8 ms·
> a small 40MB iOS app What a sad, sad world we find ourselves to live in.
by nathell 9y ago
> a small 40MB iOS app
What a sad, sad world we find ourselves to live in.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoIndeed, we no longer worry about food, safety and survival and instead our sadness is directed at irrelevant application binary file sizes.
- vim_wannabe 9y agoDrop every other issue right now! /s
- astrobe_ 9y agoIt becomes relevant when one doesn't intentionally interpret it in the wrong level of Maslow's hierarchy.
- wiz21c 9y agoMaslow ? You mean the guy behind the obsolete stuff ? Or the guy who let another one torture monkeys ? http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050849743004 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/135050849743004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ehnto 9y agoWe can be sad at more than one thing at a time. I am not overly sad about binary file sizes myself, but I wouldn't say they are irrelevant just because other issues exist, and the original comment is just using a turn of phrase. I doubt they really think this is cause for great concern.
- coldtea 9y ago>We can be sad at more than one thing at a time. Only if it makes sense as a concern. Else we're just being grumpy.
- hasenj 9y agoThe sadness does not step from the size of a random binary file per se. The sad part is the prevalence of attitudes deemed unprofessional among people of a certain profession. It's sad for example, that with all the technologies available to us, to imagine what we could have, and compare it with what we do have.
- lallysingh 9y agoIt wouldn't help. If we spent more engineering effort on efficiencies that don't have a substantive effect on consumer response, we're just being inefficient with our time. That will result in less capable software, higher big counts, or higher software prices. Software is written with budgets, and nothing is free.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThat's only true if you believe focusing things with " substantive effect on consumer response" is the right thing to do. It sounds like a good heuristic in theory, but the practice clearly shows that we ought to be able to do better than that. I mean, if only fraction of the effort that goes towards making things shiny and sexy went towards making them efficient and actually useful, the computing world would be better, for no loss in actual capabilities (and likely great gains).
- zimpenfish 9y ago> That's only true if you believe focusing things with " substantive effect on consumer response" is the right thing to do. I like eating. Which means I like getting paid. Which means the companies I work for have to focus on things like "substantive effect on consumer response" to keep getting money to pay me.
- davexunit 9y agoAdding this to the list of anecdotes about why capitalism must end.
- 9y ago
- osteele 9y agoI wonder whether the idea of “waste” is triggered by different things for different people, and evokes a moral response.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago> we no longer worry about food, safety and survival Do "we"? You are denying the existence of millions or billions of people who worry about food, safety and survival. Including the ones that work very hard at manufacturing phones so powerful that you don't care about the size of that 40MB app.
- s73ver_ 9y agoThe vast majority of people who have the luxury and time to comment on an internet message board on a discussion about the size of binaries are not having to worry about that.
- Dirlewanger 9y agoPeople need to stop pulling these "well what about x?" red herrings in an attempt to undermine the discussion.
- s73ver_ 9y agoPeople also need to stop complaining about things that really are not a problem.
- flukus 9y agoIt is really a problem, I'm out of space on my phone due to bloat and it prevents my installing new apps. Sometimes just to update I have to get rid of apps. If you make money off apps then this should concern you. The next causality is going to be the local sports league, there app has bloated to use 130MB just to show news, ladders and videos. After I uninstall it I'll be much less engaged with the product they are trying to sell me, all because a bloated binary.
- cdata 9y agoHardly irrelevant. It's the very people who do worry about food, safety, survival for whom app binary size matters the most. Your users live everywhere on Earth that has a network connection, and in some of those places there are millions or more who consider that connection a scarce, valuable resource.
- izacus 9y agoInteresting is that usually an equivalent Android app will be about 15-20MB. For larger apps (like Facebook) the difference can be even up to 4x as much (and that's after AppStore stripping).
- paradite 9y agoInstead of pixelated graphics now we get high-res images and 1080p videos. What a sad, sad world we find ourselves to live in.
- wutwutwutwut 9y agoWhat is sad about this? Small sizes are nice but as a consumer I don't care much. If a larger file size means that apps can be produced easier then I have zero objections.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoBecause for many consumers, 40MB where it could be 4MB means e.g. 5 minutes of download instead of 30 seconds, or 4% of their data plan instead of 0.4%. And waste is kind of like honesty - if you are wasteful with this, you're probably wasteful with everything else. Like with storage usage, which is a hard constraint on anything but top-of-the-line mobile phones. Like with network usage. Like with energy usage, which accumulates over everyone making wasteful software and adds up into lots of unnecessary emissions. As a consumer, I don't care about who is first to the market. Take extra time to make your application not suck. It doesn't take that much more.
- dahart 9y agoHow do you know the 40MB download wasn't aggressively optimized down from 400MB? Equating larger file size with lower quality is presumptuous. Is there any known correlation? Equating larger file size with lower honesty seems dishonest to me. Optimizing takes time, sometimes a lot of time. I know because I've spent a lot of time optimizing file sizes to fit on game consoles, taking xbox360 games over to the Wii for example. If you optimize aggressively when there's no strong need to, when consumers like the one you replied to don't really care, and wont' change their buying habits, you are prematurely optimizing. That's a significant waste of precious time (and money) for a developer. We (humans) waste a lot of things that are much more important than people's data plans. Gasoline and food, for examples. Why haven't we reduced those 10x? It is possible.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> How do you know the 40MB download wasn't aggressively optimized down from 400MB? I don't; I thought the context made it clear, that I meant relatively trivial apps that do little but are bloated internally. > Is there any known correlation Possibly, I don't know. But I also learned that heuristic from experience. When large app sizes are justified, you usually see this in functionality. > That's a significant waste of precious time (and money) for a developer. OTOH from a consumer point of view, you're saving time by externalizing your waste on me. I know that "optimize everything" isn't the right answer, but so IMO isn't "optimize nothing". If you save one dev day by wasting each user's 10 minutes over their use of the app, those 10 minutes multiplied by 100k users suddenly become over two man-years of wasted time. I know that you can't compare users' time to developers' time 1:1, but the scale at which those decisions affect people is still worth minding. Especially for other resources, as e.g. electricity usage does add up pretty much linearly, unlike small time periods. > We (humans) waste a lot of things that are much more important than people's data plans. Gasoline and food, for examples. Why haven't we reduced those 10x? It is possible. And many people are working on it too. I find wasting those things to be bad as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- osteele 9y agoAccording to https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/ https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/, the average iOS app file size is 38MB. It's much higher for more highly downloaded (and feature-rich) apps; it's probably higher for recent apps. So 40MB for an iOS app may or may not count as “small”, depending on the comparison set. But it is small compared to the historical size of applications. 40MB is 0.5% the RAM of an 8MB iPhone. My first computer, circa 1978, was a TRS-80 with 15KB RAM (+ 1KB for the screen). An application that used 0.5% of its RAM would have taken 75 bytes. I've written but not distributed functionality in programs of that size. I would classify it as small. An application that used 0.5% the RAM of the original 128K Macintosh would have taken 640 bytes. An application that used 0.5% of its 400K removable storage would be 2K. I suspect there were a lot of 2K applications (bundled as Desk Accessories), but this was considered small at the time. During my lifetime there's been an explosion in the number, functionality, and quality (as measured in every way other than absolute byte size) of applications, that may be hard to appreciate if you either haven't lived through it, or are focused on one metric. It's pretty cool.
- tcfunk 9y agoFacebook app on iPhone is reporting at 1.02 GB for me. Most space used with the exception of storage-based applications like photos/music.
- Crespyl 9y agoI knew it was big, but didn't think it was that bad. I'm not familiar with iOS, does that figure include the apps locally cached data and/or embedded resources (I imagine retina images and icons could add up quickly) or is that mostly Facebooks infamously bloated codebase?