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Why is the LinkedIn app almost half a gig?
- z3ncyberpunk 3y agoBecause LinkedIn is spyware, always was.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- yumraj 3y agoDon’t know about the app but LinkedIn website is a piece of utter shit. Any time my laptop fan starts spinning fast, is due to LinkedIn tabs using high CPU in the background, confirmed every time using Firefox task manager.
- wheresmyshadow 3y agoI sometimes feel like LinkedIn is the MySpace of our times.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beachy 3y agoWhy does the web page presenting this complaint take 140 requests to serve and transfer 10Mb? Same reasons - bloat over time, developers with powerful machines and network connections who don't notice the impact, users with huge devices that don't care about 500M space for an app and management and corporate culture that don't care much about optimisation.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoUber actually had a pretty reasonable explanation for their app being huge when their rather large app size made the rounds several years ago. Turns out localization takes a lot of space. I wonder how much of LinkedIn’s insane size can be attributed to that vs just lazy coding
- saghm 3y agoIf I only ever use a single locale on my phone, why isn't there a way to avoid needing to download all of the extra info that my phone will never use?
- mavelikara 3y agoIn Ubers case, the app works well when you travel. Not sure why LinkedIn would need that, if that is your question.
- eptcyka 3y agoThe last thing I want is my phone or apps on it to automatically change locale depending on the GPS location.
- pcl 3y agoGoogle Flights does this. It’s so frustrating. It displays prices in local currency, no matter how many times you go to the menu and pick a currency. And it always uses local calendar alignment, which is “fun”.
- gruturo 3y agoA few years ago I moved to Germany, not speaking a word of the local language. Imagine my joy when every google site helpfully switched to German, ignoring my browser's accept-language. Thankfully some googler must have been also annoyed by this at some point, so there is a somewhat little-known URL: google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect) which will revert everything to US English. Doesn't help if you wanted to default to any different locale, but it was perfect for me. Thank you unknown annoyed googler.
- gruez 3y ago>It displays prices in local currency, no matter how many times you go to the menu and pick a currency. Works fine for me, including when I'm in a foreign country and I need to change back to my home currency. Are you sure you're not disabling cookies or whatever?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- emestifs 3y agoRelated: (19 days ago) Leaving LinkedIn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612443
- new_user_final 3y agoFrom the reply >300 MB for just dynamically linked frameworks & Plugins is...a lot. In fact, just the Dylibs & Plugins today are bigger than the entire app was back in November 2022 >Here's something else that jumps out - in March 2023, the TodayExtension was < 400 KB. Today its ~60 MB... >Seeing as Today Extensions have been deprecated, its doubtful that they added THAT much functionality to them
- new_user_final 3y agoThis is what you get from so called "quality full $200k software engineer"
- endofreach 3y agoWho calls who like that?
- saagarjha 3y agoHacker News has a lot of people who swear up and down that phrases nobody has said before ever are actually standard lingo
- exe34 3y agoTechnically that's how you start trends - you claim that others are doing it, so your target group does, and now you have an example to point to!
- Jensson 3y agoWhich is why you don't become a prophet in your hometown, they know nobody listens to you so they don't listen. But as a traveler people can think you are important and then you can become important.
- jshchnz 3y agoHere's a detailed answer (using ThreadReader so no Twitter login necessary): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1772350918534582525.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1772350918534582525.html
- dang 3y agoOk, we'll change the link to that from https://twitter.com/t3dotgg/status/1772328210900074786 https://twitter.com/t3dotgg/status/1772328210900074786 above.
- angiosperm 3y agoTIL there is a Linkedin app. For me the question is why anyone would even consider installing it. The other is easy: It's Microsoft,
- jondwillis 3y agoIt’s required for messaging on a mobile phone. And probably other user hostile patterns.
- computerfriend 3y agoIt's not, you can send messages on the website on mobile.
- happymellon 3y agoThat's weird, I am able to message on my phone through the linkedin.com page.
- antonyh 3y agoFor me, if I click into a post it dims grey and refuses to do anything. It's very user-hostile.
- ValentineC 3y agoI just don't use LinkedIn on mobile, and view anyone who wants to connect only via LinkedIn as generally not useful. I think it's a good sheep filter. (I'm also not a career developer, so maybe my priorities are different.)
- exabrial 3y agoYall just don’t understand what innovation looks like….. Mmk? That’s what I’ve been told when I also question these things.
- zogrodea 3y agoI'm probably not the only person who misinterpreted "gig" in the title as "job", as in "side gig", instead of "gigabytes" as was intended. (Makes sense considering LinkedIn is about jobs, but "half a side gig" makes no sense which should have been a clue.)
- murkt 3y agoYou’re definitely not the only one. I expected a rambling about how some not very sane person spends half of their working hours on LinkedIn, constantly updating their profile and whatnot.
- carlmr 3y agoMe, too, especially if they're looking for gig work on LinkedIn, and management of LinkedIn takes up more time than expected for that.
- YouWhy 3y agoTL;DR: There're few global incentives for a LinkedIn app developer to make an overall good app, as opposed to making their PM happy. In detail: This is how death by a thousand papercuts looks like. I've had the (dubious) pleasure of observing a roughly similar BigTech app project. There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app, and they are likely under immense pressure to Just Ship Already (tm). Some of them consider it conscionable to do weird things like statically linking to an asset library - whether through unawareness/incompetence or just by wanting to make it through the next performance review. In smaller projects, there's some kind of a feedback that can make it through the system to make sure local and global incentives are aligned, but at the LinkedIn scale that would have required the people in charge to be engineers and not suit types. One interesting solution to this very problem that I actually saw in action was employing a team of top-tier systems hackers (in this case: people with a security research background) to hack through the build process. This solution naturally premises on such individuals wanting to work for an app project, incentivizing them along the right global metrics and giving them the go ahead to push back on egregious violations.
- gertop 3y ago> There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app I don't understand why you'd need 1000 or even 100 developers to produce such app. It's a CRUD frontend for a backend that already exists. What am I missing? Are you counting the developers of all the third party libs they integrate?
- emj 3y agoManagement might have been too interested in features to fix deep technical issues. > I had conversations with that manager where I was told in literally so many words, ‘You’re too idealistic. You don’t care enough about the bottom line. You should change your values.’ And I was like, no, nope, that’s not how this is going to work, man. Uh, outside I did the politic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39612443
- rob74 3y agoFurthermore, I would like to see some stats how much of their traffic is via the app and how much is via the website. Of course many people have LinkedIn profiles, but are there really so many "hardcore" users who install the app? So maybe the app just isn't that important for them in the grand scheme of things, and the bloat is more the result of neglect than of hundreds of developers working (specifically) on the app?
- infomaniac 3y agoGalaxy brain business model: shame the app developers and offer a tool to help them fix their mistakes.
- Apocryphon 3y agoMonetizing timac.org app analyses is developer catnip https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=timac.org&next=17553012 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=timac.org&next=175530...
- ericlewis 3y agoI’ve used it since close to day one and it’s great. You can get some detailed information and action items and it’s super easy to use.
- derefr 3y agoA.k.a. The Jepsen model.
- paxys 3y agoActual business model: shame users for having 2 year old phones and push them towards throwing it away and buying one with more storage (for a premium, of course).
- paulddraper 3y agoWhat makes it galaxy brain vs normal brain?
- kazinator 3y agoI would start by looking at what junk is linked in.
- teekert 3y agoI like the deep "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" multi-interpertness of this remark, very clever.
- _fw 3y agoReminds me of > Knowledge is Power - France is bacon.
- chongli 3y agoThese are examples of dangling modifiers [1]. They’re related to garden-path sentences [2] because they trick you into parsing one way and then get you to backtrack. One of my favourite grammatical constructions! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_modifier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- kazinator 3y agoModifiers are something dangled before the faces of grammarians as an incentive.
- cozzyd 3y ago.so funny
- klabb3 3y agoThis is a perfect example of why the problem isn’t the stack, native vs web, or programming languages. I’ve been saying this for ages when people bash JS for being slow, or the web for being bloated. Yes, you pay a bit for the sandboxing, GC, rendering, built in accessibility. But that’s a rounding error when businesses, especially large ones, go on a PM-centric feature frenzy. You get out exactly what you put in. Performance, security, user experience.. Whether it’s frontend, backend, embedded, whatever, the engineers are alright. Generally. It’s when you stop listening to them, or punish the grumpy ones in favor of the people-pleasers, that this crap happens. That’s worrying, because it’s become so prevalent.
- OtomotO 3y ago> This is a perfect example of why the problem isn’t... Depends on how you frame the problem. If you declare the problem is that although batteries became way more efficient you don't get out more hours because they are wasted, then the story is a different one. Same when you don't have an abundance in RAM but are forced to use certain programs and applications. I have 64GB Ram these days, colleagues at clients of mine only have 16GB and they face certain challenges I don't, because of the tools forced upon them by their superiors. These problems can be real, they can be "artificial" (there is a philosophical note to this somewhere ;)), but in the end, there is undeniable truth that launching a whole browser engine for each and every app can be and indeed is wasteful compared to alternatives. Of course if you don't see this as a problem "ex falso quodlibet" takes precedence and it all becomes futile to discuss :)
- thrnkkm 3y agoIt goes opposite way as well. I have workstation with 128GB ram with a few terabytes of storage, I can run full stack with everything in single machine. I also have VM snapshots, versioning etc... There is simple script that installs all deps and setup dev machine. My colleagues have tiny Macs with 16GB. To accommodate them, we had to split mono dev setup into separate K8S cluster. On single machine I could easily split test build process. Now we have spaghetti of dependencies. And spinning up secondary dev instances is not permitted due to high AWS cost. So investing result binary (like this blog post) is now impossible.
- feverzsj 3y agoWhy not pick a popular third-party app and buy it or employ its developer, which should be much cheaper than employing hundreds of subpar developers.
- dacryn 3y agoit's how microsoft does it's business. They have to lead by example. What message would it send if they can develop this with 5 devs, but the customers they sell their advice and licenses to needs a 1000? So they have to dogfood, leading to all of these bullshit bloated apps
- shiroiushi 3y agoI think it's more than that. Big companies like this don't exist to provide solutions in the most efficient manner possible, nor do they (contrary to popular opinion) exist to create the most "shareholder value". Their real reason for existence is to provide employment. (True, the investors really only care about RoI, and would prefer more efficiency with a lower headcount, but the reality is that you need to hire people to actually build things and create solutions to sell, and for those people, including the top executives, the company's mission is not their priority, only their own personal career and bank account.) So with a company full of people whose #1 concern is their paycheck and their resume, they'll make choices to optimize those, which means turning a trivial 20-minute shell script into a 3-month project requiring a whole team of devs.
- crotchfire 3y agoTelemetry.
- qsi 3y agoThe LinkedIn app on Android clocks in at using 351 MB on my phone, but 187 MB of that is cache and 13 MB is data. The app itself is "only" 151 MB.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mikhael28 3y agoI remember, like, three years ago looking at the LI app and wondering, why was it almost 200MB. Bloat breeds bloat.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoOne of the products my company offers is an SDK and we are happy and proud to shave away 10s of kilobytes on it whenever possible, as large SDK sizes seem to lead to loss of opportunities with potential new customers. and then there is this. What I want to say is: Some companies DO care how big their apps are.
- DanielHB 3y agoI once looked at Zendesk (the thing that powers most of those little customer support chat buttons on the bottom right of web pages), I was appalled at the size of bloat they push down to the browser. I don't remember exact numbers but I think it was ~2mb gzipped. I couldn't removed it from our app but I at least added a 5 second delay before loading it. Had similar (although not as bad) with the Okta login libraries as well. I eventually created a separate application just for the login page so I wouldn't need to bundle those libs with the main app.
- gnicholas 3y agoAnother question: why does the feed reload when I go 'back' to it? This happens on the website and the app whenever I click into a link and then go back to the feed. It just spontaneously reloads! If I wanted to comment on the link or even just like the post, I can't (unless I remember who posted it, go to their profile, and go to their recent activity, which I almost never have the patience to do). I uninstalled the app recently because I find it maddening that I can't get notifications about comments on my own posts unless I also accept notifications for 'person X and person Y like such-and-such random post'. I find it maddening and unjustifiable that these two types of behaviors would be categorized under the same notification toggle. Then I remember LI is now owned by MS, and it makes more sense.
- romanshrompsky 3y agoI got in touch with support about this a few years ago. Their answer: "we'll have a look into it." ... That was a few years ago.
- jfernandezr 3y agoBecause, as it happens with a lot of apps, the developer teams, product managers or whoever with decision powers are not users of their own applications.
- reportgunner 3y agoIt probably breaks if you go back and it doesn't reload.
- pie420 3y agoThe answer is that A/B testing found that reloading the website/app drove more user engagement.
- drooopy 3y agoMust be all those wonderful and oh-so-important “you are getting noticed” or “your profile was viewed” notifications piling up.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoDeleted that toxic app since the covid. I just had it, it is working great for me so far.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoDeleted that creepy app one minute after installing it, as it started trying to reconnect me with people from decades ago, whom I had no desire whatsoever to reconnect with.
- m0llusk 3y agoIronically, that is simple business logic and a handful of simple strings for translation. Bloat must remain unseen to be reliably preserved.
- bagels 3y agoThe size is correlated to the number of engineers working on it.
- LAC-Tech 3y agogive each engineer a budget of 256 bytes
- corinroyal 3y agoYou owe me a mouthful of coffee! I'm trying to imagine how this proposal would change the face of the planet while I wipe up this mess.
- Alifatisk 3y agoYou are onto something
- rchaud 3y ago"There's a website for that"
- oferzelig 3y agoThe short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.
- legacynl 3y agoOn android there is a way for apps to initially provide a barebones package, that downloads and installs quickly, but that then fully downloaded itself afterwards. So I guess there already has been some engineering effort, just not in making sure apps are small
- vitorgrs 3y agoActually, it's a huge metric. Not sure on iOS, but on Android this is so fundamental that usually companies even launch after a "Lite" version exactly because of this.
- actionfromafar 3y agoHow would they know, though? If the download times out, does LinkedIn care or notice?
- WJW 3y agoSurely they'd at least notice a decrease in installations of the new "too big to download" version?
- actionfromafar 3y agoAnd that department will take immediate action, communicate efficiently across corporate governance teams, all in perfect harmony, to address at the next sprint, as ever. /s
- screamingninja 3y ago> Surely they'd at least notice a decrease in installations of the new "too big to download" version? You are referring to a hypothetical scenario where A/B testing took place.
- llmblockchain 3y agoWhere else would you store your dark patterns, tracking code and contact stealing logic?
- mnw21cam 3y agoThat's great. Now do one on why Microsoft Teams grinds away with 100% CPU on my laptop for a few minutes just to bring up my calendar, or why Outlook on Android freezes for a minute or so when looking at a single small email.
- xyst 3y agoMicrosoft Teams is so awful. Between the subpar audio and video quality, and performance issues with basic chat. The experience all around is awful. I wish my company would use something else but the CIO is hellbent on “rEdUcInG tHe nUmBeR oF tOoLs” and MS was apparently throwing in teams for “free” as part of o365 sub.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoThe thing that consistently baffles me is how Slack, Teams, etc., routinely get demolished in terms of usability and performance compared to Discord. It's not like Discord isn't also doing the ridiculous "package a whole browser as a GUI lib" dance.
- mnw21cam 3y agoHaving said that, even though I complain about Teams sitting there with 100% CPU while doing nothing that appears useful, at least it does actually manage to do video conferencing full screen (3200x1800) within the limits of the Intel Atom in my current laptop, which is more than I can say for Google Meet, which was jittering all over the place until I made the window really small and switched off my camera.
- wmil 3y agoIT departments like to controll all app permissions using just Active Directory because it simplfies their lives. Teams uses Active Directory, and they can argue it's "good enough".
- naveen99 3y agoOnce LLM’s start getting packaged with apps, we’ll see half a terabyte. And then you can say “linked in was only half a gig in my day”.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoBecause it's necessary? Microsoft is trustworthy, aren't they?
- dangus 3y agoOne of these lovely discussions again. I’m firmly on the devil’s advocate side here: some install bloat isn’t a big deal. 1. Believe it or not the LinkedIn app is huge in terms of the amount of things it does. It’s basically a super-app for professionals. News, social interactions, an entire chat app, a job board, recruiting and sales tools, etc. Of course it relies on a lot of frameworks. 2. You don’t need a “high end” phone or expensive data plan to have this size of install be reasonable. A brand new $159 Samsung A03s phone can take a 1TB SD card which itself only costs $60 from a reputable brand. You can get an unlimited data plan for $30/month from Mint mobile. Basically, the poorest consumer in the US can “afford” to install the app. Mobile download speeds in the US are far into the double digit Mbps. I’ve seen speeds go up into the hundreds of Mbps. Of course the option exists to have your apps update over WiFi automatically and use no mobile data at all. 3. Install Size != Slow performance. Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware. 4. Those criticizing LinkedIn for having a large development team that has to rely on frameworks rather than custom-building tightly integrated functionality are just on another planet entirely. The app is optimized for ease of development, not install size or perfect performance. LinkedIn isn’t going to hire a bunch of expensive, impossible to find 10X developers just to over-optimize their app so that somebody will notice that it only consumed 50MB of space instead of 500.
- ksec 3y agoThe exact same App on android weight only a third of the size.
- hbn 3y ago> Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware. I mean you're not wrong that install size != slow performance, but GTA5 is a funny example for being the game that had 6 minute loading screens to start online mode until someone reverse engineered it and found it was mostly from parsing a giant 10MB JSON blob, and reduced the loading time by 70% with a small patch. Very possible the bad priorities lead to both the ginormous install size and the fact that no one internal was tasked with fixing the load times.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoBecause LinkedIn is run by people who do not care anymore. They have a monopoly and nobody is interested enough in that boring industry to disrupt them.
- echelon_musk 3y agoIt took me all day to realise the title is a pun. Not sure if it's deliberate, but one does generally look for a gig in LinkedIn.
- dividefuel 3y agoI don't have LinkedIn installed, but it's hardly the only app guilty of this. My phone has probably a dozen apps or so that take up much more space than I would expect (400 MB for the iRobot app that runs my Roomba? 250 MB for Firefox Focus which is now the same size as 'full' Firefox?) For many of these apps, I use them frequently enough that the space tradeoff is not a concern. For many others though, they're in that awkward middle zone where I use them once every month or two. But because the apps are so large, I don't want to have to waste a quarter gig of data to download them on the fly, so instead I keep them on my phone. And collectively they take up 5-10 GB of space.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoThat is wild. Firefox on Android is an 85 MB download, and it's real Firefox with all the associated features. LinkedIn is 45 MB. I don't see how anybody can believe Apple is spending any effort on automated static analysis in app review if they're leaving such low hanging fruit.
- Tactical45 3y agoI have Android and it's close to 300 MB. 180 of which is cache.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoTo compare apples to apples, I'm using download size like the article, not installed size.
- burgerrito 3y agoOriginal Tweet: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1772350918534582525 https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1772350918534582525
- mvkel 3y ago> Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy. In a startup, you're not just trying to solve problems. You're trying to solve problems that users care about. -pg Is app package size something users care about?