9 ms·

I love this. I was always frustrated by the ever-growing-in-size Twitter app. Which is around 105 Megabytes now (aka ~73 1.44 floppies). So I welcome this.

Ruud-v-A 10y ago
> Today, we are rolling out Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device. 1 MB is “acceptable” by today’s standards, but when you think about it — 1 MB to display a few 140-character tweets?
- jwarren 10y ago
  Cmon, that's disingenuous. It does a lot more than just display a few text strings. You've got routing, templates, event handlers, search, a lightbox, settings pages, the whole DM chat-style interface, the whole posting interface, and probably more that I'm not even thinking about. Now I'm not saying that it couldn't be smaller - quite probably even substantially smaller. It'd be great to get it down to 100KB. I bet you could have a much smaller first load for just the feed, and then dynamically load in the JS for the other routes as they're requested. That could then be cached locally with service workers. Edit: Looks like they do actually already do that. I just unregistered their Service Worker and refreshed - my load was ~300KB. Still kinda weighty but a lot less than 1MB. From https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite: > the app streams the initial HTML response to the browser, sending instructions to preload critical resources while the server constructs the initial app state. Using webpack, the app’s scripts are broken up into granular pieces and loaded on demand. This means that the initial load only requires resources needed for the visible screen. (When available, a Service Worker will precache additional resources and allow instant future navigations to other screens.) These changes allow us to progressive load the app so people can sooner consume and create Tweets.
- toephu2 10y ago
  That's like saying basketball is equivalent to just throwing a ball through a hoop. You are oversimplifying it.
ascagnel_ 10y ago
It's because Twitter (the company) has no idea what to do with Twitter (the product), and are trying to branch out in increasingly dubious ways. For comparison, Tweetbot is 7.6MB and Twitterific is 10.3MB (both on iOS), and they provide a much nicer experience for using Twitter than the official app.
AndrewStephens 10y ago
I don't understand why some mobile app are so large. If Twitter can write a webpage that provides the functionality in only 1Mb then what is in the mobile app?
- AndrewStephens 10y ago
  Answering my own question, I just unpacked the iOS Twitter client thinking that it must contain massive graphic resources or something. Nope: mostly frameworks, the biggest being the T1Twitter.framework - 80.1Mb of who-knows-what. That doesn't include the 17 other frameworks all over 1Mb in size (there are innumerable other smaller frameworks) for periscope and other features. Seems to me they could ship a 5Mb app that just wraps the Twitter web site and provides iOS native experience (notifications, apple watch, etc) and call it a day.
  - trvr 10y ago
    This is pure speculation on my part. I believe that, currently, if you iOS app uses any Swift code, you have to include the Switch libraries in your app. This has something to do with how quickly Swift has been changing, and Apple wanting you to reference your own library instead of the system one for now. This has caused a number of apps to balloon in size lately, but the hope is that it is temporary.
    - AndrewStephens 10y ago
      The Twitter app uses swift and does include some 20 libSwitch* frameworks that account for a grand total of 20Mb - most of them are pretty small. It is unfortunate that apps can't dynamically link to standard swift libraries in the OS, but that still doesn't explain the other 150Mb of binaries.
josefresco 10y ago
Twitter currently occupies 195 MB on my mobile device.
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  493.2 MB here. Sheesh.
  - driverdan 10y ago
    Most of that is image cache though.
    - steveklabnik 10y ago
      As a user, that's totally opaque to me. I know my phone is running out of space and photos in general and Twitter in particular take up most of that space.
    - dbbk 10y ago
      Why is Twitter so aggressive with image caching? The nature of the timeline is that it's unlikely you'll see an image more than once.
      - josefresco 10y ago
        Tell me about it - Reddit's app does the same thing. I'll be browsing for an extended period of time and will get the "storage full" message. I then check usage settings and it's up over 600 (whereas normally it's ~200)
      - joecool1029 10y ago
        At least they finally offered a way to dump the cache on ios a couple weeks ago.
        steveklabnik 10y ago
        oh? how?
dublinben 10y ago
The excellent Twitter app Twidere is only 9.3 MB. [0] No ads either! [0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=twidere&fdid=org.mariotaku.twidere https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=twidere&fdid...
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Seconding recommendation, but there are drawbacks: it's nearly impossible to read an entire thread by a person, and sometimes even seeing the chain of parent tweets is difficult.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    That is an unfortunate limitation of the Twitter API for 3rd party clients. I've heard that the new way threads are presented on the Twitter website is also terrible.
abraham 10y ago
The Android APK is around 30-31 MB https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/twitter-inc/ https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/twitter-inc/
frandroid 10y ago
Not only it's big, but it's a bandwidth hog as well... It's the most hungry app on my phone and I do a lot of web browsing on it. Twitter should not out-consume the web.

Ruud-v-A 10y ago

> Today, we are rolling out Twitter Lite, a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device. 1 MB is “acceptable” by today’s standards, but when you think about it — 1 MB to display a few 140-character tweets?

jwarren 10y ago
Cmon, that's disingenuous. It does a lot more than just display a few text strings. You've got routing, templates, event handlers, search, a lightbox, settings pages, the whole DM chat-style interface, the whole posting interface, and probably more that I'm not even thinking about. Now I'm not saying that it couldn't be smaller - quite probably even substantially smaller. It'd be great to get it down to 100KB. I bet you could have a much smaller first load for just the feed, and then dynamically load in the JS for the other routes as they're requested. That could then be cached locally with service workers. Edit: Looks like they do actually already do that. I just unregistered their Service Worker and refreshed - my load was ~300KB. Still kinda weighty but a lot less than 1MB. From https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite https://blog.twitter.com/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite: > the app streams the initial HTML response to the browser, sending instructions to preload critical resources while the server constructs the initial app state. Using webpack, the app’s scripts are broken up into granular pieces and loaded on demand. This means that the initial load only requires resources needed for the visible screen. (When available, a Service Worker will precache additional resources and allow instant future navigations to other screens.) These changes allow us to progressive load the app so people can sooner consume and create Tweets.
toephu2 10y ago
That's like saying basketball is equivalent to just throwing a ball through a hoop. You are oversimplifying it.

ascagnel_ 10y ago

It's because Twitter (the company) has no idea what to do with Twitter (the product), and are trying to branch out in increasingly dubious ways. For comparison, Tweetbot is 7.6MB and Twitterific is 10.3MB (both on iOS), and they provide a much nicer experience for using Twitter than the official app.

AndrewStephens 10y ago

I don't understand why some mobile app are so large. If Twitter can write a webpage that provides the functionality in only 1Mb then what is in the mobile app?

AndrewStephens 10y ago
Answering my own question, I just unpacked the iOS Twitter client thinking that it must contain massive graphic resources or something. Nope: mostly frameworks, the biggest being the T1Twitter.framework - 80.1Mb of who-knows-what. That doesn't include the 17 other frameworks all over 1Mb in size (there are innumerable other smaller frameworks) for periscope and other features. Seems to me they could ship a 5Mb app that just wraps the Twitter web site and provides iOS native experience (notifications, apple watch, etc) and call it a day.
- trvr 10y ago
  This is pure speculation on my part. I believe that, currently, if you iOS app uses any Swift code, you have to include the Switch libraries in your app. This has something to do with how quickly Swift has been changing, and Apple wanting you to reference your own library instead of the system one for now. This has caused a number of apps to balloon in size lately, but the hope is that it is temporary.
  - AndrewStephens 10y ago
    The Twitter app uses swift and does include some 20 libSwitch* frameworks that account for a grand total of 20Mb - most of them are pretty small. It is unfortunate that apps can't dynamically link to standard swift libraries in the OS, but that still doesn't explain the other 150Mb of binaries.

josefresco 10y ago

Twitter currently occupies 195 MB on my mobile device.

steveklabnik 10y ago
493.2 MB here. Sheesh.
- driverdan 10y ago
  Most of that is image cache though.
  - steveklabnik 10y ago
    As a user, that's totally opaque to me. I know my phone is running out of space and photos in general and Twitter in particular take up most of that space.
  - dbbk 10y ago
    Why is Twitter so aggressive with image caching? The nature of the timeline is that it's unlikely you'll see an image more than once.
    - josefresco 10y ago
      Tell me about it - Reddit's app does the same thing. I'll be browsing for an extended period of time and will get the "storage full" message. I then check usage settings and it's up over 600 (whereas normally it's ~200)
    - joecool1029 10y ago
      At least they finally offered a way to dump the cache on ios a couple weeks ago.
      - steveklabnik 10y ago
        oh? how?

dublinben 10y ago

The excellent Twitter app Twidere is only 9.3 MB. [0] No ads either! [0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=twidere&fdid=org.mariotaku.twidere https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=twidere&fdid...

pavel_lishin 10y ago
Seconding recommendation, but there are drawbacks: it's nearly impossible to read an entire thread by a person, and sometimes even seeing the chain of parent tweets is difficult.
- dublinben 10y ago
  That is an unfortunate limitation of the Twitter API for 3rd party clients. I've heard that the new way threads are presented on the Twitter website is also terrible.

abraham 10y ago

The Android APK is around 30-31 MB https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/twitter-inc/ https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/twitter-inc/

frandroid 10y ago

Not only it's big, but it's a bandwidth hog as well... It's the most hungry app on my phone and I do a lot of web browsing on it. Twitter should not out-consume the web.