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I was surprised when I read that he moved back from Fluter to Kotlin, down the line I read it's due to APK size. I'm happy to hear some developers still care a

I was surprised when I read that he moved back from Fluter to Kotlin, down the line I read it's due to APK size. I'm happy to hear some developers still care about size esp. for mobile, but on the other end, I'm sad because I'm currently using Flutter for building apps and I'm jealous of that 4.5MB difference :D

aswinmohanme 7y ago
I love everything about flutter except the size, and I would have stayed on flutter if it wasn't for the competition's app weighing around 1.6 MB.
- monsieurbanana 7y ago
  Does the size of an app affects something besides the initial download? Maybe it also lengthens the app loading but everybody here doesn't talk about it because it's well known of android developers, which I'm not?
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Yes, bigger apps take up more space in storage.
    - winter_squirrel 7y ago
      I feel like most phones nowadays don't really care about a 5mb difference considering they have multiple GB's of space. At least on my phone, the space taken by the actual app binaries is negligible compared to media.
      - cozzyd 7y ago
        Most people have no concept of how much space things take. When their phone fills up because of too many videos of toddlers bumbling around they assume it's the apps.
      - anoncake 7y ago
        One app being 5MB larger is negligible. 50 apps being 5MB larger isn't a huge problem but it is significant. Modern phones have gigabytes of storage but not many gigabytes. I also didn't see that the difference is just 5MB. Most apps are in the double or even triple digits. In addition, caring about anything being 3 times larger than necessary stikes me as the right mindset. Individual items may insignificant but they add up. It's certainly better than the electron-ic opposite.
  - toast0 7y ago
    When people fill up their phone, they look at apps, sort by size, and bigger is more likely to get removed. For users who haven't enabled automatic updates, they're going to delay updates more often for bigger apps too. There may be runtime impacts too, but that's outside my area of knowledge. I would guess there are better things to look at to improve responsiveness of an app than simply executable size, but it probably doesn't hurt.
blkhp19 7y ago
You’re always going to be targeting a framework that’s playing catch-up with the native APIs, so it’s not like app size is the only benefit.
on_and_off 7y ago
Kotlin multiplatform should be a great tool pretty soon to share lots of code between iOS and Android withouth losing on app size. It is mostly business logic you will be able to share this way, but seeing how Compose and Swift UI look extremely similar, the cost of doing the UI twice won't be too bad. This aside, I am surprised somebody changed framework not once but twice ! That must be a small codebase (or somebody that really loves to experiment).

aswinmohanme 7y ago

I love everything about flutter except the size, and I would have stayed on flutter if it wasn't for the competition's app weighing around 1.6 MB.

monsieurbanana 7y ago
Does the size of an app affects something besides the initial download? Maybe it also lengthens the app loading but everybody here doesn't talk about it because it's well known of android developers, which I'm not?
- anoncake 7y ago
  Yes, bigger apps take up more space in storage.
  - winter_squirrel 7y ago
    I feel like most phones nowadays don't really care about a 5mb difference considering they have multiple GB's of space. At least on my phone, the space taken by the actual app binaries is negligible compared to media.
    - cozzyd 7y ago
      Most people have no concept of how much space things take. When their phone fills up because of too many videos of toddlers bumbling around they assume it's the apps.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      One app being 5MB larger is negligible. 50 apps being 5MB larger isn't a huge problem but it is significant. Modern phones have gigabytes of storage but not many gigabytes. I also didn't see that the difference is just 5MB. Most apps are in the double or even triple digits. In addition, caring about anything being 3 times larger than necessary stikes me as the right mindset. Individual items may insignificant but they add up. It's certainly better than the electron-ic opposite.
- toast0 7y ago
  When people fill up their phone, they look at apps, sort by size, and bigger is more likely to get removed. For users who haven't enabled automatic updates, they're going to delay updates more often for bigger apps too. There may be runtime impacts too, but that's outside my area of knowledge. I would guess there are better things to look at to improve responsiveness of an app than simply executable size, but it probably doesn't hurt.

blkhp19 7y ago

You’re always going to be targeting a framework that’s playing catch-up with the native APIs, so it’s not like app size is the only benefit.

on_and_off 7y ago

Kotlin multiplatform should be a great tool pretty soon to share lots of code between iOS and Android withouth losing on app size. It is mostly business logic you will be able to share this way, but seeing how Compose and Swift UI look extremely similar, the cost of doing the UI twice won't be too bad. This aside, I am surprised somebody changed framework not once but twice ! That must be a small codebase (or somebody that really loves to experiment).