5 ms·

It's not an app that I'd use often enough to be worth the space on my phone, but I love the concept.

• rtkwe 9y ago
  The apk is a paltry 18 MB. Hardly enough space to think about on most phones.
  • kmonsen 9y ago
    I feel this is what is wrong with software today, this app could have been much less than 1MB.
    • rullelito 9y ago
      It would be hard to justify putting more than a few hours into getting it down to 1 MB.
      • Retr0spectrum 9y ago
        10k users, each saving 17MB = 170GB total savings. A 64GB iPhone 8 costs £699, and a 256GB iPhone 8 costs £849. That puts the cost of phone storage very roughly at £0.78/GB, so the 170GB space reduction saves the users £132 collectively. I pulled these numbers out of thin air for the most part, but you get the point. It also improves user retention. Many people are running out of storage space, and routinely have to delete apps to free up space. An 18MB app will surely be deleted before a 1MB app.
        • rtkwe 9y ago
          So you're 'saving' each customer £.01 and to frame it another way that 64 GB iPhone has ~55-60GB usable space which is 3000 17MB apps. Sure a smaller app is laudable and devs have gotten loose with optimizing for space but the numbers just don't really make sense for a single dev on a kind of jokey app with a low lifespan to spend the time on.
        • minimaxir 9y ago
          A 18MB app is smaller than the vast majority of apps nowadays.
          • skykooler 9y ago
            Which is rather disappointing, considering the amount of space on phones hasn't increased much. Back in 2010 when 1 MB was a normal app size, a decent phone had 32 to 64 gb of storage. Now apps are twenty times as big, and a decent phone might have 64 to 128 gb. It's not scaling in sync.
            • rtkwe 9y ago
              Apps have never really been the main space hog on phones though if you look at the numbers. Average app size is only ~40 MB and (the numbers are a bit sketchier here) the average person has 30-50 apps on their phone so even if we go to an extreme with multiple times the average apps you've only taken up 10-15% of a phones storage with apps. Anecdotally the main perpetrator for wasted space is content; videos, pictures, and (in my case at 29GB) podcasts. https://www.quora.com/How-many-apps-does-the-average-iPhone-user-have-installed https://www.quora.com/How-many-apps-does-the-average-iPhone-...
        • losteric 9y ago
          How much is the author's time worth? How many hours would it take to get the application down to 1MB? For an application that relies on many simultaneous users, it's better to be a large cheap app then an expensive optimized app.
        • larkeith 9y ago
          Saving £132 across 10k users does not sound worth the slightest amount of effort.
          • bdamm 9y ago
            Especially when there is no one entity saving all that money.
        • kelnos 9y ago
          Those numbers only work if all users are constantly filling up the entirety of their phone's storage. Most people don't, and don't care about saving 17MB on their phone. As someone introduced to computing in the 80s, I agree that code sizes are often insane based on what the apps actually do, but in the end, it's cheaper to just not care than to go through the effort to unnecessarily optimize.
        • yorby 9y ago
          you can buy a 200GB microSD card for ~$70 or $0.35/GB ...
          • rtkwe 9y ago
            There's quite a few flagship tier phones out there that sadly don't take microSD cards; Google Pixel/Nexus hasn't for a long time and neither has iPhone.
            • yorby 9y ago
              I buy the cheap phones, they have more useful features. (although Google tries really hard to disable microSD card slots via software...)
    • paxy 9y ago
      If you use a phone without a super hi-res screen it will be much smaller.
  • lwansbrough 9y ago
    18MB is the range for React Native apps. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is one of those.
  • disconnected 9y ago
    > The apk is a paltry 18 MB. It's somewhat disturbing that this is considered paltry. Most DOS games managed to fit into a single diskette, and that includes not only the logic bits, but also assets: images, music, sound, etc. Remember that they didn't have the benefit of being able to borrow a massive number of assets and libraries from the OS. You wanted a button? You had to draw it yourself. Also, my Linux kernel - which is infinitely more complex than this app - weights in at 7MB. Ok, sure, the modules are another 30MB, but that's only because I took the shotgun approach when I configured my kernel. I'm lazy, sue me. Anyway, this app seems absolutely trivial and it barely has any assets at all. It's frankly embarrassing that it consumes so many resources for such little functionality.
    • epmaybe 9y ago
      > I'm lazy, sue me.
    • zpr 9y ago
      I think the developer was "lazy" too which is why he didn't spend days and weeks rewriting the wheel instead of using react. As far as floppies, I think that's why we don't use them anymore.
      • GhostVII 9y ago
        Writing a native app isn't much harder than using React though.
  • exolymph 9y ago
    You don't realize how close to the line I am in terms of storage space.