application C drops its embedded version of libB and resumes sharing the system libB by depending on it with a version restriction in their next version
How code re-use works on andriod:
1) application A wants to perform operation B
2) Luckily android happens to have libB preinstalled (for argument's sake) so application A just uses it
3) A bug is discovered in the preinstalled libB that prevents Application C from using it
4) Application C embeds a fixed version of libB
5) nothing happens for a year or so until all major carriers upgrade the whole OS
6) The whole OS gets upgraded and other things in the upgrade break both application A and C even while libB gets fixed
7) The authors of application A and B say "screw this, that sucked" and embed their own copies of everything
so they never have to deal with that kind of mess again.
Someone had to do it.
It's a good comparison, except that step 6 on the Android list very rarely happens at all.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Here's something I really don't get.
The blogger - and many of the responders here - are debating the size of LinkedIn's app. But, given the bad things we know that LinkedIn has tried to do with that app on more than one occasion... why does anyone even consider having that piece of malware on their phone at all?
#DeleteChrome