7 ms·

Contrarian opinion here; I understand their logic. It looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done. Increase developer productivity at the expe

by rvnx 5y ago

Contrarian opinion here; I understand their logic. It looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done. Increase developer productivity at the expense of hardware. In this case, engineering is more expensive than hardware (because hardware is at the cost of the user). The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. This means the application takes 500/128000 blocks: 0.4% of the total device storage. Over time, the iPhones are going to have more and more storage. So, if app size is a problem, and over time, the problem is fixed by itself, why would you invest engineering resources into that ? You have X engineers with Y amount of working hours, and tons of important things to do. Yes, probably fixing a problem that brings a low amount of complains from end users at the cost of productivity isn't high on the list for them. EDIT: Possibly interesting source: https://www.androidauthority.com/average-smartphone-storage-1213428/ https://www.androidauthority.com/average-smartphone-storage-...

athorax 5y ago
This kind of bloat doesn't just affect storage usage, for people with capped data plans these kind of apps are a nightmare
- ratww 5y ago
  It's especially worse for people who are traveling.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    Yep. Airlines are one of the few brand apps where there probably is a significant business case for spending developer time optimising an app for download size, since customers who make the decision to try to download United's app on slow or metered connections at the airport or overseas are probably customers ready to be upsold stuff via the app.
gpderetta 5y ago
Perfect example of Wirth's Law in action, sadly.
throw10920 5y ago
> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. The smallest iPhone sold now is 128 GB. The iPhone 5C, sold in 2015, had 8 GB internal storage with no expansion options. 439 MiB is a full 5% of the total storage capacity of the iPhone 5C, completely ignoring the amount reserved for the OS that's completely unusable to the user. The logic used here hurts lower-income people and contributes to climate change by encouraging poor use of device resources -> shorter device lifetimes -> more e-waste and wasted energy.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.
  - yuliyp 5y ago
    United Airlines is not a luxury product.
    - dymk 5y ago
      Flying anywhere, period, is a luxury
      - aledalgrande 5y ago
        Flying in NA, with covid, is a luxury. Europe is a different story. Edit: why the downvotes? You can get flights for 50 bucks to go to different countries in Europe.
        Symbiote 5y ago
        Maybe people don't believe it. The cheapest flight I can see on SouthWest.com is $60, for a 1 hour journey from Atlanta to South Carolina. The cheapest flight with Ryanair from Copenhagen is $9, though it doesn't include checked luggage. It's also an hour. An even cheaper one is Kraków to Eindhoven, 2 hours, $6. There are fewer dates for this price though.
anamax 5y ago
I use a 32GB Android. A significant fraction of that 32GB is taken by system crap, so a GB makes a difference.
sitzkrieg 5y ago
you didnt factor in the mobilw bandwidth to download this oversized crap constantly. with 1gb plans in mind how many downloads a month do you get to instagib a plan like that? and for what, no actual patch notes ever?! at least most apps dont hard lock you out when they detect being behind
IggleSniggle 5y ago
Yeah no, clearly false, because my iPhone has 8 GB and that ought to be plenty. Hope your web app works on my phone, ‘cause I’m not installing a bullshit app with that much bloat.
tschwimmer 5y ago
This is not the most relevant tradeoff. The United App is the only way to watch in-flight entertainment on many United Flights (esp. on newer planes without seatback screens). Every time I fly United, they make an announcement that says "Make sure to download the app before we take off because you can't do it once we're in the air!" and then I see everyone whip out their phones and tablets. Usually that's 10m or so before we lose cell reception and it's often not enough time to fully download the app. I've often thought that they either need to cache the app locally on the plane itself or provide a special free passthrough on the in-flight wifi, but so far they haven't provided either. In any case, app size is crucially important for the key use case that many (most?) people use the United App.
- bluedino 5y ago
  > I've often thought that they either need to cache the app locally It's not that simple, but it makes total sense to cache a 500MB app when they have a couple TB (?) of videos on the plan.
- hadlock 5y ago
  Also the only way to order adult beverages
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Wait you can't order alcohol without their beast of an app? I haven't flown anythign but SW in a while (rewards card)
    - tedunangst 5y ago
      They eliminated flight attendants taking payments.
    - hadlock 5y ago
      Most airlines won't let you order adult beverages in economy, certain United flights (SFO to IAD (D.C.)) appear to be an exception. But yes. And you need to re-fill in, manually your flight info and seat number. It's a whole process. This is after connecting to their in-flight wifi, which has it's own hurdles.
PascLeRasc 5y ago
There's no app as valuable to me as 2-3 albums or 400 photos.
xorcist 5y ago
> Increase developer productivity at the expense of hardware Only this is almost never true. If it's possible to do something unnecessarily complicated, someone will inevitably do it. Maintenance costs are often greater as complexity and bloat goes up. Longer compile times and generally greater development cycle latency also tends to decrease developer productivity more than the small time differences might suggest.
aserafini 5y ago
But the problem is not only storage but also bandwidth (on a runway).
astrobe_ 5y ago
Here is today's car analogy : well sure, they pollute, but if nobody complains why would car makers invest in cleaner, more efficient motors? Oil is cheap anyway and will be cheaper in the future (that's probably what they thought in the '60). Oh, wait... A friend of mine told me their company is trying to downsize their flash storage in order to come back to the unit prices of before the shortages.
dogleash 5y ago
>Contrarian opinion here; I understand their logic. It looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done. This is not a contrarian opinion. This is the default attitude in web, cloud hosted, and mobile app development. >looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done What are your back-of-the-envelope numbers? Or are you just shrugging and assuming that performance has zero impact on the development loop, so therefore no development effort should be expended on it?
jakub_g 5y ago
> what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them It may depend on the app, but Uber noticed that the bigger the app, the fewer people install it, unsurprisingly. I also had friends who wouldn't install Signal because they don't have any space left on the device, and they stick to Whatsapp/Messenger which they already have. https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/ https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/ > App-download-size restriction means first-time users cannot download the app ... when they are not on Wi-Fi. > We established a correlation between the Uber Rider app size and customer engagement — when the app size crosses the download size limit, and it leads to a 10% reduction in app installations, 12% reduction in sign-ups, and 20% reduction in first-time bookings, resulting in revenue loss. > Over the past three years, the Uber Rider app’s size has often approached the App store’s over-the-air download limit, and staying below it is a clear priority.
- chefandy 5y ago
  Worth noting that going from Uber->Lyft/et al is a lot easier for most than switching airlines.
mquander 5y ago
When someone starts looking into why it's so big and they immediately discover a huge dumb mistake (the example in the post), why do you assume that the rest of the app size is because of rational tradeoffs, instead of being more dumb mistakes?
retrac 5y ago
> So, if app size is a problem, and over time, the problem is fixed by itself, why would you invest engineering resources into that ? You are assuming apps won't scale larger over time. The old addage about software expanding to consume all available resources comes to mind. I remember thinking I'd never be able to fill my first 1 GB hard drive with software. And now it takes half that for the simplest things. As the bytes get cheaper we ration them less.
Banana699 5y ago
This bizarre reasoning puzzles and infuriates me so much. The linked post shaves more than 40% of an app's size in 5 minutes, by doing nothing but being curious about the half-gigabyte app and knowing how to use a couple of tools. This is not a case of "I have plenty of water so let the kids splash some in the playground to have fun", this is a case of "I have plenty of water so I will load 10000 liters in a truck and drive 1000 kilometers and back just to dump them in the desert for no fucking reason". Seriously, 5 minutes? I spend more than that in the bathroom. How many 5-minutes is a "Scrum standup"? a "progress meeting" ? a <insert bullshit corporate activity here>? Do all of those things not waste the engineers' time? I'm trying to imagine the world if every profession and craft tried to justify this disgustingly irresponsible mindset : " - This combustion engine uses an inferior injection mechanism that wastes 40% more fuel compared to latest... = Don't waste my time!!! I have more important things to worry about. -.... It would take 5 minutes to fix = Customers don't notice the fuel consumption anyway, so that means robbing them out of money with inferior engineering is okay. Now hurry up, we'll miss the daily 3-hours progress meeting. " If only Donald Knuth knew what " Forget about the small efficiencies" would be used to justify.
- rixed 5y ago
  I share your feeling. Day by day I feel more guilty of belonging to that industry because of the laziness, sloppiness, negligence, acceptance of spying, of dark patterns, etc, and I do not disclose what I'm doing for a living more readily than I would if I worked for some mafia.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  There’s probably an observability bias here. It could be that the app sizes would be 3x worse, if no one ever tried. You would never know, because you only see the app sizes after people have done the work.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    That would mean they did the 3 minute cleanup and then declared their work done. That's not a sufficient amount of trying.
acchow 5y ago
> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB You can buy a brand new, unlocked iPhone 12 from Apple. It starts at 64GB for $729 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-12 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-12
- addaon 5y ago
  The iPhone 11 and iPhone SE are also both available, new, with 64GB.

by rvnx 5y ago

athorax 5y ago

This kind of bloat doesn't just affect storage usage, for people with capped data plans these kind of apps are a nightmare

ratww 5y ago
It's especially worse for people who are traveling.
- notahacker 5y ago
  Yep. Airlines are one of the few brand apps where there probably is a significant business case for spending developer time optimising an app for download size, since customers who make the decision to try to download United's app on slow or metered connections at the airport or overseas are probably customers ready to be upsold stuff via the app.

gpderetta 5y ago

Perfect example of Wirth's Law in action, sadly.

throw10920 5y ago

> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB. The smallest iPhone sold now is 128 GB. The iPhone 5C, sold in 2015, had 8 GB internal storage with no expansion options. 439 MiB is a full 5% of the total storage capacity of the iPhone 5C, completely ignoring the amount reserved for the OS that's completely unusable to the user. The logic used here hurts lower-income people and contributes to climate change by encouraging poor use of device resources -> shorter device lifetimes -> more e-waste and wasted energy.

tut-urut-utut 5y ago
People with 7-year-old phones are not really a target group a company selling luxury stuff is going to bother optimizing for.
- yuliyp 5y ago
  United Airlines is not a luxury product.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Flying anywhere, period, is a luxury
    - aledalgrande 5y ago
      Flying in NA, with covid, is a luxury. Europe is a different story. Edit: why the downvotes? You can get flights for 50 bucks to go to different countries in Europe.
      - Symbiote 5y ago
        Maybe people don't believe it. The cheapest flight I can see on SouthWest.com is $60, for a 1 hour journey from Atlanta to South Carolina. The cheapest flight with Ryanair from Copenhagen is $9, though it doesn't include checked luggage. It's also an hour. An even cheaper one is Kraków to Eindhoven, 2 hours, $6. There are fewer dates for this price though.

anamax 5y ago

I use a 32GB Android. A significant fraction of that 32GB is taken by system crap, so a GB makes a difference.

sitzkrieg 5y ago

you didnt factor in the mobilw bandwidth to download this oversized crap constantly. with 1gb plans in mind how many downloads a month do you get to instagib a plan like that? and for what, no actual patch notes ever?! at least most apps dont hard lock you out when they detect being behind

IggleSniggle 5y ago

Yeah no, clearly false, because my iPhone has 8 GB and that ought to be plenty. Hope your web app works on my phone, ‘cause I’m not installing a bullshit app with that much bloat.

tschwimmer 5y ago

This is not the most relevant tradeoff. The United App is the only way to watch in-flight entertainment on many United Flights (esp. on newer planes without seatback screens). Every time I fly United, they make an announcement that says "Make sure to download the app before we take off because you can't do it once we're in the air!" and then I see everyone whip out their phones and tablets. Usually that's 10m or so before we lose cell reception and it's often not enough time to fully download the app. I've often thought that they either need to cache the app locally on the plane itself or provide a special free passthrough on the in-flight wifi, but so far they haven't provided either. In any case, app size is crucially important for the key use case that many (most?) people use the United App.

bluedino 5y ago
> I've often thought that they either need to cache the app locally It's not that simple, but it makes total sense to cache a 500MB app when they have a couple TB (?) of videos on the plan.
hadlock 5y ago
Also the only way to order adult beverages
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Wait you can't order alcohol without their beast of an app? I haven't flown anythign but SW in a while (rewards card)
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    They eliminated flight attendants taking payments.
  - hadlock 5y ago
    Most airlines won't let you order adult beverages in economy, certain United flights (SFO to IAD (D.C.)) appear to be an exception. But yes. And you need to re-fill in, manually your flight info and seat number. It's a whole process. This is after connecting to their in-flight wifi, which has it's own hurdles.

PascLeRasc 5y ago

There's no app as valuable to me as 2-3 albums or 400 photos.

xorcist 5y ago

> Increase developer productivity at the expense of hardware Only this is almost never true. If it's possible to do something unnecessarily complicated, someone will inevitably do it. Maintenance costs are often greater as complexity and bloat goes up. Longer compile times and generally greater development cycle latency also tends to decrease developer productivity more than the small time differences might suggest.

aserafini 5y ago

But the problem is not only storage but also bandwidth (on a runway).

astrobe_ 5y ago

Here is today's car analogy : well sure, they pollute, but if nobody complains why would car makers invest in cleaner, more efficient motors? Oil is cheap anyway and will be cheaper in the future (that's probably what they thought in the '60). Oh, wait... A friend of mine told me their company is trying to downsize their flash storage in order to come back to the unit prices of before the shortages.

dogleash 5y ago

>Contrarian opinion here; I understand their logic. It looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done. This is not a contrarian opinion. This is the default attitude in web, cloud hosted, and mobile app development. >looks like a rational trade-off that the engineers have done What are your back-of-the-envelope numbers? Or are you just shrugging and assuming that performance has zero impact on the development loop, so therefore no development effort should be expended on it?

jakub_g 5y ago

> what it would have cost United Airlines to do it “the right way”, versus what value it brings them It may depend on the app, but Uber noticed that the bigger the app, the fewer people install it, unsurprisingly. I also had friends who wouldn't install Signal because they don't have any space left on the device, and they stick to Whatsapp/Messenger which they already have. https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/ https://eng.uber.com/how-uber-deals-with-large-ios-app-size/ > App-download-size restriction means first-time users cannot download the app ... when they are not on Wi-Fi. > We established a correlation between the Uber Rider app size and customer engagement — when the app size crosses the download size limit, and it leads to a 10% reduction in app installations, 12% reduction in sign-ups, and 20% reduction in first-time bookings, resulting in revenue loss. > Over the past three years, the Uber Rider app’s size has often approached the App store’s over-the-air download limit, and staying below it is a clear priority.

chefandy 5y ago
Worth noting that going from Uber->Lyft/et al is a lot easier for most than switching airlines.

mquander 5y ago

When someone starts looking into why it's so big and they immediately discover a huge dumb mistake (the example in the post), why do you assume that the rest of the app size is because of rational tradeoffs, instead of being more dumb mistakes?

retrac 5y ago

> So, if app size is a problem, and over time, the problem is fixed by itself, why would you invest engineering resources into that ? You are assuming apps won't scale larger over time. The old addage about software expanding to consume all available resources comes to mind. I remember thinking I'd never be able to fill my first 1 GB hard drive with software. And now it takes half that for the simplest things. As the bytes get cheaper we ration them less.

Banana699 5y ago

This bizarre reasoning puzzles and infuriates me so much. The linked post shaves more than 40% of an app's size in 5 minutes, by doing nothing but being curious about the half-gigabyte app and knowing how to use a couple of tools. This is not a case of "I have plenty of water so let the kids splash some in the playground to have fun", this is a case of "I have plenty of water so I will load 10000 liters in a truck and drive 1000 kilometers and back just to dump them in the desert for no fucking reason". Seriously, 5 minutes? I spend more than that in the bathroom. How many 5-minutes is a "Scrum standup"? a "progress meeting" ? a <insert bullshit corporate activity here>? Do all of those things not waste the engineers' time? I'm trying to imagine the world if every profession and craft tried to justify this disgustingly irresponsible mindset : " - This combustion engine uses an inferior injection mechanism that wastes 40% more fuel compared to latest... = Don't waste my time!!! I have more important things to worry about. -.... It would take 5 minutes to fix = Customers don't notice the fuel consumption anyway, so that means robbing them out of money with inferior engineering is okay. Now hurry up, we'll miss the daily 3-hours progress meeting. " If only Donald Knuth knew what " Forget about the small efficiencies" would be used to justify.

rixed 5y ago
I share your feeling. Day by day I feel more guilty of belonging to that industry because of the laziness, sloppiness, negligence, acceptance of spying, of dark patterns, etc, and I do not disclose what I'm doing for a living more readily than I would if I worked for some mafia.
ironmagma 5y ago
There’s probably an observability bias here. It could be that the app sizes would be 3x worse, if no one ever tried. You would never know, because you only see the app sizes after people have done the work.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  That would mean they did the 3 minute cleanup and then declared their work done. That's not a sufficient amount of trying.

acchow 5y ago

> The smallest iPhone starts at 128 GB You can buy a brand new, unlocked iPhone 12 from Apple. It starts at 64GB for $729 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-12 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-12

addaon 5y ago
The iPhone 11 and iPhone SE are also both available, new, with 64GB.