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How the new Threads app is made
- enahs-sf 3y agocan someone explain to me why this is a separate app and not just a view in Instagram? IG has the potential to be Meta's Wechat and this seems like it does that journey a disservice.
- keyle 3y agoAnother offering. Another ad platform. They might merge if it doesn't grow.
- madeofpalk 3y agoInstagram has launched many other services as “just a view in Instagram” that people did not use.
- 0xDEF 3y agoThe EU will never let "Meta's WeChat" become a thing. That is a good thing.
- hexage1814 3y ago>Threads app is made Horribly.
- elwell 3y agoHow so?
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoHonestly threads is so minimum. A solo dev can pull this off in half a year. Only thing complicated is scale. But meta has that in place. Threads team is a corporate cushion team.
- Infinitesimus 3y ago> A solo dev can pull this off in half a year. > Only thing complicated is scale So, a solo dev cannot, in fact, pull this off.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Arch485 3y agoServerless will handle scale, if your pockets are deep enough
- chrisco255 3y agoYeah I think a talented dev using cloud services could.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoOne dev could replace the threads mobile team, no doubt. I mean getting the API in order is the hard work.
- yeeetz 3y agoThis is the most Hacker News comment I've read today.
- yamazakiwi 3y agoReads to me like a Blind post by student.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoNo worked for corporates, startups etc. Both in small and big teams, and this is hugely unimpressive for 6 months with unlimited budget. It's not an existing project, but it's from scratch, so you dont have all the headaches or minor details.
- Panini_Jones 3y ago
- jheriko 3y agoamazing how massive they made it with so little functionality classic shitware
- yamazakiwi 3y agoThis comment reminds me of when American based AAA game studios were mad about Elden Ring's success. What functionality is missing that you would add?
- stavros 3y agoIt's not about what functionality is missing, it's about what's there. 250 MB to show you a list of text posts and comments? Why is it so big? What does it do to warrant that?
- chrisco255 3y agoIt apparently needs to spy on your Apple Watch heartbeat and every other sensor on your phone.
- housemusicfan 3y agoThis isn't far from the truth. Have you seen the list of App Store data collection permissions it requests? For what amounts in functionality to little more than a terminal session to a BBS? Holy shit. I verified it's longer than TikTok's which is widely assumed to be a hostile state-backed surveillance tool at this point. For Threads, the following may be "collected and linked to your identity": Health & Fitness Purchases Financial info Location Contact info Contacts User content Search history Browsing history Identifiers Usage data Sensitive Info - whatever the hell that is [1] Diagnostics And my favorite, "other data" I.e. it collects so much we don't even have a category for it [1] Apple's definition includes: racial/ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, or biometric data I'm sure there's a valid reason for all this...
- synergy20 3y agoInterested in knowing if they're made by native SDKs or React Native or, unlikely flutter. will they do desktop apps? electronjs came to mind for that, yes it's fat but it's the only one truly cross platform now. Not a IG, FB, Threads, Twitter user per se, just interested in what stack Meta uses to build Threads, looks like a mix of various pieces from their existing code base to me.
- ryandrake 3y agoI'm kind of amazed at how saturated the news is with stories about Threads. And not just tech news, but also every mainstream news site has at least one or more "submarine" marketing articles promoting Threads. Meta Marketing Team: You're not fooling anyone into thinking these are grassroots and viral, but honestly, well done with the media saturation. Meta's clearly got all the right channels on full-blast. It's really impressive.
- conception 3y agoI don’t know with Twitter going through various meltdowns having met a step up and say hey, you can come here instead I feel like it’s pretty big news. This product also wasn’t at least on my radar at all and so I think it was sort of a big surprise for everybody. The eighth largest website on the planet size to go toe to toe with Twitter… Seems like big news?
- yeeetz 3y agoHonestly I don't fuck with social media that much besides my private Instagram, but there's more to it than just viral marketing. It's a pretty smooth app that appeals to people like my 18-25-ish age that feels like Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic. The honeymoon effect won't last forever, but it has something that a lot of social media users are looking for.
- jxramos 3y agolol, makes me think of serial monogamy applied to social media
- PaulHoule 3y agoThe real market is for brands, they can't stand the insanity on Twitter. I think of Musk's idea of turning Twitter into a super app. Well, if I go into a business and somebody asks me to pay with Twitter that business is going to be associated with Musk, Twitter, and all that. If the business is selling anti-woke razor blades it might be a good fit, but an ordinary business just doesn't want to be associated with that. Contrast that to Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, all of which have worked hard to be associated with a positive image.
- dmix 3y agoApparently Jetpack Compose is an Android copy of SwiftUI? https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose Only two HN threads with comments discussing this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32255709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32255709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284517
- saagarjha 3y agoIt’s not nothing particularly new if you’re doing Android development.
- yen223 3y agoBoth Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI came out around the same time, in 2019 I think. It's probably more correct to say that both frameworks copied React Native and made it more "native"
- tomaskafka 3y ago... and React Native copied the declarative approach of React, which copied WPF, which copied ... (no, we're definitely not the first ones to do declarative UIs here in 2023).
- thinkpad13 3y agooh, its from wpf maybe thats why gearon interest in react that much because he have c# background
- miffy900 3y agoReact definitely did not copy WPF. It copied XHP: https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/XHP/introduction https://docs.hhvm.com/hack/XHP/introduction which was another Facebook thing, but that itself was inspired by E4X: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_for_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript_for_XML
- woodpanel 3y agoClearly the Threads main ingredient is a whole lot if cringe. The cringe of grassroots-washing a social-media clone from Mark Zuckerberg, done by just about every major news outlet over the world which, of course coincidentally, already have been subsidized by meta via „publishing deals“ for years [1]. [1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/05/new-york-timesfacebook-deal-is-here.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/05/new-york-timesfacebo...
- WoodenChair 3y agoI'd like to know if the non-React parts of the iOS app are UIKit or SwiftUI.
- deminature 3y agoIt looks like UIKit, the static analysis [1] shows numerous ViewControllers (eg IGSundialSingleVideoClipEditorViewController) with various UIKit lifecycle methods like viewDidLoad, rather than SwiftUI. There's also a surprising amount of Objective-C, in fact it looks like mostly Objective-C, at least all the IG-prefixed classes. Unusual for 2023. [1] https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.burbn.barcelona https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.burbn.barcel...
- jacobp100 3y agoIt’ll be UIKit. It’s very easy to bind UIKit components to React Native. The same can’t be said for SwiftUI components That said, if there’s any home screen widgets or a watch app, they will be SwiftUI
- gumballindie 3y agoAnything that kills off twitter is welcome. Even something made by facebook.
- fidotron 3y agoDoesn’t the use of libgojni indicate using golang on the client? Which then might be shared in the big lump on iOS? I’ve run into a few people that have actually deployed go on android in production. It works surprisingly well.
- thinkpad13 3y ago>This suggests that their sign-in experience isn’t native and they are showing a webview. what is the benefit of using webview instead native for the sign-in?
- 0x6c6f6c 3y agoOAuth flows typically end up needing to load a web view in many cases (like, signing up through Facebook) but also simpler implementation / code reuse
- cbeach 3y agoThe hype doesn’t feel organic, and neither do the posts from brands on Threads. Some examples, which feel like they were written by the same social media intern: https://twitter.com/chrisbeach/status/1677584064436477952 https://twitter.com/chrisbeach/status/1677584064436477952 As for the app itself, feels very bare bones to me, and I dislike Zuckerberg locking us into another walled garden with no web access.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gravitronic 3y agoAny clues to what percentage is made with react native? https://www.threads.net/t/CuW_fXZOgPc/ https://www.threads.net/t/CuW_fXZOgPc/ would suggest to me the answer is "not much"
- jacobp100 3y agoIt’ll be hard to tell just from file sizes. Stuff like the news feed is unlikely to use it - but maybe things like profile pages, settings, search
- morgannewman 3y ago[dead]
- maxptop 3y agoHard to tell from just looking at the static analysis. The size of Compose is relatively small compared to overall dex, but our guess is that a lot of that has to do with sharing code with IG
- moffkalast 3y agoAh, so even the makers of React are not dogfooding it anymore. Sounds about right.
- elwell 3y agoMeta is not the target market for React Native.
- gravitronic 3y agoIn your opinion who is?
- granzymes 3y agoA team that doesn’t have the resources for both Android and iOS experts. You won’t get as polished of a product but you’ll get it done with less work.
- wbobeirne 3y agoHave there been any public plans for a fully featured web app? Having it be read-only on the web is a non-starter for me.
- pootusmaximus 3y agoYes > the priority is the mobile apps, but we are working on www https://www.threads.net/t/CuWp3eMNE8h/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== https://www.threads.net/t/CuWp3eMNE8h/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...
- codetrotter 3y agoIs threads.net the official website? This is the first time I actually look at anything that is on the Instagram Threads. Seems a lot like the comments under an Instagram post, without the picture / video on top. Also the logo on the top of the page just toggles dark mode / light mode, instead of bringing me to any kind of home page where I can explore more discussions. Weird.
- jjaken 3y agoYeah, threads.com is taken by a slack competitor
- davidw 3y agoGlad to hear it. I can write about 10 times faster via a keyboard compared to a screen.
- solardev 3y agoWow, is that the actual app? It took so long, like five or six seconds, to load a few short sentences.
- mvkel 3y agoNo web support is likely a bot mitigation strategy
- dylan604 3y ago
- kelsolaar 3y ago> Threads has one of the largest plugins we’ve ever seen. BarcelonaShareExtension is 81 MB. For context, the largest Instagram plugin - InstagramNotificationExtension is 23.5 MB. TheInstagramShareExtension is 5.6 MB Out of a 244.2 MB App on iOS.
- tough 3y agoWhy the heck would they need an extension to share "Barcelona" Are we talking the whole city map or like wut
- cpeterso 3y ago"Barcelona" is the code name of the Threads project. The Threads Android app is called "com.instagram.barcelona".
- PaulHoule 3y agoMaybe they should have named it something other than "Threads", the other day it just got out that these guys https://threads.com/ https://threads.com/ have a trademark filing for "Threads" as a name for a communications service. If I picked out the right two screenshots you might have a hard time telling them apart https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87522273&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87522273&caseType=SERIAL_... and "Threads Group, Inc." is really the people behinds threads.com https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/threads-aa50 https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/threads-aa50 "Barcelona" might really have been available. "Threads Group, Inc." would be within their rights to make Meta change the name.
- explain 3y ago> "Threads Group, Inc." would be within their rights to make Meta change the name. Meta's use of the term "Threads" for a communications service likely actually predates or at least rival's "Threads Group, Inc.". Meta had an app called Threads until it was shut down in late 2021.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tezza 3y ago[flagged]
- epistasis 3y agoThe accusation that Threads is using stolen code is one of the more embarrassing accusation for Musk that he's made. Not as embarrassing for Musk as the fabricated pedophile accusations, but definitely incredibly cringe. The idea of stealing code for large distributed systems build on entirely different underlying compute architectures just shows how technologically clueless Musk is. Might as well measure productivity by lines of code written. Major pointy-haired boss vibes.
- fmajid 3y agoI’ve written against the Facebook Graph API and Twitter’s. Facebook was rock-solid (although they tightened it after Cambridge Analytica to the point it no longer supported my use-case), Twitter couldn’t go two weeks without a failure or regression of some sort. Gave me strong contempt for Twitter’s engineering culture and I suspect Meta would know this as well. As a former CTO and hiring manager, I’d certainly consider a stint at Twitter on a candidate’s resume as a black mark.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jeron 3y agodoing a writeup like Jane Manchun Wong on an app that Jane Manchun Wong worked on
- ketzo 3y agooff-topic, but since she's joining Meta to work on Threads, I guess we proooobably won't be getting as many of her info-dumps? kind of a bummer, love her stuff
- Panini_Jones 3y agoI would be surprised if that wasn't explicitly written into her employment contract.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago72 MB is egregious for a Twitter-clone MVP. For comparison, the full-featured Twitter app itself is 40 MB. The Mastodon app weighs in at 1.6 MB.
- constantly 3y agoNo prob, my phone has a terabyte of hard drive space and many gbs of memory.
- tredre3 3y ago> The Mastodon app weighs in at 1.6 MB. The official Mastodon app weighs in at 70MB on my iOS device right now. The store listing puts it at 58MB: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon-for-iphone-and-ipad/id1571998974 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon-for-iphone-and-ipad/i...
- lern_too_spel 3y agoAll of my figures are for Android. None of the app sizes will match on iOS.
- asadotzler 3y agoTwitter Lite, which covers more use cases than Threads is 0.5 MB.
- 999900000999 3y agoThe target consumer doesn't care, wasting time optimizing for space doesn't make sense in this instance . I'm a little disappointed they didn't go purely React Native here. It would have been a great showcase as they ultimately own the React Native project.
- akira2501 3y ago> The target consumer doesn't care The app's target consumer is advertisers, and the app is this way because of those advertisers and their concerns. I'm not sure the person using the app is a "consumer" from Meta's point of view, more like a "digital subscriber."
- dahwolf 3y ago[flagged]
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoWith 1b people, you've just qualified 15% of the planet as "obnoxious, superficial, bottom of the barrel culture, cheap, narcissistic, lacking any depth.". I'm not sure why you'd exclude Facebook users though, that's 3b or 40% of all humans. Earth is beyond salvageable
- hotdogscout 3y agoshort form social media is an industrial farm of mental illness. it surrounds you with histrionics with all the time possible to spare, minimal commitment and inundates your monkey-brained need for peer approval with their low standards. leaving leftist online spaces was the decision that had the most positive impact on my life. any community based around a struggle will have a hard time not being a pit of vindictive envy regardless of ideology.
- astrange 3y agoI don't think leftists are really that associated with short-form writing, haven't you seen the jokes about "leftist memes"?[0] They were on Twitter because they left Tumblr, which was long-form. [0] the joke is they have pages of text on them
- hotdogscout 3y agoTumblr leftism was much more contained though, it was hard to peer pressure targets and journalists outside the scene looking for easy stories had no ability to reproduce the gossip and slander. Twitter's mechanics are a shouting competition, with 10% of users making up 90% of tweets, while giving users tremendous power over public figure's profiles. It turned leftist discourse into a more violent /r9k/ with a minority skin and corporate backing. I don't think the move towards a short-form platform had a non-trivial influence in this shift.
- 3y ago
- londons_explore 3y ago> ig_signals_cupid_better_recall_v1.mlmodelc Are they using on-device ML? Why?
- nwallin 3y agoThey're probably just using an already trained model. They're almost certainly not training a model on-device. AFAIK both the iphone and the pixel have a chip that are specifically designed to do forward propagation on a deep neural network. I don't know much about them though.
- londons_explore 3y agoTrue - but what model would they want to use on-device? All the feed ranking stuff is done serverside I assume... And apart from that, the app is just for posting and reading text and pictures. I don't really see any use for any ML there.
- tempest_ 3y agoAll sorts of crap like facial recognition or object identification. Every bit of ML you can offload on your clients is one you don't have to pay for.
- londons_explore 3y agoIf one could profitably offload serverside CPU to the client then every app would be mining bitcoins on-device. But it turns out that user complaints of a laggy app, hot phone and bad battery life (and therefore lost users and lost ad revenue) far outweigh any CPU time savings on the server.
- imposter 3y agoI have a suspicion that it could be something that does voice recognition via the gyroscope data. I believe so for many reasons- 1. Gyroscope creates a lot of data for every millisecond, so it doesn't makes any sense to send all of it over to the server. 2. You only need to recognise certain keywords/movements of the user for somewhat accurate ad-tracking and behavourial analysis. 3. You don't need to prompt the user to allow access to it.