13 ms·

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 organi

by 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?
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Just for some perspective, the entire installer package for the Shareware version Doom took up about 2.39MB of space. This included the EXE and all art assets. The installer for WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) was about 3.6MB. The full on-disk footprint of Microsoft Office 95 was less than 100MB, including all documentation, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I'm not entirely convinced value-per-byte is a measure of software quality that a lot of users care about, but it undeniably trends down every year.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The one I like is that the Finder icon on macOS is larger than the entire system on the original Mac.
    - testplzignore 5y ago
      DOOM2.WAD has always been my measuring stick for software size, as I remember how frustrating it was to download such a huge file (15MB!) in the dial-up days. I never did get it to complete - I couldn't justify to my parents that the phone line would be busy for a whole day :)
  - PascLeRasc 5y ago
    Thanks for recommending Hyperweb, you've just saved me a ton of space.
    - dont__panic 5y ago
      Keep in mind that even on the free version, you can add (unlimited?) adlists. I've added some of the most popular uBlock Origin default lists to mine to make the ad blocking even better. It is absolutely insane how many apps Hyperweb replaced for me, too!
- tyingq 5y ago
  I don't think the Stripe app is a good comparison. Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. Typically with broad support for different currencies, languages, etc, etc. 439mb is obviously not right, but I would expect the app to be fairly large.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. All of that happens online.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      That may be true for some airlines (webviews vs native), but it is not true for many. Boarding passes are probably a good example. It's very typical for that functionality to use something like Apple Wallet integration, and also native widgets to upsell cross-sell boarding/seat upgrades, etc.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        While broadly fair, one minor quip, I believe all Wallet passes have to come down from the server. Apps can't make their own, can they?
        tyingq 5y ago
        Passes already in the wallet don't require you to be online. But, what I meant was that there was additional code, thus additional size for all the functionality and ui related to boarding passes, whether or not parts of it don't work offline. At least the airlines I've worked with prefer native code and UIs for any flow that's either revenue-producing, or likely to create issues on day-of-travel. They tend to use webviews only for things that don't have to be working to sell a ticket or board the aircraft.
bastardoperator 5y ago
Couple bad development practices with archaic technology for ticketing and we get the worst of both worlds. I've worked with two airlines and it was fairly frightening to see what type of BS they're working with and against.
stingraycharles 5y ago
I’d like to approach this differently, and think about what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them. I’m the first to say that this utter bloat is terrible, but most people aren’t really bothered by it. And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low. From that perspective, it’s probably much more pragmatic to fix the problem at the root(s): Apple may want to mandate stripped binaries (I think this is also what RPM does by default, just strip everything), and/or god forbid these Electron-type frameworks should make things more efficient.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  > And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low. From my experience being on a mobile development team for a competitor. Last time I checked like most major airlines their team is in house and I’d be in shock if that changed.
- sneak 5y ago
  If Apple would allow web notifications, most apps wouldn't need to be apps at all, but could simply be webpages that get bookmarked to the launcher. The UX for the user would be, for most non-game apps, identical. The problem is that purchases would no longer be subject to Apple's 10x industry standard (30% instead of 3%) captive credit card payment processing service (for apps), so no web notifications in MobileSafari that might undermine platform control and payment processing monopoly. Apple, of course, will say this is about protecting users from notification spam, and sidestep the inconvenient facts that it protects an Apple cash cow and locks developers and users into a closed and proprietary platform.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    I strongly suspect the bulk of this 500MB is DRM frameworks for their in-flight video playback that they can't or don't want to support in-browser. Safari kicks video playback over to the United app each time you select something to watch and it does what appears to be a multi-stage hand-off dance.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions. Or are they trade-offs? Do these 'bad decisions' actually impact their business or are they manageable, allowing them to achieve their mission, focusing on other things that are more important?
- MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
  Without diving into specifics we'll never know of course. But consider the opposite: would good decisions positively or negatively impact their business? Would they prevent them from achieving their mission or focusing on other things? I can think of how bad decisions could negatively impact their mission and focus: - App is slow and buggy, pressuring users to choose a different service altogether - A much larger support staff is required to handle customer issues - Bugs are painful to address and require weeks or months to resolve - Developers spend more time fixing bugs and less time working on features, resulting in delayed features and an increased team size to allow more parallel development
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  I've worked on one of these apps (healthcare space, just checked and the size sits at 350MB). Here's the problem as I saw it firsthand: * Far too many hands in the pot: My rough calculation is at any given time, there are around 1000 contributors to this app, across various teams. This itself is not a problem, but leads to issues. * Tech Debt Racks up Quick: Again because there are so many hands in the pot, tech debt racks up unbelievably quickly. And furthermore it's almost impossible to address because it cuts accross so many teams and orgs. * The Solution? More Hands in the Pot!: With tech debt racking up quick and not being resolved, productivity grinds to a halt. App has constant errors, crashes, and things like hot reloading are just totally broken because of all the underlying issues. So what do you do when faced with this problem? More engineers! Rather than addressing the problems that face developers, they just throw more labor at the problem, compounding the previous issues. * Code Duplication: With so many folks working on the project but not talking to one another, code duplication becomes a MAJOR issue. Say you have a "Button" component that needs to be modified. Well, modifying that component means going through 5+ teams to get approval. So to sidestep you create "Button2", and the next guys creates "Button3". The result is you pull up the fuzzy finder and search "Button", only to get 15 results with subtle differences. This is just my experience. Currently this app is top 20 in healthcare on the Apple Appstore. The company also has a number of other apps and when I was leaving the company, there were talks to merge all the apps into the "main" app (good fucking luck).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
markus_zhang 5y ago
I think one needs to understand the mentalities of the project managers and programmers/contractors who actually work for those behemoth corporations to understand the quality of their work.
Friday_ 5y ago
Maybe they bundle movie inside app.
hammock 5y ago
As a frequent and mostly non-loyal flier, I can say despite all its faults the United app is far and away the best airline app in the US: fast, easy to navigate, powerful, useful and often pleasantly surprising. American is the only other app that compares, I can't stand to use any other airlines' apps.
- thaway2839 5y ago
  One could argue that maybe the developers of the app were optimizing for the right things. Usability, performance, etc., as opposed to disk space.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    As a long time united frequent flyer, while I have many gripes, they have consistently made the app better and better without useless "redesigns for the sake for redesigns"
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    In this case, shipping symbols with the app is almost certainly an oversight. Stripping symbols of shipped binaries is standard good practice. That said, I don't think the difference between a 40MB app and a 400MB app is all that critical these days. Optimizing for development speed and user experience over an absolutely minimal download size is a reasonable choice.
    - potatolicious 5y ago
      Not to mention the surface area of the app is often larger than it appears to a single user, especially for companies this large whose customer bases are this wide. It's tempting to think about the United app as something very simple: - Search for flights - Run through the booking flow for flights - Look up existing bookings - Change existing bookings But this ignores a lot of scope that's actually critical for a company whose products are very complicated: - ID verification for international travel - Custom functionality for large institutional cu stomers (government, corporate) - Functionality for ancillary services: in-air streaming entertainment, in-airport services like lounges and baggage checks, loyalty program, loyalty-tier-specific functionality like priority connections. - ... etc. In this case the lack of stripping symbols seems like a very easy win and definitely is an example of sloppiness, but the idea that the binary should definitively be < 100MB seems to ignore a lot of scope.
gopher_space 5y ago
The tl;dr was halfway through the article. > pushing code into frameworks has been a best practice for a while
kingcharles 5y ago
This seems like a huge market opportunity for a service where you upload your "final" binary and some app goes through the thing and shows you all the stupid you are doing and how to fix it. This would have really pissed me off if I had to download it over my cell plan. I have one phone with minimum apps on it which I use for day-to-day, and then another with all the scummy bloated apps on it, but the data plan on that phone is small and 500MB would be a huge chunk out of my monthly quota.
- monocularvision 5y ago
  https://www.emergetools.com/ https://www.emergetools.com/
mvid 5y ago
It is especially frustrating because half the time it dumps you into a webview anyway
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I call it the Electron Generation. :)

by 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?
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Just for some perspective, the entire installer package for the Shareware version Doom took up about 2.39MB of space. This included the EXE and all art assets. The installer for WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) was about 3.6MB. The full on-disk footprint of Microsoft Office 95 was less than 100MB, including all documentation, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I'm not entirely convinced value-per-byte is a measure of software quality that a lot of users care about, but it undeniably trends down every year.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The one I like is that the Finder icon on macOS is larger than the entire system on the original Mac.
  - testplzignore 5y ago
    DOOM2.WAD has always been my measuring stick for software size, as I remember how frustrating it was to download such a huge file (15MB!) in the dial-up days. I never did get it to complete - I couldn't justify to my parents that the phone line would be busy for a whole day :)
- PascLeRasc 5y ago
  Thanks for recommending Hyperweb, you've just saved me a ton of space.
  - dont__panic 5y ago
    Keep in mind that even on the free version, you can add (unlimited?) adlists. I've added some of the most popular uBlock Origin default lists to mine to make the ad blocking even better. It is absolutely insane how many apps Hyperweb replaced for me, too!
tyingq 5y ago
I don't think the Stripe app is a good comparison. Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. Typically with broad support for different currencies, languages, etc, etc. 439mb is obviously not right, but I would expect the app to be fairly large.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. All of that happens online.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    That may be true for some airlines (webviews vs native), but it is not true for many. Boarding passes are probably a good example. It's very typical for that functionality to use something like Apple Wallet integration, and also native widgets to upsell cross-sell boarding/seat upgrades, etc.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      While broadly fair, one minor quip, I believe all Wallet passes have to come down from the server. Apps can't make their own, can they?
      - tyingq 5y ago
        Passes already in the wallet don't require you to be online. But, what I meant was that there was additional code, thus additional size for all the functionality and ui related to boarding passes, whether or not parts of it don't work offline. At least the airlines I've worked with prefer native code and UIs for any flow that's either revenue-producing, or likely to create issues on day-of-travel. They tend to use webviews only for things that don't have to be working to sell a ticket or board the aircraft.

bastardoperator 5y ago

Couple bad development practices with archaic technology for ticketing and we get the worst of both worlds. I've worked with two airlines and it was fairly frightening to see what type of BS they're working with and against.

stingraycharles 5y ago

I’d like to approach this differently, and think about what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them. I’m the first to say that this utter bloat is terrible, but most people aren’t really bothered by it. And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low. From that perspective, it’s probably much more pragmatic to fix the problem at the root(s): Apple may want to mandate stripped binaries (I think this is also what RPM does by default, just strip everything), and/or god forbid these Electron-type frameworks should make things more efficient.

aiisjustanif 5y ago
> And I can only imagine that they outsourced their app development completely and like to keep costs low. From my experience being on a mobile development team for a competitor. Last time I checked like most major airlines their team is in house and I’d be in shock if that changed.
sneak 5y ago
If Apple would allow web notifications, most apps wouldn't need to be apps at all, but could simply be webpages that get bookmarked to the launcher. The UX for the user would be, for most non-game apps, identical. The problem is that purchases would no longer be subject to Apple's 10x industry standard (30% instead of 3%) captive credit card payment processing service (for apps), so no web notifications in MobileSafari that might undermine platform control and payment processing monopoly. Apple, of course, will say this is about protecting users from notification spam, and sidestep the inconvenient facts that it protects an Apple cash cow and locks developers and users into a closed and proprietary platform.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  I strongly suspect the bulk of this 500MB is DRM frameworks for their in-flight video playback that they can't or don't want to support in-browser. Safari kicks video playback over to the United app each time you select something to watch and it does what appears to be a multi-stage hand-off dance.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> I can imagine it's layers upon layers of poor, bad and terrible architectural and organizational decisions. Or are they trade-offs? Do these 'bad decisions' actually impact their business or are they manageable, allowing them to achieve their mission, focusing on other things that are more important?

MetaWhirledPeas 5y ago
Without diving into specifics we'll never know of course. But consider the opposite: would good decisions positively or negatively impact their business? Would they prevent them from achieving their mission or focusing on other things? I can think of how bad decisions could negatively impact their mission and focus: - App is slow and buggy, pressuring users to choose a different service altogether - A much larger support staff is required to handle customer issues - Bugs are painful to address and require weeks or months to resolve - Developers spend more time fixing bugs and less time working on features, resulting in delayed features and an increased team size to allow more parallel development
_fat_santa 5y ago
I've worked on one of these apps (healthcare space, just checked and the size sits at 350MB). Here's the problem as I saw it firsthand: * Far too many hands in the pot: My rough calculation is at any given time, there are around 1000 contributors to this app, across various teams. This itself is not a problem, but leads to issues. * Tech Debt Racks up Quick: Again because there are so many hands in the pot, tech debt racks up unbelievably quickly. And furthermore it's almost impossible to address because it cuts accross so many teams and orgs. * The Solution? More Hands in the Pot!: With tech debt racking up quick and not being resolved, productivity grinds to a halt. App has constant errors, crashes, and things like hot reloading are just totally broken because of all the underlying issues. So what do you do when faced with this problem? More engineers! Rather than addressing the problems that face developers, they just throw more labor at the problem, compounding the previous issues. * Code Duplication: With so many folks working on the project but not talking to one another, code duplication becomes a MAJOR issue. Say you have a "Button" component that needs to be modified. Well, modifying that component means going through 5+ teams to get approval. So to sidestep you create "Button2", and the next guys creates "Button3". The result is you pull up the fuzzy finder and search "Button", only to get 15 results with subtle differences. This is just my experience. Currently this app is top 20 in healthcare on the Apple Appstore. The company also has a number of other apps and when I was leaving the company, there were talks to merge all the apps into the "main" app (good fucking luck).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

markus_zhang 5y ago

I think one needs to understand the mentalities of the project managers and programmers/contractors who actually work for those behemoth corporations to understand the quality of their work.

Friday_ 5y ago

Maybe they bundle movie inside app.

hammock 5y ago

As a frequent and mostly non-loyal flier, I can say despite all its faults the United app is far and away the best airline app in the US: fast, easy to navigate, powerful, useful and often pleasantly surprising. American is the only other app that compares, I can't stand to use any other airlines' apps.

thaway2839 5y ago
One could argue that maybe the developers of the app were optimizing for the right things. Usability, performance, etc., as opposed to disk space.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  As a long time united frequent flyer, while I have many gripes, they have consistently made the app better and better without useless "redesigns for the sake for redesigns"
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  In this case, shipping symbols with the app is almost certainly an oversight. Stripping symbols of shipped binaries is standard good practice. That said, I don't think the difference between a 40MB app and a 400MB app is all that critical these days. Optimizing for development speed and user experience over an absolutely minimal download size is a reasonable choice.
  - potatolicious 5y ago
    Not to mention the surface area of the app is often larger than it appears to a single user, especially for companies this large whose customer bases are this wide. It's tempting to think about the United app as something very simple: - Search for flights - Run through the booking flow for flights - Look up existing bookings - Change existing bookings But this ignores a lot of scope that's actually critical for a company whose products are very complicated: - ID verification for international travel - Custom functionality for large institutional cu stomers (government, corporate) - Functionality for ancillary services: in-air streaming entertainment, in-airport services like lounges and baggage checks, loyalty program, loyalty-tier-specific functionality like priority connections. - ... etc. In this case the lack of stripping symbols seems like a very easy win and definitely is an example of sloppiness, but the idea that the binary should definitively be < 100MB seems to ignore a lot of scope.

gopher_space 5y ago

The tl;dr was halfway through the article. > pushing code into frameworks has been a best practice for a while

kingcharles 5y ago

This seems like a huge market opportunity for a service where you upload your "final" binary and some app goes through the thing and shows you all the stupid you are doing and how to fix it. This would have really pissed me off if I had to download it over my cell plan. I have one phone with minimum apps on it which I use for day-to-day, and then another with all the scummy bloated apps on it, but the data plan on that phone is small and 500MB would be a huge chunk out of my monthly quota.

monocularvision 5y ago
https://www.emergetools.com/ https://www.emergetools.com/

mvid 5y ago

It is especially frustrating because half the time it dumps you into a webview anyway

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I call it the Electron Generation. :)