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Why is the Oral-B iOS app almost 300 MB? And why is Colgate's app even bigger..?
- khrbrt 2y agoUnrolled: https://unrollnow.com/status/1828490449881047401 https://unrollnow.com/status/1828490449881047401
- jshchnz 2y agothanks, sorry should've just posted this link instead!
- thih9 2y agoNot working for me > Connection failed: User 'u327838624_unroll' has exceeded the 'max_connections_per_hour' resource (current value: 500)
- jshchnz 2y agogoing so viral it broke unroll
- daemonologist 2y agoSeems to have been HN'ed to death: > Connection failed: User 'uxxxxxxx_unroll' has exceeded the 'max_connections_per_hour' resource (current value: 500) (Is that a MySQL error?)
- SushiHippie 2y ago> (Is that a MySQL error?) Seems like it, but why would a website have such a (low) limit for mysql connections.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoThe better to sink its teeth into your iPhone deeper . . .
- MBCook 2y agoSo it’s all just stupidly big PDFs used as images of the different models? Not what I was expecting. I was expecting it to be more like the Colgate app mentioned later in thread.
- maccard 2y agoThat’s insane. They should absolutely, 100% be pulled on demand.
- arghwhat 2y agoThey should just be made properly - a properly made PDF is less than a megabyte, and model pictures should be just hundreds of KB. Takes a lot of models and instructions to burn hundreds of megs that way.
- maccard 2y agoEh, I disagree. High res images are big no matter what way you cut it, and my mobile resolution is 2550x1800 - I don’t mind the detail. But I don’t need that detail for 15 different toothbrush models.
- RedShift1 2y agoA 3840x2160 jpeg image at 100% quality is somewhere between 2 and 3 MB, so 15 models makes 45 MB, still way short of + 300 MB for the app.
- maccard 2y ago2.5MB is about an order of magnitude larger than the OP's hundreds of KB. I'd be fine with 3MB. But they should still be pulled on demand.
- arghwhat 2y agoJPEG at 100% quality makes very little sense - the goal is to dial it down to the lowest value where artifacts are still low enough to not notice. AVIF also has much better behavior in the artifact department, letting you go much lower without introducing artifacts - you simply loose detail, which is no issue in a largely smooth product photo. For reference, my own photos downscaled to 3840x2560 AVIF for sharing purposes range from 500KB to 2MB depending on how "busy" the image is. The off-camera 6000x4000 JPEG is ~7MB in comparison. I stand by my opinion that a few hundred KB per image is plenty at the required resolution for model photos in an app.
- larsrc 2y agoThe real question is why do toothbrushes need apps in the first place?
- diebeforei485 2y agoThey show you if you have spent sufficient time on the front, top, and back of each tooth. Electric toothbrushes are used differently than manual brushes (you don't move them back and forth).
- jshchnz 2y agotbh i was wondering the same thing... brush stats, time per tooth maybe?
- jjeaff 2y agothe one reason I have used the app is for my kids. it plays animations while they brush and keeps stats and let's them pick avatar colors and stuff as rewards.
- gibbitz 2y agoSo the animations are probably all embedded mpegs because what would a toothbrush company want to manage a CDN for...
- 0xEF 2y agoNot that I am the world's brightest parent, or anything, but trainiing your kids to do tasks with media consumption as a reward seems like a remarkably bad idea, given how influencing that can be.
- mrguyorama 2y ago>The only other nodes that jump out is the `Comino.bundle` (15 MB), which has files like `20class_seqlen26_6p5h_20200302-095627_comino_android_production` Guessing these are some sort of model weights Fuck you. A "toothbrush app" which shouldn't exist in the first place CANNOT justify AI anything. What an indictment of our entire industry, nobody stopped this at any point. Nobody said "no we can't justify doing this to our customers", nobody said "this is an insane waste of the resources of everyone", nobody said "this is atrocious". APPLE didn't say "No you can't do this to the people we supposedly lock the garden for". The management of our entire industry needs to be re-educated. Also, how is it POSSIBLE to ship duplicate files in such an ecosystem? Apple could trivially and invisibly duplicate files in the file system and app submissions.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoNobody said you should get riled up for something that does not affect you in the slightest, unless you want it to.
- sharpshadow 2y agoLet’s say everytime you ask your GPT about liquor, get drunk and don’t brush teeth your dental GPT reports that and next time when you search for liquor you get a nice reminder to brush later with fitting dental advertisement.
- pif 2y agoMy question is: why do an Oral-B app and a Colgate app even exist?
- fragmede 2y agoto log how well you're brushing your teeth, so it can advise you on how to brush your teeth better, so you can have better teeth and not have to see the dentist. it's a late stage technology thing. I wasn't born with an innate ability to know how to brush my teeth or how to shave (my electric razor also has an app), I had to learn how. If the devices I use can tell that I'm using them wrong, and there's a better way to do things, it's nice to have it tell me.
- ragnese 2y agoAnd if we were in an alternate universe where we had reason to believe that the app did this analysis offline and never sent the data off to be sold to who-knows-who, that would be fine.
- broast 2y agoI'm not familiar with the apps, how does it measure and improve your dental health?
- russb 2y agoThe idea is to help focus brushing on specific teeth or quadrants, and it uses Bluetooth to know when the brush is on or off. Maybe it signals when you push too hard and the brush pauses for a second as well. To my knowledge it does not know where you are in your mouth when brushing (positioning via accelerometer/gyroscope), so a synchronized start would likely give similar results.
- rdudek 2y agoExcept brushing is just one piece of an overall oral health. Flossing is another thing. Then you got your diet which plays a great role in your teeth health. How would one tracking app know all of this?
- rychco 2y agoMore embarrassing than the size itself is that it is supposedly required to change the mode of the toothbrush. I truly do not think this should be allowed, but I’m not sure how to approach enforcing it.
- SrslyJosh 2y agoWell, challenge number one is having a consumer protection agency that's legally empowered to pull products that are defective by design from the market. Second challenge is precisely defining what is and is not allowed, but given the sheer number of stupid things that a business could conceivably do to fuck with their customers, I'm willing to give such an agency a fair amount of latitude to evaluate things and make decisions, so long as the decisions are based on a good set of core principles. (E.g., "functionality that can be implemented without a companion app must not require a companion app".)
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoYou are wildly optimistic about the competency of government
- Johnny555 2y agoI guess it depends on which one you have and what mode you want to change, but I have the Oral-B Pro 5000, and have been able to change cleaning modes ("Daily Clean", "Sensitive", etc) and the color of the LED at the tip without the app. The display shows a timer for cleaning time which is all the tracking I need from a toothbrush. There could be other modes that aren't accessible from the buttons, but none that I'm aware of.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoWhy do we need legislation against this? Just don't buy the toothbrush and let the product die of natural causes
- geoelectric 2y agoOn my IO, you can change the mode from the toothbrush, but the selection of modes to change from is on the app. However, I think it defaults to "all of them" so it's still usable without ever running the app.
- notamy 2y agohttps://xcancel.com/emergetools/status/1828490449881047401 https://xcancel.com/emergetools/status/1828490449881047401
- renewiltord 2y agoThis is the worst Twitter proxy I've ever seen. It's got one of those idiotic "wait x seconds to view this page" and then a "reload the page". It's like a spam interstitial you get when you're trying to view illegal streams. I can't believe anyone not affiliated with it would post it. Awful tool.
- iudqnolq 2y agoEvery other one is dead. I'm guessing wildly here but maybe there's a reason they need to limit visitors.
- mananaysiempre 2y agohttps://nitter.poast.org/ https://nitter.poast.org/ is alive (but also subjects you to Cloudflare proctology)
- colecut 2y agoI never heard of this proxy before this post. the interstitial only seemed to appear on first load, and didn't take very many seconds.. the interface is clean and allows me to see the entire thread without being logged in, unlike x.. I had to log out of X to test this, but I can see the utility, and am not understanding the hate.
- max-privatevoid 2y agoI wonder who's to blame for that.
- layer8 2y agoWithout that it probably wouldn’t be operating anymore.
- 2y ago
- manav 2y agoSome of the apps do 3d maps / AI positioning.
- RIMR 2y agoEvery health company out there has an app that connects their devices, but make one for a toothbrush and people freak out like this is the first time we've ever let an app measure something health-related. Y'all will back smart watches that know all your vitals, and pendants that listen to everything you say, but log how frequently and thoroughly you brush your teeth, and suddenly there's an outrage. As for why they are 300MB? It sounds like it was just poorly packaged assets. That's stupid, but also not a big deal.
- badgersnake 2y agoSo many reasons not to use Twitter, but “because you are blogging” is up there.
- jakelsaunders94 2y agoPossibly a controversial opinion here but… who cares? I don’t mean this in a snarky way. If you’re an app developer you’ve got limited development time like everyone else. Most phones have at least 128gb internal memory and the app is downloaded over WiFi. I just don’t see this as a constraint. Sure you could have a CDN and lazy load but then the app doesn’t work without internet. Just dump it all on the device.
- ravenstine 2y agoTo me, it's not so much about the size itself but its correlation with poorly engineered applications that are slow, buggy, and stupid.
- joebob42 2y agoFelt the same. I agree with the whole "why is there even an app" thread, but it being 300mb doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
- MaxBarraclough 2y ago> who cares? Some people have limited storage space remaining on their device. Some people have slow Internet, or capped Internet.
- jakelsaunders94 2y agoLimited storage space is a valid argument I guess, though with music / everything streaming these days I’ve always struggled to see how you’d fill up a 128gb phone. And I’ve obviously got no data to support this but i suspect the cross number of people downloading the Oral B toothbrush app on 4G internet out and about would be low. Feels like the number of people in developing countries buying an app-enabled toothbrush would be similar.
- 3np 2y agoSmartphones with 32GB or less storage are not rare. I can still buy a brand-new Android phone at the local electronics chain with 32GB storage.
- egorfine 2y agoImagine how dead inside of a developer one has to be to deliver this.
- vindex10 2y agoNot sure whether there is a payment module in there, but that's why Uber app is so heavy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeCYiD0hnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeCYiD0hnE
- FredPret 2y agoI bought an electric toothbrush from Walmart for $6.99 probably 5 years ago. It takes Oral-B brush heads and AA batteries. It's not capable of using an app. Who know being a tech guy would make me love as-simple-as-possible "retro" devices.
- layer8 2y agoThat’s every other tech guy. It’s a common effect.
- lloeki 2y ago> I work in IT, which is the reason our house has: - mechanical locks - mechanical windows - routers using OpenWRT - no smart home crap - no Alexa/Google Assistant/... - no internet connected thermostats >> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! >> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. - https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L
- FredPret 2y agoI think this happened when tech went mainstream. I used to love cutting-edge gadgets.
- latexr 2y agoAnd it’s common in many industries, not only in tech. We even have an idiom that refers to it. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/how_the_sausage_gets_made https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/how_the_sausage_gets_made
- ptrrrrrrppr 2y agoelectric and sonic toothbrushes are completely different things. get yourself a sonic one, thank me later
- 2y ago
- 0x0 2y agoThe Oral-B app was fun a few years ago when it was fairly lightweight, showed an up-to-date current world events news feed, while logging data into apple health and encouraging a brushing streak. Then they rewrote the entire app and it lost almost all of those features. I never opened the app once after the first run after the upgrade. Really makes me wish for an iOS app store that would allow installing older versions, like testflight does (up to 90 days only, unfortunately). Maybe it's time to break out a BLE sniffer... although I'm sure getting a HealthKit entitlement for a one-off unlicensed adhoc app is impossible :(
- zyberzero 2y agoThe protocol has already been reverse engineered. I’m using Home Assistant with bluetooth and it picks up one of my neighbour’s Oral-B toothbrush…
- nabla9 2y agoCan you reprogram or remote update the toothbrush? I mean, if it has vibration or sound, you might be able make it talk or play music.
- alentred 2y ago> showed an up-to-date current world events news feed Say what now? Oral-B? World events news feed?
- cj 2y agoADA recommends brushing your teeth for 4 minutes a day (2 mins morning/night). 2 minutes feels incredibly long for a lot of people. Doing something that feels productive or provides 2 minutes of entertainment while simultaneously operating as a timer seems like not so crazy of an idea.
- alentred 2y agoOooh! Thank you, it makes much more sense now. It is weird, though, that we humans need to be distracted to focus on brushing the teeth.
- WheatMillington 2y agoWhat kind of sane person is downloading a toothbrush app?
- datavirtue 2y ago[flagged]
- DannyBee 2y agoHow else will you update the firmware on your toothbrush? (i'm wish i was kidding: Phillips seems to publish firmware updates for the sonicare a few times a year)
- uhtred 2y agoPeople are so dumb! Who the fuck installs an Oral B app!
- settsu 2y agoI know this is probably going to land with a thud in this venue, but as a counterpoint to the predictable "why do toothbrushes need an app?!", it should at least be acknowledged that these apps might be the first and only place someone could learn of good oral hygiene.
- antimemetics 2y agoWeird, I learned this in three places, at kindergarten, again in school, and at home
- settsu 2y agoAnd that's good! But it can't be assumed that everyone had the benefit of that experience.
- daft_pink 2y agoPersonally, I’ve used both and they work pretty well at displaying where your toothbush is in relation to the rest of your mouth and tracking your habits, etc. Don’t dis it until you try it.
- wolpoli 2y agoI only have the app installed so I can check my battery percentage.
- lern_too_spel 2y agoBecause developers who make toothbrush apps don't care. For these long tail apps, the standard tooling has to be idiot proof, and no you're not going to sell tooling to these developers — they don't care.
- kevinsync 2y agoI can't comment specifically about either of these apps, and I actually may be hypothesizing in the wrong direction (especially if they're somehow hilariously connecting to an electric toothbrush, and developed these apps in-house) but... 1. an agency probably built these apps, an arena where I've worked or contributed to for 15 years that is defined by arbitrary quarterly client budgets and flavor of the month tech stacks evangelized by a rotating cast of characters (including random contractors), due mostly to high industry turnover, mis-allocation of project 'resources' (human beings), moving goalposts often dictated by client whim, etc etc, all in the pursuit of technology deliverables that are intentionally crippled by analytics libraries and conceived almost entirely by creative departments that "ladder up to the dynamic storytelling and next-gen digital transformations that Brand X will deliver holistically to its army of advocates and consumer clusters who crave end-to-end digital alchemy and mindblowing content journeys on socials". (don't forget, we sell electric toothbrushes) You can imagine how in that environment it's Thunderdome, anything goes! :-D And of course I'm being actively silly in my description, but it's worth painting this picture to articulate that a lot of these projects are moving too fast and have too many things literally bolted onto to them to ever find themselves in a place where you could package and release a 10MB app again. 2. after throwing that industry under the bus, I opened Xcode to interrogate one of my own iOS apps, of which I'm the sole and only contributor, painstakingly birthed from scratch with love. IT, TOO, IS 300MB, much to my surprise! The app itself does a lot of things: - beautiful onboarding screens that you likely only ever see once (graphics, video, etc) - complex notification receipt and display - full-featured audio player - embedded HTML webviews and code for audio visualization - custom iOS Sticker extension - integrated image editor - iOS widgets - Apple Watch support - tvOS support for a completely unique second-screen experience - a bunch of frameworks and libraries, leveraged for different reasons (Messages, WidgetKit, SwiftUI, SPPermissions, Haneke, MarqueeLabel, NotificationBannerSwift, Reachability, SDWebImage, Shift, SnapKit, SwiftAudioEx, SwiftQueue, SwiftyJSON) But realistically, the app actually only does two things: plays some tunes and lets you know when some new merch is for sale. The rest of the stuff is shiny toy territory. Then you compile and package it up, and voila, 300MB. Turns out, I'm just as culpable for the bloat as any agency or poor soul making apps these days -- you're gonna reach for libraries and include giant assets and do all this stuff that's probably not sane, while in the pursuit of fun, beauty, innovation, or I guess even just collecting intrusive metrics on people's dental habits.
- pixl97 2y agoWhile I can't say anything about these apps, I do work close to a bunch of companies that make and distribute software, and there is a general rule I see. The crappier the companies software security is, the larger their apps are. One of the large companies I work with takes software security seriously and has internal employees that make most of the software, and internal security teams that audit it. Outside of having low defect rates, their software is also small and streamlined. They just don't have tons of external libraries they pull in unless it's for a legitimate reason. Another large company in the same industry has almost everyone making their software as an external contractor. Employees turn over all the time and no one stays on a team long. I swear they make software by running 'npm install *'. Their software binaries/release are much much larger than the first company. Their defect rate is huge, which causes huge delays in releasing software because there are always a pile of showstopper security tasks before release that anything that's not showstopper gets ignored.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sukispeeler 2y agoWhat drives me nuts is that gathering user data for data brokers is such a valuable operation. I am sorry, but I can't sit here and be excited about who numbers are going up at conglomerates as they continue to make apps to extract data rather than any sort of good product. I know I have officially passed middle age due to my good old day's rant, but fridges, dishwashers, and toothbrushes with apps... like when the dishwasher loads itself. I'll accept the hedonistic inflation adjustments.
- huppeldepup 2y agoIf only the ad quality went up with the efficiency with which they syphon the data. I don’t have a driver’s license and I’m in a relationship yet a considerable amount of personalised ads on my devices are about dating sites and car dealerships.
- SushiHippie 2y agoI just checked on the Play Store and it seems like the Oral B Android App is "only" 67MB. I wonder if these were developed by different teams and maybe it doesn't have those large PDFs? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.oralbapp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.o...
- beryilma 2y agoNext we will get subscription toothbrush features. Personally, I want my ultrasonic toothbrush to hum to the tune of Taylor Swift songs. More seriously, at this point, any idiot who downloads such invasive apps deserves its consequences.
- latexr 2y ago> at this point, any idiot who downloads such invasive apps deserves its consequences. Most people aren’t aware of how invasive these are. That doesn’t make them idiots. Instead of ignoring them you should do the exact opposite: have empathy for them and let them know what’s happening. Only when enough people know what these companies are up to and say “no more” will anything change.
- ElFitz 2y agoThe Colgate one is probably still based on Kolibree[0]. I remember the KL prefix. I don’t know about the Oral-B app, but the Colgate / Kolibree at least had some mostly accurate mapping of brushed areas (when using one of their "smart" toothbrushes). [0]: https://www.kolibree.com/en https://www.kolibree.com/en
- mococa 2y agoPlease, avoid X links
- Mr_Modulo 2y agoWhat's wrong with x.com links?
- Ylpertnodi 2y agoIt was formerly known as twitter.
- mococa 2y agoPlease, avoid X links, I do not have an account there and they do not allow me to view.
- joecool1029 2y agohttps://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1828490449881047401 https://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1828490449881047... Here's a link that can be actually viewed.
- hi_hi 2y agoThe truely sad part, they could be 1GB and no one would care.
- nom 2y ago15 years ago Apple told us "There is an app for that" and we were excited. It reads quite a bit differently now :D
- pzo 2y agoThe sad truth is that if you go to App Store > Your Accoun and refresh you will see that only handful of application are less than 100MB. In my case most apps are 300MB and we are talking only about update. I compared with Android and over there all apps are much less heavy. I noticed old Objective-C app used to much more slim and all Swift even after having ABI are big and fat. It's partially because of developer laziness and partially because Apple tools sux - there is no tree shaking or dead code removal from compiled cocoapods or swift packages. Apple probably don't care and more than happy to sell you the next shiny device with more storage or subscription to iCloud.
- danpalmer 2y agoI worked on this at Google. The modern Android app publishing format is designed entirely around being able to slice and dice apps so that users have the minimum downloaded and installed at any point. Resources, architectures, languages, are only downloaded as needed, but it also gets further into a few domain specific things such as game asset texture compression formats[0], so not only do phones only get the textures they need, but developers can publish in multiple formats so that users can get the best option their device supports. There's also on-demand code module downloading and installing too. This means you can, for example, pull your registration process out into a separate module, install it at the beginning, but then offload it after the user has registered, reducing the installed size (and reducing the chance your app gets uninstalled for taking up too much space). One developer has a multi-megabyte VOIP module for customer support, but doesn't actually download and install it until a user opens the support screen in the app, which means most users never have it installed. [0]: https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/asset-delivery/texture-compression https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/asset-delivery/...
- saagarjha 2y agoApple also has this too for developers that have large assets that they need on-demand. Code is not allowed to be downloaded.
- saagarjha 2y agoSure there is. Apple added new tools to do this even for dynamic libraries too!
- petabyt 2y agoA few hours ago I pushed an update for my app that sadly increased the size from 70kb to 233kb. So it's nice to see im not the only one struggling with bloaty apps.
- egberts1 2y agoElectron SDK, build, and its app.
- egberts1 2y agoTo the downvoter, I am not wrong that Electron is 99% responsible for app bloat.
- winternewt 2y agoThe "Bose Music" Android app, which is essentially two sliders for controlling volume and noise cancellation, plus a firmware update tool, is also 300 MB. I remember when my Atari ST had 60 MB hard drive space in total, and I could fit every piece of software I owned on it.
- jvandonsel 2y agoIs OralB able to actually do per-tooth tracking? Impressive if it’s just based on data from a cheap IMU in the toothbrush.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThey include the entire .net framework?
- ags1905 2y agoToday people make software with only financial gains in mind. The software is not made with passion, by passionate professionals. Someone should start a list with crappy software like these, and a list with highly optimized and efficient software. I propose Total Commander for Windows, Spinrite.
- babra4151 2y ago[dead]