29 ms·

I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app

626 points by trevor-e 5y ago

kloch 5y ago
so that is why they say before every single flight "Make sure you download the United app before takeoff as you will not be able to download it in the air".
Danborg 5y ago
Maybe Apple wants you to use up all your space with fat Apps so you have to upgrade to a bigger iPhone. ;-) (Tim, if you’re reading this, I’m just kidding. Please don’t delete my iCloud account.)
jrc2022 5y ago
Nicely done! Someone should send this to UA...
jeffbee 5y ago
This is the kind of thing the App Store review process should be flagging.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Why? Bloat drives sales and upgrades.
  - memco 5y ago
    So does optimization and efficiency. Apple can add this in at some point and say they reduced App sizes by X% across the entire App Store at WWDC and get lots of oohs and aahs.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Agreed, but I'm wondering if they will. I'm a real "dependency skeptic." Doesn't make me too many friends, hereabouts. I'm also not a fan of running Web code on the phone, like a lot of PWAs and hybrid systems. Again, doesn't make me popular, in this crowd. If the main app runs afoul of stripping symbols, then the App Store inspection can flag it. If, however, it's a dependency, then I could see them tossing out boatloads of apps, simply because they include piggy frameworks. There's really no automated way for Apple to realize the framework is really just the developer's aggregated code, or from another source, over which the developer has no control. What really needs to happen, is that the developer has their own inspection regimen, before submitting something that could cause brand damage, to the App Store. Again, suggesting stuff like this, is tantamount to heresy, in today's "Move fast and break things" tech world.
- bluedino 5y ago
  They'll introduce it as a feature at the next WWDC. The best App Store yet!
  - bitwize 5y ago
    You joke, but really, if anyone can change the economics of development to dissuade app cruft, only Apple can. Apple routinely achieves with a wave of the hand things that years or decades of concerted effort from industry professionals couldn't do. Things like remove and deprecate DRM from music. This is Apple's industry, we're just allowed to play in it.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
While not a security bug, this should still be some sort of bounty amount worthy.
mojuba 5y ago
But even the stripped version is way way too much for an app like this. I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions.
- MikeCapone 5y ago
  I think the Stripe app is like 20 megs, Overcast even smaller than that.
  - dont__panic 5y ago
    Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB. I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.
    - andai 5y ago
      My favorite iOS app, Decoupled, is 2.4MB. My favorite Android apps were 5-10x smaller.
    - pgalvin 5y ago
      I have AdGuard on my phone at ~60MB, you might want to check that.
      - dont__panic 5y ago
        Strange, the download from the app store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047223162 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...) is 100 MB, but my install somehow crept up to ~400 (logs, maybe?) over a couple of years of use. I don't have it installed any more, but it's wild how much this varies across devices. What phone do you use? I use a 2016 SE, I wonder if there's a bug that's consume extra space on a device as old (and likely untested by AdGuard) as mine?
melony 5y ago
Does iOS not have code splitting? I thought most of iOS app bloat comes from the multiscreen assets. I surprised compiled code takes up so much space.
- grishka 5y ago
  Do iOS apps still use bitmap graphics?
  - O-stevns 5y ago
    In many cases yes, but svg support has been available in xcode since ver. 12 and before that pdf had been available. As a consultant I haven't worked on a project yet where vector assets has been chosen over bitmap
    - perardi 5y ago
      But does Xcode convert PDF and SVG to various PNG assets? https://bjango.com/articles/svgassetcatalogs/ https://bjango.com/articles/svgassetcatalogs/ It's my understanding, as a designer, that it was auto-generating 2x and 3x PNGs as from your vector assets, and that's what actually got bundled in the final app—and that PNG compression was not good compared to what I could get by going through ImageOptim. I would be quite happy to be wrong about that. It would save me a lot of time.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> it is fair to say this area of app development is complicated to understand. Not really, but it's also actively suppressed. If they can make as much money with a 439MB app as they can with a 10MB app, why would they waste any time or effort trying to save you a few minutes of download time? If anything, I expect this to get worse, as management is constantly pushing for adoption of frameworks that (in their imagination) speed up time-to-market.
- digikata 5y ago
  They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager. How does this factor into this year's bonus?
    - digikata 5y ago
      Increase of passenger engagement metrics on app delivered video services?
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      If more people download and run the app, then surely you can justify further investment in the product?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Southwest has a webapp, lol.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Don’t these airplane steaming services have a local copy of all the movies on some storage device inside the plane? I wonder how crazy it would be to cache the iOS app… like maybe they run a caching transparent proxy on the plane… or some crazy relationship with a CDN that treats each plane as an edge node. I dunno, it would probably be pretty be way to expensive to set up something like that to be worthwhile.
JTon 5y ago
TL;DR: > Wow! I honestly wasn’t expecting that much of an improvement. We shaved 187MB off the app size in five minutes by stripping framework symbols.
- anthk 5y ago
  C++ and Go binaries such as mednafen can be about 50% smaller once stripped.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> While the United dev team should have noticed this much earlier I suspect it's more that their devs are either junior and don't know any better, or more likely that they just don't care. I've also met some devs who believe whatever comments they read on HN, like "file/memory size don't matter"
- paxys 5y ago
  They will care if they are paid to care. It's as simple as that.
- bluedino 5y ago
  They don't teach this at iOS boot camp
ngoel36 5y ago
File size aside, I can confidently say - United hands down has the best app of any major airline in the world. It's better than their website and often-times even better than calling customer service on their 1K (top loyalty status) line. Many ways to make it better, but if we're comparing it to airlines & hotels, it's extremely well done.
- trevorLane 5y ago
  have you seen Breeze's app?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  "Sorry, your device's memory is too low. Start your search again." -Delta app
- notyourwork 5y ago
  Interesting, I've found Delta's app to be usable (above average?). Sort of funny that a usable app is my above average rating but I've found Delta's app just doesn't get in the way. I'm looking forward to trying United.
  - bluedino 5y ago
    The Spirit app installs a bitcoin miner.
    - MH15 5y ago
      I usually fly Spirit right now (college student) so I'd love to see a source for this.
      - sodality2 5y ago
        It's a joke about how absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel terrible Spirit is, I think.
- 121789 5y ago
sidlls 5y ago
Reminds me of Facebook’s (in?)famous “Apple can’t handle our scale” thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/facebook_engineer_ios_cant_handle_our_scale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... There was an HN thread about it, too, but I can’t find it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I've talked with folks that have worked on their code. I think that it's unreasonable to expect a Lambo (or even a Yugo) to accommodate a 300Kg man.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10275396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10275396 But no comments, and no votes, so it must have been another thread, thereabouts. It was quite some years ago.
- scandinavian 5y ago
  I found the PDF if anyone is curious. https://drive.google.com/file/d/16lDaCfEjT7Z72EEDFBo5r3lTDCVcWUjf/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/16lDaCfEjT7Z72EEDFBo5r3lTDCV... I'm not sure what I just read though.
- password4321 5y ago
  2014 (Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342 2015 (scale) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338 2018 (491MB) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995954 2020 (Messenger) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466462 2020 (SDK) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23790207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23790207
- indrora 5y ago
  When Windows 10 Mobile was a thing, Microsoft had written a very competent Facebook application to go along with it. The original version was 18MB. The official Facebook-written version was nearly 300MB, with the bonus that it disabled the old app. I wrote about it then: https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-not-to-transition-an-app-between-companies-d703230d91a4 https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-not-to-transition-an-app-b...
allisdust 5y ago
Even after optimization its massive. What does this app contain? An Embedded game? Shouldn't an airline app be simple.
- polpo 5y ago
  Especially since a large number of people are probably downloading the app in a panic at the airport on crappy overloaded WiFi or cell signal.
- wnoise 5y ago
  Yes, actually. You can see "sudoku" in one of the listings.
lulzury 5y ago
What is the purpose of having those framework symbols there in the first place? What was the original intent/use?
- joezydeco 5y ago
  Upstream telemetry on a crash?
- Siecje 5y ago
  Debugging
- galad87 5y ago
  No purpose. Even without those, you can resymbolicate a crash log later.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    You are very incorrect sir. I encourage you to strip the frameworks in your /System folder and then reboot your system. You can strip the main executable but stripping frameworks is a VERY VERY bad idea.
    - galad87 5y ago
      There is no framework to strip in the /System folder, everything is in the shared dylib cache since Big Sur.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
DrBazza 5y ago
Hello world by size - https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/04/Slow.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/04/Slow.html 439Mb? That's horrific. If I was cynical, I'd say it's in Apple's interests to have bloaty apps, so they can sell more expensive phones with more storage and memory. But that would be cynical. It feels like a failure at every step in the tool chain if a binary comes out at that size.
abotsis 5y ago
I wonder what effect stripping has on crash dump reports though. I don’t know enough about how the App Store manages those, like (if a user opts in to “share information with the developer”), does the developer get less nice dumps as a result of stripping? Surely this can be worked around so long as someone has a symbol table (which they likely do), but the infrastructure might not be in place to do that automatically.
- mlindner 5y ago
  A good crash dump doesn't need symbols at all. The symbols come from the stored symbols from when the author originally compiled it. As long as the builds are reproducible you can even produce the symbols at a later date for an old version if you still have the source code.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    Even if the builds aren't reproducible, rebuilding on the same machine with the same settings usually gives you something a crash dump will work with. But, make your builds reproducible and/or save your debug symbols as part of your release process, it will be something you wish you did otherwise when you're not quite sure if the stack trace you have is correct.
- ajconway 5y ago
  Debug symbols are stored separately on the developer’s computer (and may be uploaded to Apple, but that’s optional). Including symbols in the App Store binary is practically useless.
  - hoten 5y ago
    Is there any reason Apple couldn't just strip the code binaries themselves?
    - ajconway 5y ago
      No, Apple already modifies uploaded binaries before storing them for distribution. In some cases Apple even compiles the binaries themselves (if the developer chose to include the LLVM "bitcode" when submitting the app).
jb1991 5y ago
I don't understand why this actually happened, why were the names not stripped? That seems like a terrible thing not just for size but also for insights into the developer's process (in this case). Shouldn't Xcode be doing this automatically? The author even points out that Swift doesn't need them, so why are they there?
rob74 5y ago
"App review failed: your app contains >30% cruft. Please remove cruft and re-submit"
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  How is that not done by Apple's servers automatically?
ksec 5y ago
There is a whole Node.js runtime for iOS included? I would imagine this is basically an Electron for iOS and Android? If that is case I am not surprised at the file size.
ziggus 5y ago
Is it an Electron app?
dorianmariefr 5y ago
Maybe they pushed a debug build instead of a release build?
silverfrost 5y ago
mb and MB - beings out the pedant in me...
sagivo 5y ago
This is why I always prefer simple mobile web version over installing apps. There's no added value for the app that I cannot get from a simple browser.
throw10920 5y ago
Every time I see an article like this, it's another point of evidence that, no, large application sizes are not actually needed for performance/functionality/ease of development - they're just due to sloppy programming. Electron and web developers, take note.
mwcampbell 5y ago
I think the most effective way to fix this systemic problem would be for app stores to start charging developers for app size, both for storage and outbound transfer. And for desktop apps downloaded from websites, all hosting providers and CDNs should start charging for egress like the big cloud providers do, in acknowledgement of the fact that bandwidth isn't free. Yes, I recently migrated some of my company's infrastructure off of AWS, in part so we wouldn't have to pay for egress. I now believe the world would be better off if we didn't have that option.
- tantalor 5y ago
  If app sizes trend down, it might serve the users well, but it would depress iPhone sales as fewer users would need to upgrade storage. Which one do you think Apple cares more about?
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    If App sizes go down, its a win for Apple as well: 1. Faster update downloaded to devices compared to before & to Google/Android. That's a big PR win. 2. Most badly behaving apps have tons of unnecessary process & their binaries. Also storage is taken up by UI assets. If these are streamlined & reusable, the footprint goes down. That means less RAM can still do fine.
    - tantalor 5y ago
      > big PR win But it wouldn't move the sales needle. Nobody is going to switch from Android because they were waiting for smaller download sizes. > less RAM can still do fine That's bad for Apple because it discourages upgrading.
      - srvmshr 5y ago
        Regarding PR, it adds ammo to their oft repeated claim of "best mobile OS" (Not that I fully agree) Size and RAM (and indirectly a modest battery life gain) will be a win for whoever uses, regardless of our personal views on this matter. When developers throw in big frameworks mindlessly, they assume best case use. Minimalist and efficient coding will actually win across the board whichever way you look. As far as Apple devices go, they are getting support way longer than Android flagships. Apple is devious possibly in many ways, but they don't get to win by 'planned obsolescence'. Much rather the opposite: as new generations of devices come in with newer hardware, they don't have to crazily support a lot of firmware and instruction sets. Only the ones which satisfies the newer frameworks. If they did, they will turn out as another Intel (which famously supported a lot of opcodes all the way back to 386). Their fanbase has some (valid) strength based on a lot of older generation devices still getting OS upgrades which they might normally wouldn't have.
jmbwell 5y ago
United Airlines has been posting jobs for internal application development for a while... --including at upper management levels.-- Just saying.
kazinator 5y ago
Only 250 more to go.
alberth 5y ago
You know what also have huge app sizes, it's various iOS email app. Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB) [0]. - Gmail (397MB) [1] - Outlook (328MB) [2] - Hey (69MB) [3] - Protonmail (128MB) [4] [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmail-email-calendar/id931370077 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmail-email-calendar/id9313... [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-by-google/id422689480 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-by-google/id422689... [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-outlook/id951937596 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-outlook/id951937596 [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hey-email/id1506603805 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hey-email/id1506603805 [4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protonmail-encrypted-email/id979659905 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protonmail-encrypted-email/id9...
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Fastmail is also mostly a wrapper around web views (but then again, so is Hey)
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I haven’t analyzed their binaries or anything like that, but I’d wager that a significant chunk of the heft of the Gmail and Outlook iOS apps are Google/Microsoft’s custom UI frameworks.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    That's terrible.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- petters 5y ago
  It's ridiculous. The complete size of Mario 64 with all assets is 6MB.
  - anthk 5y ago
    And the whole 9front weights less than those apps. When I was a Windows user, a video player install of more than 80MB would be slightly bloated. Today my OpenBSD install uses less than 3GB and it has far more stuff than a phone install. Golang binaries are like 5-15x the size of a dinamically linked C binary, yes, but at least they provide everything and run everywhere.
azalemeth 5y ago
I once flew United and, like the author, didn't realise this until I was on the plane for a ten hour flight. Downloaded the app for Android. I opened it. I was immediately ip-blocked for having a rooted phone, which was then kicked off the network and couldn't get an IP address. United cabin crew then started trying to sell me an iPad loan for the duration. I read a book and vowed never to fly with them again.
- _hhkc 5y ago
  They had a similar check for jailbroken iPhones. The last time I flew with them they seem to have fixed it.
  - digisign 5y ago
    Fixed to block or not block?
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  Unrelated to their inflight entertainment, United pulled this stunt on me the other day. - Flight at 11AM, boarding at 10:20. - Show up at 10:25, boarding doors are closed. - "Didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago" - "Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up, sorry, you should show up when boarding starts" - "Yeah but didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago, how was I to know" - "You should have known, sorry"
  - sb057 5y ago
    >Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up So they are essentially scamming 5% of passengers out of their tickets?
    - vel0city 5y ago
      I mean, you're supposed to be at the gate when boarding starts. For all practical purposes if you miss boarding you've missed your flight even if the plane hasn't left the ground due to safety rules about letting passengers go after the door is considered closed. There's a bit of a checklist of things that need to be completed after the door gets closed and the gate pulls away. They're often incentivized to try and speed things up, so if there's nobody at the gate anymore to board they might assume those passengers decided not to go on the flight. Especially with people now checking into flights the day before, the airline may not even know if the passenger is even at the airport and would realistically show up to the gate anytime soon as checking in means pretty much nothing these days. They're not scamming anyone. Your ticket said you were supposed to be at the gate to board at a certain time. You weren't there, so you missed the flight.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
And here I am feeling unsatisfied about the ~20MB size of the app I’m responsible for. I haven’t seriously tried to cut its size down yet, but aspirationally I’d like to cut that in half. Probably doesn’t make that much of a difference in the long run, but I have a theory that smaller binary sizes increase chances of any given user being up-to-date, thus increasing the percentage of the userbase that’s running the latest version at any point in time. iOS tends to pull updates while charging, and so an app that’s 10MB is more likely to get updated during a brief charging period than an app 50x as large, especially if the user in question has a slower connection. It also makes for smoother troubleshooting when the user can pop into the App Store page for your app and have the app updated almost instantly.
jshchnz 5y ago
This is awesome to hear! I'm actually one of the founders of Emerge Tools (mentioned in the blog post), we work on helping teams just like United fix problems like this. I had actually tweeted at United in April of last year letting them know about these issues: https://twitter.com/jshchnz/status/1379154466872549377 https://twitter.com/jshchnz/status/1379154466872549377 If anyone at United wants help, happy to chat! josh@emergetools.com
andai 5y ago
Similar article by same author (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901051
willis936 5y ago
With all of these complaints about app size I have to wonder: why has everyone heralded the era of static linking?
Scoundreller 5y ago
App, OS and other file sizes are big deals in bandwidth-constrained environments. Canada has a number of remote communities with satellite uplinks, so every update means the whole town needs to download them independently. While some cos have “appliances” that ISPs can install that’ll dramatically reduce back haul bandwidth usage, I’m unaware of any that make any that work for a small community or aircraft. SSL really impacted the use of general-purpose proxies to save bandwidth. Maybe more torrent-based schemes for app stores and others could fill this gap. > Apple also supports incremental downloads, meaning you can download a “diff” of app binaries in some cases (also amazing!), but this is even harder to measure on an actual device. In my case I was trying to download the United app for the first time on a runway before my flight took off. What would be interesting is if Apple did this diff between apps, since I’m sure a lot share frameworks and other bits.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anon_9867864 5y ago
Apple. Hire this man!
blah_humbug 5y ago
We need bloat, and more than that, we need necessary things to be bloated. Otherwise, how will we keep the tech sales treadmill moving? Conversely, it may be that only bloated tech will survive, as bloat drives sales, and sales means survival.
markstos 5y ago
At a job interview, I pointed out the company could cut their bandwidth in half if they enabled gzip compression on their web server. I got the job.
mzs 5y ago
tldr; strip
account-5 5y ago
Out of interest having never been on an airline that forced you to install an app to get what is now a basic customer service, what happens if you don't have a phone that supports their app? Do you get a discount?
- Arrath 5y ago
  You know the answer. In fact it's quite the opposite, as another poster mentioned: they will offer to rent you an airline ipad for the flight so you can enjoy their content at a little extra fee.
coldcode 5y ago
I spent the last ten years of my career building iOS apps, all but one you would likely known at the time, and whoever in charge of this app is an idiot. Shipping an app to the general public with symbols intact? Really? If they didn't know/didn't care, it tells me no one there likely cared about any other quality issue either. It's highly likely that any relevant lead person probably screamed about this daily, but higher ups don't give a shit. At my last job our legal team would have had a cow shipping labels. Our apps are gleaned by blogs looking for scoops on upcoming features. I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight. Their app was a POS and they had hired someone to write a new one -- the same company. Now they had no idea why it was so delayed so they wanted to hire someone to embed in the other company to spy on what was going on. Of course I wanted nothing to do with this travesty. This was years ago, no idea what happened. You'd be amazed at how pathetic mobile development can be even at big companies. Mobile doesn't have to be hard, but if management tries hard enough, can make crap at scale.
- pinot 5y ago
  I travel on United probably 6 flights a month on average. Overall I think it’s a pretty good app but like anything I use routinely, I could easily come up with a list of 10 complaints, from a UX perspective. My biggest is the UI only considers one half of a RT “trip” a trip.
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  > I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight Oh it goes deeper than that. Almost every airline (Southwest is the only exception coming to mins at the moment) also outsources their web design, their pricing structure, and their availability tracking. I've worked with several airlines that legitimately could not give us a list of all their current routes. Some of them actually paid us to scrape their website and tell them where they're currently flying and how much it cost on average.
  - 5y ago
azinman2 5y ago
What is the Android size? Google play store tells me it varies with device, and I don’t have any android devices.
- haxiel 5y ago
  76 MiB for my Android device.
bnycum 5y ago
I really thought that app size would be a hinderance because of the cellular download limits (at least because I only remember to download these apps while at the airport). So I had to look it up and it appears there isn't a size limit anymore from Apple as of 2019, just a popup asking you to allow a download over 200MB. https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/03/ios-13-removes-200-mb-file-size-limit-for-app-downloads-over-cellular/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/03/ios-13-removes-200-mb-file-si...
TrianguloY 5y ago
On android, the default Hello World example when you load Android studio takes more that 1MB, and it's a single screen with two words displayed. The same ninja-optimized app can be less than 1kb. All the useless space is taken by libraries, features "just in case" like login and assets, and more runtime generic things. Supposedly all that generic stuff should help for more complex apps, so for a very simple app the ratio used/unused is very high, but for more advanced apps it is low which means that the size of apps should not be linear with complexity ...yet they are, because the more complex an app is the more useless libraries are included.
StillBored 5y ago
Apple should have never allowed these "non-compiled" applications. An LTO like pass/etc would rip out tons of size too simply by removing all the unused code. BTW: The last couple times I've run into this, they say use the app, but there has been a plex/etc like http video server on the onboard Wifi network which can just stream to random browsers/PCs/etc. I've yet to have any DRM/etc issues, although I suspect that might be part of why they want to push people to dedicated apps. A large number of people though just use their locked down work laptops/etc so they will have a problem when they cut off that path.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
It's 78MB on Android (Pixel 6 Pro). That's one of the hidden advantages of Android: much smaller apps. Makes for faster downloads, less storage consumption, and maybe even better caching / performance. It's common for iOS apps to be 4-5x bigger than Android apps.
- hnburnsy 5y ago
  For me the download from Play store is 78 MB, but it expands to 237MB once installed (One Plus 6T Android 11).
  - hnburnsy 5y ago
    Southwest app is 41MB installed. I know it does have a video player installed as Southwest let you stream from the browser.
mech4bg 5y ago
>It’s becoming somewhat of a popular trend in the airline industry to cut costs by having the passenger bring the hardware, and as an added bonus they get to force their way into your coveted list of installed apps. TBH I see this as a positive - less weight on the plane, less fuel consumed, less waste when these screens are junked, etc. I personally always take a ton of videos with me and just watch my own stuff, I would never trust that the in-flight stuff is working (although I admit I overprepare and it's still important to provide this). And when you're flying - having the app installed is a net positive, it has maps of the airports (with great directions, which is super helpful when you're making a connection), can manage your ticket, etc - the videos are a bonus.
- lentil_soup 5y ago
  > less weight on the plane, less fuel consumed For a plane that's negligible. Tbh, I don't want to sit on a 12hr flight watching a phone screen. I have to hold it on my hand, have nowhere to put it while eating, I have to plug it in to a charger as well (and it's never guaranteed there'll be a plug) + what the OP said about having to download more stuff to my phone I don't want or I might not have space for.
  - mech4bg 5y ago
    FWIW I've noticed on a lot of airlines removing the screens have phone holders in their place and always have a USB charger. It's a moderate weight saving, there are some details in this article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3034196/airlines-are-tossing-seat-back-screens-here-is-why-thats-a-great-design-mo https://www.fastcompany.com/3034196/airlines-are-tossing-sea...
squeaky-clean 5y ago
Not that it excuses it, but having worked at a place that did contractual web design for airlines, I'd bet money that the app wasn't developed by any employees at United and instead was developed by the lowest bidding external company they could find. Based on some of the names of packages I don't recognize (CYFDCTEncoder) and some googling I'm going to guess the company was CYFuture.
VBprogrammer 5y ago
It's times like these that I'm reminded our first computer had a 1GB hard-drive.
- Narishma 5y ago
  Mine was 40MB and I couldn't imagine what to fill it up with.
pinephoneguy 5y ago
Meanwhile the KaiOS store doesn't even allow apps larger than ~50mb for larger devices.
mrweasel 5y ago
Ignoring the economy of the development process, vs. just being able to push out an app quickly, I cannot help wonder how small, and fast apps like this could be, without losing features. Sure stripping out symbols is a quick thing you can do, but how about eliminating the ad tech stuff (people already bought the ticket, leave them alone). Remove the dependency of 3rd. party libraries and frameworks, utilizing only the built in frameworks (or does that not make difference in iOS applications?).
- hnburnsy 5y ago
  Check the article there is code for Soduku.
hparadiz 5y ago
Here I am agonizing over adding an extra 20 MB of assets to an app that is only 22 MB to support a new design.
Spivakov 5y ago
“most bloated apps are within the 100-200MB range, not 400MB.” WeChat enters the chat...
hnburnsy 5y ago
Apple\Google should charge for over-sized apps, just like some airlines charge for over-weight bags.
barrkel 5y ago
The real problem is that people no longer understand the abstractions they're using to build apps.
sayrer 5y ago
You can't paste your password on United's inflight WiFi portal. I eventually got it to work by making Safari share it from my laptop to my phone.
nhoughto 5y ago
187MB of symbols seems like alot! Kind of funny that this bloat could be reduced by X% just by having a shorter path in the CI pipeline and not even stripping, also surprising that xcode doesn't strip swift symbols by default for a release build? Some low hanging fruit right there
morpheuskafka 5y ago
> It’s becoming somewhat of a popular trend in the airline industry to cut costs by having the passenger bring the hardware, I mean, there's virtually no one taking a flight without at least a phone if not a laptop/tablet with them, and most of them probably have a much better screen and headphone support then whatever outdated stuff would be built in to the plane. The only thing I really miss on flights that don't have the seat backs is the thing that shows the altitude and progress on the map.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > The only thing I really miss on flights that don't have the seat backs is the thing that shows the altitude and progress on the map. But you can get that on their app as well. I think flights should do-away with in-seat entertainment. I very rarely see anyone using them, and if you are unfortunate enough to be in economy, they actually take up quite a lot of your personal space. All the screens must weigh a ton as well - bad for the environment.
  - preinheimer 5y ago
    I usually fly Air Canada (AC), where these have been more common than the us carriers i've been on for a while. I use it _every time_. Do I also have a phone? Sure, but the screen is smaller and I have to hold it. Do I also have a laptop? Sure, but if the person in front of me reclines quickly I don't want to hear a crunch. In economy I'll use the in-seat thing to watch something, and leave my laptop in my bag. In economy-plus or higher I'll put a movie on the screen and write some code on my laptop. On the AC flights I've taken I'd estimate something like 80% plus of the folks on the plane are using the in-seat stuff to watch something. The rest are asleep or reading a book.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Mediocre developers being mediocre developers. What else is there to say?
boredumb 5y ago
I recently bought a 100$ android waiting for my phone to be repaired and the size of modern apps on older hardware render them completely unusable. It's a shame that the amount of bloat creeping into everything in the name of "developer productivity". Do we have to wait until we hit some limitation in storage size before we decide that it's simply dog shit software? Samsungs "notes" application is almost 100mb in order for me to keep track of a few kb of grocery lists and restaurant suggestions.
larrybud 5y ago
My pet peeve: Samsung SmartThings app clocks in at 438Mb https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smartthings/id1222822904 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smartthings/id1222822904
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Until app stores start penalizing apps for their size, there is little incentive for developers to improve. And I guess the phone makers don't mind forcing people to buy new phones - although a shortage of space would also get people to stop buying more apps, so maybe that doesn't play into it as much as a desire to keep developers happy. Notably, the Google Play Store doesn't even show the app size. I bet just showing it below the download button would already create significant pressure to reduce size. Both major stores used to have some form of limit - either a hard one, or a soft one where users would get warnings or the apps would only be downloaded over WiFi - which kept developer madness in check, but that seems to be gone now. Some banking apps are the worst offenders, because banks know that few people will change their primary bank just because their app was too big so they don't care at all. Revolut is 200 MB (for comparison: Chrome - a complete browser! - is 50 MB), and that isn't the biggest one on my phone.
- pcurve 5y ago
  Yeah, and given App Store owners (AAPL GOOG) have vested interest in selling more phones (or increase share), they won't be penalizing any time soon.
WalterBright 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised that the reason the Netflix app is so much smaller is because the app is Netflix's core business, and UA's app is an afterthought. (If the Netflix app is too big to fit on the phone, Netflix loses a customer.)
onlyontheapi 5y ago
I worked for someone who took an America Airlines contract 5+ years ago. He was working on encryption, and he was like the 3rd or 4th person they brought in to do the job because their codebase was total spaghetti and no one could figure it out.
onlyontheapi 5y ago
I worked for someone who took an America Airlines contract years ago. He was working on encryption, and he was like the 3rd or 4th person they brought in to do the job because their codebase was total spaghetti and no one could figure it out.
OOPMan 5y ago
Android apps are also hideously bloated. It's kinda disgusting really.
happybuy 5y ago
Small app size is one of the KPIs that I track for the app I develop. Obviously there are user benefits to smaller apps, but as a developer I feel that the app size is a proxy for app complexity and dependencies. The smaller the app, the less third party dependencies and the less maintenance required to keep it up to date and running on the latest OS releases. As a comparison, the biggest competitor to my app AdGuard is a 450MB download on the Mac versus a less than 10MB download for my app (Magic Lasso Adblock). Do most users notice? Not sure but overtime I've actually made my app size smaller simply by replacing unnecessary third party libraries with in-built, simpler functionality and it's become a more pleasant app to maintain.
blunte 5y ago
"Outsourcing".
WatchDog 5y ago
Not an IOS or mobile developer, but doesn't preserving symbols help with telemetry error reporting and stack traces?
- incanus77 5y ago
  When you build the app, you can set aside the symbols for a given version and, either manually or with tools that allow symbol upload, symbolicate things later for debug purposes.
marvindanig 5y ago
It is possible to shave the remaining 252MB as well by using webassembly, a webview wrapper from a service like Red Goose, and an intrinsic css framework like Toucaan. [1] https://github.com/Toucaan/toucaan https://github.com/Toucaan/toucaan
stereo 5y ago
Apple could and should run this as part of their compression routine. They should also optimise images - it's very common for apps to bundle images that can be shrunk without any quality loss. ImageOptim is a decent tool to throw your images at: https://imageoptim.com/mac https://imageoptim.com/mac
AniseAbyss 5y ago
Don't see the point personally, even €400 phones have 256 gigabyte storage. And that will only increase as time goes on.
stuckkeys 5y ago
Interesting approach. I wonder if the bandwidth can be optimized also.
inadequatespace 5y ago
tldr: he stripped the binaries

626 points by trevor-e 5y ago

so that is why they say before every single flight "Make sure you download the United app before takeoff as you will not be able to download it in the air".

Danborg 5y ago

Maybe Apple wants you to use up all your space with fat Apps so you have to upgrade to a bigger iPhone. ;-) (Tim, if you’re reading this, I’m just kidding. Please don’t delete my iCloud account.)

jrc2022 5y ago

Nicely done! Someone should send this to UA...

jeffbee 5y ago

This is the kind of thing the App Store review process should be flagging.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Why? Bloat drives sales and upgrades.
- memco 5y ago
  So does optimization and efficiency. Apple can add this in at some point and say they reduced App sizes by X% across the entire App Store at WWDC and get lots of oohs and aahs.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Agreed, but I'm wondering if they will. I'm a real "dependency skeptic." Doesn't make me too many friends, hereabouts. I'm also not a fan of running Web code on the phone, like a lot of PWAs and hybrid systems. Again, doesn't make me popular, in this crowd. If the main app runs afoul of stripping symbols, then the App Store inspection can flag it. If, however, it's a dependency, then I could see them tossing out boatloads of apps, simply because they include piggy frameworks. There's really no automated way for Apple to realize the framework is really just the developer's aggregated code, or from another source, over which the developer has no control. What really needs to happen, is that the developer has their own inspection regimen, before submitting something that could cause brand damage, to the App Store. Again, suggesting stuff like this, is tantamount to heresy, in today's "Move fast and break things" tech world.
bluedino 5y ago
They'll introduce it as a feature at the next WWDC. The best App Store yet!
- bitwize 5y ago
  You joke, but really, if anyone can change the economics of development to dissuade app cruft, only Apple can. Apple routinely achieves with a wave of the hand things that years or decades of concerted effort from industry professionals couldn't do. Things like remove and deprecate DRM from music. This is Apple's industry, we're just allowed to play in it.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

While not a security bug, this should still be some sort of bounty amount worthy.

mojuba 5y ago

But even the stripped version is way way too much for an app like this. I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions.

MikeCapone 5y ago
I think the Stripe app is like 20 megs, Overcast even smaller than that.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB. I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.
  - andai 5y ago
    My favorite iOS app, Decoupled, is 2.4MB. My favorite Android apps were 5-10x smaller.
  - pgalvin 5y ago
    I have AdGuard on my phone at ~60MB, you might want to check that.
    - dont__panic 5y ago
      Strange, the download from the app store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047223162 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...) is 100 MB, but my install somehow crept up to ~400 (logs, maybe?) over a couple of years of use. I don't have it installed any more, but it's wild how much this varies across devices. What phone do you use? I use a 2016 SE, I wonder if there's a bug that's consume extra space on a device as old (and likely untested by AdGuard) as mine?

melony 5y ago

Does iOS not have code splitting? I thought most of iOS app bloat comes from the multiscreen assets. I surprised compiled code takes up so much space.

grishka 5y ago
Do iOS apps still use bitmap graphics?
- O-stevns 5y ago
  In many cases yes, but svg support has been available in xcode since ver. 12 and before that pdf had been available. As a consultant I haven't worked on a project yet where vector assets has been chosen over bitmap
  - perardi 5y ago
    But does Xcode convert PDF and SVG to various PNG assets? https://bjango.com/articles/svgassetcatalogs/ https://bjango.com/articles/svgassetcatalogs/ It's my understanding, as a designer, that it was auto-generating 2x and 3x PNGs as from your vector assets, and that's what actually got bundled in the final app—and that PNG compression was not good compared to what I could get by going through ImageOptim. I would be quite happy to be wrong about that. It would save me a lot of time.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> it is fair to say this area of app development is complicated to understand. Not really, but it's also actively suppressed. If they can make as much money with a 439MB app as they can with a 10MB app, why would they waste any time or effort trying to save you a few minutes of download time? If anything, I expect this to get worse, as management is constantly pushing for adoption of frameworks that (in their imagination) speed up time-to-market.

digikata 5y ago
They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager. How does this factor into this year's bonus?
  - digikata 5y ago
    Increase of passenger engagement metrics on app delivered video services?
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    If more people download and run the app, then surely you can justify further investment in the product?
- bitwize 5y ago
  Southwest has a webapp, lol.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Don’t these airplane steaming services have a local copy of all the movies on some storage device inside the plane? I wonder how crazy it would be to cache the iOS app… like maybe they run a caching transparent proxy on the plane… or some crazy relationship with a CDN that treats each plane as an edge node. I dunno, it would probably be pretty be way to expensive to set up something like that to be worthwhile.

JTon 5y ago

TL;DR: > Wow! I honestly wasn’t expecting that much of an improvement. We shaved 187MB off the app size in five minutes by stripping framework symbols.

anthk 5y ago
C++ and Go binaries such as mednafen can be about 50% smaller once stripped.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

> While the United dev team should have noticed this much earlier I suspect it's more that their devs are either junior and don't know any better, or more likely that they just don't care. I've also met some devs who believe whatever comments they read on HN, like "file/memory size don't matter"

paxys 5y ago
They will care if they are paid to care. It's as simple as that.
bluedino 5y ago
They don't teach this at iOS boot camp

ngoel36 5y ago

File size aside, I can confidently say - United hands down has the best app of any major airline in the world. It's better than their website and often-times even better than calling customer service on their 1K (top loyalty status) line. Many ways to make it better, but if we're comparing it to airlines & hotels, it's extremely well done.

trevorLane 5y ago
have you seen Breeze's app?
jaywalk 5y ago
"Sorry, your device's memory is too low. Start your search again." -Delta app
notyourwork 5y ago
Interesting, I've found Delta's app to be usable (above average?). Sort of funny that a usable app is my above average rating but I've found Delta's app just doesn't get in the way. I'm looking forward to trying United.
- bluedino 5y ago
  The Spirit app installs a bitcoin miner.
  - MH15 5y ago
    I usually fly Spirit right now (college student) so I'd love to see a source for this.
    - sodality2 5y ago
      It's a joke about how absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel terrible Spirit is, I think.
121789 5y ago

sidlls 5y ago

Reminds me of Facebook’s (in?)famous “Apple can’t handle our scale” thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/facebook_engineer_ios_cant_handle_our_scale/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo... There was an HN thread about it, too, but I can’t find it.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I've talked with folks that have worked on their code. I think that it's unreasonable to expect a Lambo (or even a Yugo) to accommodate a 300Kg man.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10275396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10275396 But no comments, and no votes, so it must have been another thread, thereabouts. It was quite some years ago.
scandinavian 5y ago
I found the PDF if anyone is curious. https://drive.google.com/file/d/16lDaCfEjT7Z72EEDFBo5r3lTDCVcWUjf/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/16lDaCfEjT7Z72EEDFBo5r3lTDCV... I'm not sure what I just read though.
password4321 5y ago
2014 (Android) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342 2015 (scale) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338 2018 (491MB) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995954 2020 (Messenger) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466462 2020 (SDK) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23790207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23790207
indrora 5y ago
When Windows 10 Mobile was a thing, Microsoft had written a very competent Facebook application to go along with it. The original version was 18MB. The official Facebook-written version was nearly 300MB, with the bonus that it disabled the old app. I wrote about it then: https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-not-to-transition-an-app-between-companies-d703230d91a4 https://medium.com/hackernoon/how-not-to-transition-an-app-b...

allisdust 5y ago

Even after optimization its massive. What does this app contain? An Embedded game? Shouldn't an airline app be simple.

polpo 5y ago
Especially since a large number of people are probably downloading the app in a panic at the airport on crappy overloaded WiFi or cell signal.
wnoise 5y ago
Yes, actually. You can see "sudoku" in one of the listings.

lulzury 5y ago

What is the purpose of having those framework symbols there in the first place? What was the original intent/use?

joezydeco 5y ago
Upstream telemetry on a crash?
Siecje 5y ago
Debugging
galad87 5y ago
No purpose. Even without those, you can resymbolicate a crash log later.
- _3u10 5y ago
  You are very incorrect sir. I encourage you to strip the frameworks in your /System folder and then reboot your system. You can strip the main executable but stripping frameworks is a VERY VERY bad idea.
  - galad87 5y ago
    There is no framework to strip in the /System folder, everything is in the shared dylib cache since Big Sur.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

DrBazza 5y ago

Hello world by size - https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/04/Slow.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/04/Slow.html 439Mb? That's horrific. If I was cynical, I'd say it's in Apple's interests to have bloaty apps, so they can sell more expensive phones with more storage and memory. But that would be cynical. It feels like a failure at every step in the tool chain if a binary comes out at that size.

abotsis 5y ago

I wonder what effect stripping has on crash dump reports though. I don’t know enough about how the App Store manages those, like (if a user opts in to “share information with the developer”), does the developer get less nice dumps as a result of stripping? Surely this can be worked around so long as someone has a symbol table (which they likely do), but the infrastructure might not be in place to do that automatically.

mlindner 5y ago
A good crash dump doesn't need symbols at all. The symbols come from the stored symbols from when the author originally compiled it. As long as the builds are reproducible you can even produce the symbols at a later date for an old version if you still have the source code.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  Even if the builds aren't reproducible, rebuilding on the same machine with the same settings usually gives you something a crash dump will work with. But, make your builds reproducible and/or save your debug symbols as part of your release process, it will be something you wish you did otherwise when you're not quite sure if the stack trace you have is correct.
ajconway 5y ago
Debug symbols are stored separately on the developer’s computer (and may be uploaded to Apple, but that’s optional). Including symbols in the App Store binary is practically useless.
- hoten 5y ago
  Is there any reason Apple couldn't just strip the code binaries themselves?
  - ajconway 5y ago
    No, Apple already modifies uploaded binaries before storing them for distribution. In some cases Apple even compiles the binaries themselves (if the developer chose to include the LLVM "bitcode" when submitting the app).

jb1991 5y ago

I don't understand why this actually happened, why were the names not stripped? That seems like a terrible thing not just for size but also for insights into the developer's process (in this case). Shouldn't Xcode be doing this automatically? The author even points out that Swift doesn't need them, so why are they there?

rob74 5y ago

"App review failed: your app contains >30% cruft. Please remove cruft and re-submit"

dzhiurgis 5y ago
How is that not done by Apple's servers automatically?

ksec 5y ago

There is a whole Node.js runtime for iOS included? I would imagine this is basically an Electron for iOS and Android? If that is case I am not surprised at the file size.

ziggus 5y ago

Is it an Electron app?

dorianmariefr 5y ago

Maybe they pushed a debug build instead of a release build?

silverfrost 5y ago

mb and MB - beings out the pedant in me...

sagivo 5y ago

This is why I always prefer simple mobile web version over installing apps. There's no added value for the app that I cannot get from a simple browser.

throw10920 5y ago

Every time I see an article like this, it's another point of evidence that, no, large application sizes are not actually needed for performance/functionality/ease of development - they're just due to sloppy programming. Electron and web developers, take note.

mwcampbell 5y ago

I think the most effective way to fix this systemic problem would be for app stores to start charging developers for app size, both for storage and outbound transfer. And for desktop apps downloaded from websites, all hosting providers and CDNs should start charging for egress like the big cloud providers do, in acknowledgement of the fact that bandwidth isn't free. Yes, I recently migrated some of my company's infrastructure off of AWS, in part so we wouldn't have to pay for egress. I now believe the world would be better off if we didn't have that option.

tantalor 5y ago
If app sizes trend down, it might serve the users well, but it would depress iPhone sales as fewer users would need to upgrade storage. Which one do you think Apple cares more about?
- srvmshr 5y ago
  If App sizes go down, its a win for Apple as well: 1. Faster update downloaded to devices compared to before & to Google/Android. That's a big PR win. 2. Most badly behaving apps have tons of unnecessary process & their binaries. Also storage is taken up by UI assets. If these are streamlined & reusable, the footprint goes down. That means less RAM can still do fine.
  - tantalor 5y ago
    > big PR win But it wouldn't move the sales needle. Nobody is going to switch from Android because they were waiting for smaller download sizes. > less RAM can still do fine That's bad for Apple because it discourages upgrading.
    - srvmshr 5y ago
      Regarding PR, it adds ammo to their oft repeated claim of "best mobile OS" (Not that I fully agree) Size and RAM (and indirectly a modest battery life gain) will be a win for whoever uses, regardless of our personal views on this matter. When developers throw in big frameworks mindlessly, they assume best case use. Minimalist and efficient coding will actually win across the board whichever way you look. As far as Apple devices go, they are getting support way longer than Android flagships. Apple is devious possibly in many ways, but they don't get to win by 'planned obsolescence'. Much rather the opposite: as new generations of devices come in with newer hardware, they don't have to crazily support a lot of firmware and instruction sets. Only the ones which satisfies the newer frameworks. If they did, they will turn out as another Intel (which famously supported a lot of opcodes all the way back to 386). Their fanbase has some (valid) strength based on a lot of older generation devices still getting OS upgrades which they might normally wouldn't have.

jmbwell 5y ago

United Airlines has been posting jobs for internal application development for a while... --including at upper management levels.-- Just saying.

kazinator 5y ago

Only 250 more to go.

alberth 5y ago

You know what also have huge app sizes, it's various iOS email app. Fastmail is the only email/calendar app with a reasonable size (just 20MB) [0]. - Gmail (397MB) [1] - Outlook (328MB) [2] - Hey (69MB) [3] - Protonmail (128MB) [4] [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmail-email-calendar/id931370077 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fastmail-email-calendar/id9313... [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-by-google/id422689480 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gmail-email-by-google/id422689... [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-outlook/id951937596 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-outlook/id951937596 [3] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hey-email/id1506603805 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hey-email/id1506603805 [4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protonmail-encrypted-email/id979659905 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/protonmail-encrypted-email/id9...

marcellus23 5y ago
Fastmail is also mostly a wrapper around web views (but then again, so is Hey)
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I haven’t analyzed their binaries or anything like that, but I’d wager that a significant chunk of the heft of the Gmail and Outlook iOS apps are Google/Microsoft’s custom UI frameworks.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  That's terrible.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
petters 5y ago
It's ridiculous. The complete size of Mario 64 with all assets is 6MB.
- anthk 5y ago
  And the whole 9front weights less than those apps. When I was a Windows user, a video player install of more than 80MB would be slightly bloated. Today my OpenBSD install uses less than 3GB and it has far more stuff than a phone install. Golang binaries are like 5-15x the size of a dinamically linked C binary, yes, but at least they provide everything and run everywhere.

azalemeth 5y ago

I once flew United and, like the author, didn't realise this until I was on the plane for a ten hour flight. Downloaded the app for Android. I opened it. I was immediately ip-blocked for having a rooted phone, which was then kicked off the network and couldn't get an IP address. United cabin crew then started trying to sell me an iPad loan for the duration. I read a book and vowed never to fly with them again.

_hhkc 5y ago
They had a similar check for jailbroken iPhones. The last time I flew with them they seem to have fixed it.
- digisign 5y ago
  Fixed to block or not block?
_fat_santa 5y ago
Unrelated to their inflight entertainment, United pulled this stunt on me the other day. - Flight at 11AM, boarding at 10:20. - Show up at 10:25, boarding doors are closed. - "Didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago" - "Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up, sorry, you should show up when boarding starts" - "Yeah but didn't boarding start 5 minutes ago, how was I to know" - "You should have known, sorry"
- sb057 5y ago
  >Yeah we close the doors once 95% of people show up So they are essentially scamming 5% of passengers out of their tickets?
  - vel0city 5y ago
    I mean, you're supposed to be at the gate when boarding starts. For all practical purposes if you miss boarding you've missed your flight even if the plane hasn't left the ground due to safety rules about letting passengers go after the door is considered closed. There's a bit of a checklist of things that need to be completed after the door gets closed and the gate pulls away. They're often incentivized to try and speed things up, so if there's nobody at the gate anymore to board they might assume those passengers decided not to go on the flight. Especially with people now checking into flights the day before, the airline may not even know if the passenger is even at the airport and would realistically show up to the gate anytime soon as checking in means pretty much nothing these days. They're not scamming anyone. Your ticket said you were supposed to be at the gate to board at a certain time. You weren't there, so you missed the flight.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

And here I am feeling unsatisfied about the ~20MB size of the app I’m responsible for. I haven’t seriously tried to cut its size down yet, but aspirationally I’d like to cut that in half. Probably doesn’t make that much of a difference in the long run, but I have a theory that smaller binary sizes increase chances of any given user being up-to-date, thus increasing the percentage of the userbase that’s running the latest version at any point in time. iOS tends to pull updates while charging, and so an app that’s 10MB is more likely to get updated during a brief charging period than an app 50x as large, especially if the user in question has a slower connection. It also makes for smoother troubleshooting when the user can pop into the App Store page for your app and have the app updated almost instantly.

jshchnz 5y ago

This is awesome to hear! I'm actually one of the founders of Emerge Tools (mentioned in the blog post), we work on helping teams just like United fix problems like this. I had actually tweeted at United in April of last year letting them know about these issues: https://twitter.com/jshchnz/status/1379154466872549377 https://twitter.com/jshchnz/status/1379154466872549377 If anyone at United wants help, happy to chat! josh@emergetools.com

andai 5y ago

Similar article by same author (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14901051

willis936 5y ago

With all of these complaints about app size I have to wonder: why has everyone heralded the era of static linking?

Scoundreller 5y ago

App, OS and other file sizes are big deals in bandwidth-constrained environments. Canada has a number of remote communities with satellite uplinks, so every update means the whole town needs to download them independently. While some cos have “appliances” that ISPs can install that’ll dramatically reduce back haul bandwidth usage, I’m unaware of any that make any that work for a small community or aircraft. SSL really impacted the use of general-purpose proxies to save bandwidth. Maybe more torrent-based schemes for app stores and others could fill this gap. > Apple also supports incremental downloads, meaning you can download a “diff” of app binaries in some cases (also amazing!), but this is even harder to measure on an actual device. In my case I was trying to download the United app for the first time on a runway before my flight took off. What would be interesting is if Apple did this diff between apps, since I’m sure a lot share frameworks and other bits.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

anon_9867864 5y ago

Apple. Hire this man!

blah_humbug 5y ago

We need bloat, and more than that, we need necessary things to be bloated. Otherwise, how will we keep the tech sales treadmill moving? Conversely, it may be that only bloated tech will survive, as bloat drives sales, and sales means survival.

markstos 5y ago

At a job interview, I pointed out the company could cut their bandwidth in half if they enabled gzip compression on their web server. I got the job.

mzs 5y ago

tldr; strip

account-5 5y ago

Out of interest having never been on an airline that forced you to install an app to get what is now a basic customer service, what happens if you don't have a phone that supports their app? Do you get a discount?

Arrath 5y ago
You know the answer. In fact it's quite the opposite, as another poster mentioned: they will offer to rent you an airline ipad for the flight so you can enjoy their content at a little extra fee.

coldcode 5y ago

I spent the last ten years of my career building iOS apps, all but one you would likely known at the time, and whoever in charge of this app is an idiot. Shipping an app to the general public with symbols intact? Really? If they didn't know/didn't care, it tells me no one there likely cared about any other quality issue either. It's highly likely that any relevant lead person probably screamed about this daily, but higher ups don't give a shit. At my last job our legal team would have had a cow shipping labels. Our apps are gleaned by blogs looking for scoops on upcoming features. I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight. Their app was a POS and they had hired someone to write a new one -- the same company. Now they had no idea why it was so delayed so they wanted to hire someone to embed in the other company to spy on what was going on. Of course I wanted nothing to do with this travesty. This was years ago, no idea what happened. You'd be amazed at how pathetic mobile development can be even at big companies. Mobile doesn't have to be hard, but if management tries hard enough, can make crap at scale.

pinot 5y ago
I travel on United probably 6 flights a month on average. Overall I think it’s a pretty good app but like anything I use routinely, I could easily come up with a list of 10 complaints, from a UX perspective. My biggest is the UI only considers one half of a RT “trip” a trip.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
> I once interviewed at a major airline (not United) and at the time they had outsourced their entire app and web to some foreign companies, including any and all oversight Oh it goes deeper than that. Almost every airline (Southwest is the only exception coming to mins at the moment) also outsources their web design, their pricing structure, and their availability tracking. I've worked with several airlines that legitimately could not give us a list of all their current routes. Some of them actually paid us to scrape their website and tell them where they're currently flying and how much it cost on average.
- 5y ago

azinman2 5y ago

What is the Android size? Google play store tells me it varies with device, and I don’t have any android devices.

haxiel 5y ago
76 MiB for my Android device.

bnycum 5y ago

I really thought that app size would be a hinderance because of the cellular download limits (at least because I only remember to download these apps while at the airport). So I had to look it up and it appears there isn't a size limit anymore from Apple as of 2019, just a popup asking you to allow a download over 200MB. https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/03/ios-13-removes-200-mb-file-size-limit-for-app-downloads-over-cellular/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/03/ios-13-removes-200-mb-file-si...

TrianguloY 5y ago

On android, the default Hello World example when you load Android studio takes more that 1MB, and it's a single screen with two words displayed. The same ninja-optimized app can be less than 1kb. All the useless space is taken by libraries, features "just in case" like login and assets, and more runtime generic things. Supposedly all that generic stuff should help for more complex apps, so for a very simple app the ratio used/unused is very high, but for more advanced apps it is low which means that the size of apps should not be linear with complexity ...yet they are, because the more complex an app is the more useless libraries are included.

StillBored 5y ago

Apple should have never allowed these "non-compiled" applications. An LTO like pass/etc would rip out tons of size too simply by removing all the unused code. BTW: The last couple times I've run into this, they say use the app, but there has been a plex/etc like http video server on the onboard Wifi network which can just stream to random browsers/PCs/etc. I've yet to have any DRM/etc issues, although I suspect that might be part of why they want to push people to dedicated apps. A large number of people though just use their locked down work laptops/etc so they will have a problem when they cut off that path.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

It's 78MB on Android (Pixel 6 Pro). That's one of the hidden advantages of Android: much smaller apps. Makes for faster downloads, less storage consumption, and maybe even better caching / performance. It's common for iOS apps to be 4-5x bigger than Android apps.

hnburnsy 5y ago
For me the download from Play store is 78 MB, but it expands to 237MB once installed (One Plus 6T Android 11).
- hnburnsy 5y ago
  Southwest app is 41MB installed. I know it does have a video player installed as Southwest let you stream from the browser.

mech4bg 5y ago

>It’s becoming somewhat of a popular trend in the airline industry to cut costs by having the passenger bring the hardware, and as an added bonus they get to force their way into your coveted list of installed apps. TBH I see this as a positive - less weight on the plane, less fuel consumed, less waste when these screens are junked, etc. I personally always take a ton of videos with me and just watch my own stuff, I would never trust that the in-flight stuff is working (although I admit I overprepare and it's still important to provide this). And when you're flying - having the app installed is a net positive, it has maps of the airports (with great directions, which is super helpful when you're making a connection), can manage your ticket, etc - the videos are a bonus.

lentil_soup 5y ago
> less weight on the plane, less fuel consumed For a plane that's negligible. Tbh, I don't want to sit on a 12hr flight watching a phone screen. I have to hold it on my hand, have nowhere to put it while eating, I have to plug it in to a charger as well (and it's never guaranteed there'll be a plug) + what the OP said about having to download more stuff to my phone I don't want or I might not have space for.
- mech4bg 5y ago
  FWIW I've noticed on a lot of airlines removing the screens have phone holders in their place and always have a USB charger. It's a moderate weight saving, there are some details in this article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3034196/airlines-are-tossing-seat-back-screens-here-is-why-thats-a-great-design-mo https://www.fastcompany.com/3034196/airlines-are-tossing-sea...

squeaky-clean 5y ago

Not that it excuses it, but having worked at a place that did contractual web design for airlines, I'd bet money that the app wasn't developed by any employees at United and instead was developed by the lowest bidding external company they could find. Based on some of the names of packages I don't recognize (CYFDCTEncoder) and some googling I'm going to guess the company was CYFuture.

VBprogrammer 5y ago

It's times like these that I'm reminded our first computer had a 1GB hard-drive.

Narishma 5y ago
Mine was 40MB and I couldn't imagine what to fill it up with.

pinephoneguy 5y ago

Meanwhile the KaiOS store doesn't even allow apps larger than ~50mb for larger devices.

mrweasel 5y ago

Ignoring the economy of the development process, vs. just being able to push out an app quickly, I cannot help wonder how small, and fast apps like this could be, without losing features. Sure stripping out symbols is a quick thing you can do, but how about eliminating the ad tech stuff (people already bought the ticket, leave them alone). Remove the dependency of 3rd. party libraries and frameworks, utilizing only the built in frameworks (or does that not make difference in iOS applications?).

hnburnsy 5y ago
Check the article there is code for Soduku.

hparadiz 5y ago

Here I am agonizing over adding an extra 20 MB of assets to an app that is only 22 MB to support a new design.

Spivakov 5y ago

“most bloated apps are within the 100-200MB range, not 400MB.” WeChat enters the chat...

hnburnsy 5y ago

Apple\Google should charge for over-sized apps, just like some airlines charge for over-weight bags.

barrkel 5y ago

The real problem is that people no longer understand the abstractions they're using to build apps.

sayrer 5y ago

You can't paste your password on United's inflight WiFi portal. I eventually got it to work by making Safari share it from my laptop to my phone.

nhoughto 5y ago

187MB of symbols seems like alot! Kind of funny that this bloat could be reduced by X% just by having a shorter path in the CI pipeline and not even stripping, also surprising that xcode doesn't strip swift symbols by default for a release build? Some low hanging fruit right there

morpheuskafka 5y ago

> It’s becoming somewhat of a popular trend in the airline industry to cut costs by having the passenger bring the hardware, I mean, there's virtually no one taking a flight without at least a phone if not a laptop/tablet with them, and most of them probably have a much better screen and headphone support then whatever outdated stuff would be built in to the plane. The only thing I really miss on flights that don't have the seat backs is the thing that shows the altitude and progress on the map.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> The only thing I really miss on flights that don't have the seat backs is the thing that shows the altitude and progress on the map. But you can get that on their app as well. I think flights should do-away with in-seat entertainment. I very rarely see anyone using them, and if you are unfortunate enough to be in economy, they actually take up quite a lot of your personal space. All the screens must weigh a ton as well - bad for the environment.
- preinheimer 5y ago
  I usually fly Air Canada (AC), where these have been more common than the us carriers i've been on for a while. I use it _every time_. Do I also have a phone? Sure, but the screen is smaller and I have to hold it. Do I also have a laptop? Sure, but if the person in front of me reclines quickly I don't want to hear a crunch. In economy I'll use the in-seat thing to watch something, and leave my laptop in my bag. In economy-plus or higher I'll put a movie on the screen and write some code on my laptop. On the AC flights I've taken I'd estimate something like 80% plus of the folks on the plane are using the in-seat stuff to watch something. The rest are asleep or reading a book.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

Mediocre developers being mediocre developers. What else is there to say?

boredumb 5y ago

I recently bought a 100$ android waiting for my phone to be repaired and the size of modern apps on older hardware render them completely unusable. It's a shame that the amount of bloat creeping into everything in the name of "developer productivity". Do we have to wait until we hit some limitation in storage size before we decide that it's simply dog shit software? Samsungs "notes" application is almost 100mb in order for me to keep track of a few kb of grocery lists and restaurant suggestions.

larrybud 5y ago

My pet peeve: Samsung SmartThings app clocks in at 438Mb https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smartthings/id1222822904 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smartthings/id1222822904

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Until app stores start penalizing apps for their size, there is little incentive for developers to improve. And I guess the phone makers don't mind forcing people to buy new phones - although a shortage of space would also get people to stop buying more apps, so maybe that doesn't play into it as much as a desire to keep developers happy. Notably, the Google Play Store doesn't even show the app size. I bet just showing it below the download button would already create significant pressure to reduce size. Both major stores used to have some form of limit - either a hard one, or a soft one where users would get warnings or the apps would only be downloaded over WiFi - which kept developer madness in check, but that seems to be gone now. Some banking apps are the worst offenders, because banks know that few people will change their primary bank just because their app was too big so they don't care at all. Revolut is 200 MB (for comparison: Chrome - a complete browser! - is 50 MB), and that isn't the biggest one on my phone.

pcurve 5y ago
Yeah, and given App Store owners (AAPL GOOG) have vested interest in selling more phones (or increase share), they won't be penalizing any time soon.

WalterBright 5y ago

I wouldn't be surprised that the reason the Netflix app is so much smaller is because the app is Netflix's core business, and UA's app is an afterthought. (If the Netflix app is too big to fit on the phone, Netflix loses a customer.)

onlyontheapi 5y ago

I worked for someone who took an America Airlines contract 5+ years ago. He was working on encryption, and he was like the 3rd or 4th person they brought in to do the job because their codebase was total spaghetti and no one could figure it out.

onlyontheapi 5y ago

I worked for someone who took an America Airlines contract years ago. He was working on encryption, and he was like the 3rd or 4th person they brought in to do the job because their codebase was total spaghetti and no one could figure it out.

OOPMan 5y ago

Android apps are also hideously bloated. It's kinda disgusting really.

happybuy 5y ago

Small app size is one of the KPIs that I track for the app I develop. Obviously there are user benefits to smaller apps, but as a developer I feel that the app size is a proxy for app complexity and dependencies. The smaller the app, the less third party dependencies and the less maintenance required to keep it up to date and running on the latest OS releases. As a comparison, the biggest competitor to my app AdGuard is a 450MB download on the Mac versus a less than 10MB download for my app (Magic Lasso Adblock). Do most users notice? Not sure but overtime I've actually made my app size smaller simply by replacing unnecessary third party libraries with in-built, simpler functionality and it's become a more pleasant app to maintain.

blunte 5y ago

"Outsourcing".

WatchDog 5y ago

Not an IOS or mobile developer, but doesn't preserving symbols help with telemetry error reporting and stack traces?

incanus77 5y ago
When you build the app, you can set aside the symbols for a given version and, either manually or with tools that allow symbol upload, symbolicate things later for debug purposes.

marvindanig 5y ago

It is possible to shave the remaining 252MB as well by using webassembly, a webview wrapper from a service like Red Goose, and an intrinsic css framework like Toucaan. [1] https://github.com/Toucaan/toucaan https://github.com/Toucaan/toucaan

stereo 5y ago

Apple could and should run this as part of their compression routine. They should also optimise images - it's very common for apps to bundle images that can be shrunk without any quality loss. ImageOptim is a decent tool to throw your images at: https://imageoptim.com/mac https://imageoptim.com/mac

AniseAbyss 5y ago

Don't see the point personally, even €400 phones have 256 gigabyte storage. And that will only increase as time goes on.

stuckkeys 5y ago

Interesting approach. I wonder if the bandwidth can be optimized also.

inadequatespace 5y ago

tldr: he stripped the binaries