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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 roughl
by 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 agoSo 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 agoA 18MB app is smaller than the vast majority of apps nowadays.
- skykooler 9y agoWhich 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 agoApps 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 agoHow 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 agoSaving £132 across 10k users does not sound worth the slightest amount of effort.
- bdamm 9y agoEspecially when there is no one entity saving all that money.
- kelnos 9y agoThose 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 agoyou can buy a 200GB microSD card for ~$70 or $0.35/GB ...
- rtkwe 9y agoThere'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 agoI buy the cheap phones, they have more useful features. (although Google tries really hard to disable microSD card slots via software...)