6 ms·

The Santander UK iOS app is 613 MB and 35% of it does nothing

57 points by msephton 2y ago

szszrk 2y ago
https://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1831772650685018352 https://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1831772650685018...
fancyfredbot 2y ago
Santander doesn't think you care that their app is so big. Are they right? Personally although I find this wasteful and sloppy, if Santander have better interest rates or branches close by, or basically anything else going for them then I'll happily ignore the size of their app. So at least in my case they'd have been right to assume that I don't care.
- delecti 2y ago
  I agree with this. The two banking apps I have installed are ~250MB and ~180MB (Chase and Capitol One), but I had no idea about either until I just checked. As far as satisfying me as a user is concerned, any effort spent optimizing for storage is wasted.
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    Size is meaningless by itself but it's a decent proxy for quality. I know publicly benchmarking DBs is mostly illegal, but I wonder if public analysis of common consumer apps for consumers' informed benefit would fall into similar gray areas.
    - sideshowb 2y ago
      Why is benchmarking dbs illegal?
      - intelVISA 2y ago
        DeWitt Clause? Big corps really dislike provable metrics of enshittification.
      - brianwawok 2y ago
        The ones that charge money make you sign licenses with very draconian terms.
      - rcxdude 2y ago
        Not illegal, but against the license terms so could land you in a lawsuit.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- JSDevOps 2y ago
  Bad practice is bad practice, It's costing them bottom line somewhere.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    But on the contrary, introducing tooling to fix it might cost more
    - msephton 2y ago
      They can spot and fix this without tooling. The tooling just makes it (arguably) easier.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I feel like the only apps incentivized to change this are the ones that people don’t have to use (to use their bank account, because their employer makes them etc.) and that have competition installed in the same phone. At least I sometimes prune my app list by size every once in a while (when I run out of space); I rarely need to get past the top 15, but everything in there gets a very close look. I’d never delete my primary bank’s app, but the 10th food delivery service app I’ve only installed for a promotion? Gone without a second thought. In that sense, Santander is probably extremely safe, given how infrequently people change banks. (That’s also why they can get away with poor app experiences.)
minkles 2y ago
Doesn't surprise me. It's probably something generic they bought in and customised.
- sideshowb 2y ago
  But they're all crud apps, on a system that already has a webview! Why do any need to be over 100k?
  - minkles 2y ago
    It's amazing how complicated you can make a CRUD app with a suitable architect and project management team in there!
    - JSDevOps 2y ago
      non technical project management, there is the problem
- msephton 2y ago
  No need to guess, full details are at the link. Spoiler: it's not something generic they bought in and customised.
pvaldes 2y ago
lets be fair. It says: 35% of it does nothing -for the user- Maybe if does something for the bank then. An app can have different tasks and not all must be related with communicating with the users. Machines need communicate with other machines, or send data, or store a database of legal texts or exception handling cases. 90% of the instruction manuals of appliances just are spent saying the same in twenty different languages that I will never use. Is this outrageous? Maybe. Maybe not Or maybe this apps are just mining crypto in the background and sucking battery. Who knows?
- black3r 2y ago
  the thread literally says that 35% of the app bundle is taken by "binary symbol tables". binary symbol tables is a mapping of a memory address to function and variable names. it's use is to debug an app locally. >99% users won't even know what a debugger is and just report the error once the os prompts them to. the remaining <1% of curious developers owning a mac with XCode and knowing what debugger and debugging symbols are may play with them, but without knowledge of how the source code is organized it won't be useful to them anyway. the submitted report will contain the memory addresses but won't contain the symbols, the developer will have to load them externally from the company's build server. it's literally useless to anyone for anything.
  - usr1106 2y ago
    > it's literally useless to anyone for anything. Very helpful for anyone who wants to crack or reverse engineer that app. Not sure why anybody would want to do that. But there could be people with criminal minds having some creative idea. Not trying to say that stripping symbols is the ultimate security measure. But at least I cannot see a reason to keep them, as the parent commenter wrote. Appears as an utterly incompetent software delivery process.
- msephton 2y ago
  (poster) I had to trim the title to fit HN submission. I would argue it does nothing for the user, and nothing in the app given it can be trimmed with no side-effects.
pzo 2y ago
I encourage everyone to go to app store -> profile -> swipe refresh, and see how heavy all those apps updates on iOS are few examples: Gmail: 570 MB Facebook: 345 MB Booking.com: 260 MB AirAsia: 510 MB Reddit: 330 MB Slack: 400 MB X: 290 MB Google Translate: 180 MB Uber: 480 MB Speedtest: 150 MB It's horrible how heavy all those apps are. I barely can find app update that is less 100 MB.
- siquick 2y ago
  And to think I was mildly concerned when our app inflated out to 36.8MB recently
  - lawgimenez 2y ago
    Our app has ~20K MAU and download size is around 3.5 MB, it was 3.2 MB before though.
    - msephton 2y ago
      Great work! Pass on my thanks to your team. I feel the effort.
  - msephton 2y ago
    Well done, keep it up! I also strive to keep my apps small and lean.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I feel like it’s either this, or some super optimized app that weighs in at <10 MB and does what it should perfectly. I really wish there was a middle ground. Google Docs/Sheets/Slides are particularly infuriating. I’m pretty sure they all contain 90% identical code and assets.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    I like this for simple mobile projects: https://quasar.dev/ https://quasar.dev/ In some cases, going with an SVG icon pack etc. can save a bit of space. =3
PenguinRevolver 2y ago
Breakdown of the app is available here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xeWx https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xe...
- usr1106 2y ago
  To be exact, that's what they call the X-Ray in their product speech, the breakdown is also there if you click around. But very nice data! Do you know how these examples are made? Is there a way for free uploads of apps or at least browsing those they have? My Web search found https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/android/bumble https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/android/bumble for Android which I am more interested in. No, I am not an app developer. Not considering buying a license just out of general engineering curiosity.
rty32 2y ago
It could just be simply about a bad build system that does not efficiently trim out unused dependencies, or people are using unnecessary dependencies in the first place. Which happens all the time everywhere. And to be honest, I can totally see why this is happening. Santander does not have a lot of incentive to improve this. The distribution of the app package is done by Apple, and they don't charge you by what your file size is or how much bandwidth this uses. They charge you a developer fee and 30% IAP. If there is no (direct) extra cost, and trimming the file size could mean additional work on the developers and may cause things to break if not handled well, someone could be blamed for it. So why take the risk. And actually, it is possible that nobody internally at Santander ever looked into this problem. How do I know? The build system at my company sucks -- tons of waste of build time, memory use, disk space, debugging time, communication etc. I myself have brought up many of the issues. Nothing happened. Why? Because things are working, and nobody wants to do something when there is only risk but little benefit (to them). As of why people aren't being rewarded for saving CI costs, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
- Retr0id 2y ago
  > Santander does not have a lot of incentive to improve this. There is some incentive. A not-insignificant percentage of users won't be able to immediately install it without going through the hassle of finding something else to delete first to free up storage space, adding onboarding friction.
  - dangus 2y ago
    This is funny: the idea that banks have the same concerns about “onboarding friction” as high growth startup companies. You know who big banks don’t care about serving? People who are too poor to have free storage space on their phone.
    - Retr0id 2y ago
      Santander has a 9-figure annual ad spend, more than most startups are worth - they definitely care about acquiring new customers. Poor people pay more overdraft fees.
lxgr 2y ago
At this point I’m just assuming that the developers of such apps receive a large gift basket from Apple each Christmas… I’ve definitely upgraded storage sizes for this reason alone at least once.
jshchnz 2y ago
here's the unroll: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1831772650685018352.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1831772650685018352.html
RandallBrown 2y ago
This isn't a surprise at all. Most iOS apps have 4 or 5 analytics frameworks included that are probably at least 50mb each. Airship (maybe the defacto standard framework for push notifications) is over 100mb. Throw in a few pictures and videos and you're very quickly at 613mb.
- msephton 2y ago
  But that's not what is taking up 613MB here, the details are at the link.
  - RandallBrown 2y ago
    Hmm. I must have missed the link. I'm just seeing a single tweet with no details.
usr1106 2y ago
I am old enough to remember times when 100 computer science students did their exercises on a VAX 11/750 with 4 MB of main memory. Admittedly it was a bit laggy when all 15 terminals were in use during peak hours. I don't remember disk sizes. Now main memory is a different story than application size. But in most cases your main memory must be significantly bigger than size of a single application. So for that 4 MB VAX running a 2 MB application might be suitable. Let's reduce the 15 users to one, that's progress over 4 decades... Now the question: What can that 2 MB VAX banking application not do, that the 613 MB iOS application can? * Cryptographic operations have developed. But I am not aware that those used by a banking application are particularly memory hungry. * The screen resolution is different, but banking on 80x25 characters would work just fine at least outside of CJK. * The touch input might be problematic, so we would need to use a Blackberry or Nokia Communicator with physical keyboard. That would not only be a disadvantage IMHO. (The last 2 items are largely influenced by the operating system. But of course that would need to be very different to run on a 4 MB computer.) What else am I missing in this thought experiment? Honest question.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > Now the question: What can that 2 MB VAX banking application not do, that the 613 MB iOS application can? Work on your iPhone? All the bells and whistles of that UI come at a large cost - memory. And why not? The iPhone's got it. A better question might be: why does App A on the iPhone take up about ~10x as much space as the same app on Android? And the answer is probably because iPhone users don't care... If they did, Apple would probably do something about it...
  - usr1106 2y ago
    > And why not? > The iPhone's got it. And why not? Let's ruin the planet, we've got it. Apple is more unethical in their resource waste than Google. But Google is very very far from innocent.
    - dangus 2y ago
      How is Apple more unethical than Google on resource waste? Apple supports all their consumer hardware longer than Google. Apple will still let you sync your original iPod with your Mac and purchase music digitally “the old fashioned way.” Good luck using the Google Play Store on your EOL Android device. Google is the one that wasted a whole bunch of plastic and silicon on Stadia controllers before discontinuing the service and giving people an arbitrary deadline to convert the controllers into standard Bluetooth. In what universe is Google less wasteful than Apple?
philipwhiuk 2y ago
This is all a pitch to run Emerge tools in the CI/CD process. So from Santander’s side: Introduce a third party dependency * that has to go through the appropriate auditing * that adds a supply chain attack vector * that likely slows down internal development by adding an extra step to the build process (no you can’t just do it on release builds that would be crazy) * with an added cost All for something most likely no customer (or statistically no customer) ever complains about.
- stefan_ 2y ago
  Yes, the thing that people who ship 600 MiB apps have in common is an extreme attention to detail in their "software supply chain".
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    Yes, that is the sort of thing you have to care about in banking.
- usr1106 2y ago
  > This is all a pitch to run Emerge tools in the CI/CD process. True. But still very educational about the current state of computing.
- msephton 2y ago
  But they can fix the issues that are bloating the app without those tools now that they know about them. Plus, it would be possible to figure most of this out just by looking casually at the size and structure of the IPA they're uploading for distribution.
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    > Plus, it would be possible to figure most of this out just by looking casually at the size and structure of the IPA they're uploading for distribution. Which they'd probably do if a statistically significant number of people cared.
is_true 2y ago
I'm a victim of the Santander app in another country and it's not only "large", lot of functionalities are there but when you try to use them it just says "this function is only available on our website". Also it super slow and I have to kill the app a couple of times a week. Except if I have to do a wire transfer I always use another app from a Fintech company.
southernplaces7 2y ago
Then maybe this is a problem with Santander in general, because my own Santander app for Mexico eats over 460MB despite only modest use and I see no reason why it should. I suspect a mountain of bullshit consume tracking bloat and other related nonsense while they offer you their "service" in the background.

57 points by msephton 2y ago

https://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1831772650685018352 https://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1831772650685018...

fancyfredbot 2y ago

Santander doesn't think you care that their app is so big. Are they right? Personally although I find this wasteful and sloppy, if Santander have better interest rates or branches close by, or basically anything else going for them then I'll happily ignore the size of their app. So at least in my case they'd have been right to assume that I don't care.

delecti 2y ago
I agree with this. The two banking apps I have installed are ~250MB and ~180MB (Chase and Capitol One), but I had no idea about either until I just checked. As far as satisfying me as a user is concerned, any effort spent optimizing for storage is wasted.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  Size is meaningless by itself but it's a decent proxy for quality. I know publicly benchmarking DBs is mostly illegal, but I wonder if public analysis of common consumer apps for consumers' informed benefit would fall into similar gray areas.
  - sideshowb 2y ago
    Why is benchmarking dbs illegal?
    - intelVISA 2y ago
      DeWitt Clause? Big corps really dislike provable metrics of enshittification.
    - brianwawok 2y ago
      The ones that charge money make you sign licenses with very draconian terms.
    - rcxdude 2y ago
      Not illegal, but against the license terms so could land you in a lawsuit.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
JSDevOps 2y ago
Bad practice is bad practice, It's costing them bottom line somewhere.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  But on the contrary, introducing tooling to fix it might cost more
  - msephton 2y ago
    They can spot and fix this without tooling. The tooling just makes it (arguably) easier.
lxgr 2y ago
I feel like the only apps incentivized to change this are the ones that people don’t have to use (to use their bank account, because their employer makes them etc.) and that have competition installed in the same phone. At least I sometimes prune my app list by size every once in a while (when I run out of space); I rarely need to get past the top 15, but everything in there gets a very close look. I’d never delete my primary bank’s app, but the 10th food delivery service app I’ve only installed for a promotion? Gone without a second thought. In that sense, Santander is probably extremely safe, given how infrequently people change banks. (That’s also why they can get away with poor app experiences.)

minkles 2y ago

Doesn't surprise me. It's probably something generic they bought in and customised.

sideshowb 2y ago
But they're all crud apps, on a system that already has a webview! Why do any need to be over 100k?
- minkles 2y ago
  It's amazing how complicated you can make a CRUD app with a suitable architect and project management team in there!
  - JSDevOps 2y ago
    non technical project management, there is the problem
msephton 2y ago
No need to guess, full details are at the link. Spoiler: it's not something generic they bought in and customised.

pvaldes 2y ago

lets be fair. It says: 35% of it does nothing -for the user- Maybe if does something for the bank then. An app can have different tasks and not all must be related with communicating with the users. Machines need communicate with other machines, or send data, or store a database of legal texts or exception handling cases. 90% of the instruction manuals of appliances just are spent saying the same in twenty different languages that I will never use. Is this outrageous? Maybe. Maybe not Or maybe this apps are just mining crypto in the background and sucking battery. Who knows?

black3r 2y ago
the thread literally says that 35% of the app bundle is taken by "binary symbol tables". binary symbol tables is a mapping of a memory address to function and variable names. it's use is to debug an app locally. >99% users won't even know what a debugger is and just report the error once the os prompts them to. the remaining <1% of curious developers owning a mac with XCode and knowing what debugger and debugging symbols are may play with them, but without knowledge of how the source code is organized it won't be useful to them anyway. the submitted report will contain the memory addresses but won't contain the symbols, the developer will have to load them externally from the company's build server. it's literally useless to anyone for anything.
- usr1106 2y ago
  > it's literally useless to anyone for anything. Very helpful for anyone who wants to crack or reverse engineer that app. Not sure why anybody would want to do that. But there could be people with criminal minds having some creative idea. Not trying to say that stripping symbols is the ultimate security measure. But at least I cannot see a reason to keep them, as the parent commenter wrote. Appears as an utterly incompetent software delivery process.
msephton 2y ago
(poster) I had to trim the title to fit HN submission. I would argue it does nothing for the user, and nothing in the app given it can be trimmed with no side-effects.

pzo 2y ago

I encourage everyone to go to app store -> profile -> swipe refresh, and see how heavy all those apps updates on iOS are few examples: Gmail: 570 MB Facebook: 345 MB Booking.com: 260 MB AirAsia: 510 MB Reddit: 330 MB Slack: 400 MB X: 290 MB Google Translate: 180 MB Uber: 480 MB Speedtest: 150 MB It's horrible how heavy all those apps are. I barely can find app update that is less 100 MB.

siquick 2y ago
And to think I was mildly concerned when our app inflated out to 36.8MB recently
- lawgimenez 2y ago
  Our app has ~20K MAU and download size is around 3.5 MB, it was 3.2 MB before though.
  - msephton 2y ago
    Great work! Pass on my thanks to your team. I feel the effort.
- msephton 2y ago
  Well done, keep it up! I also strive to keep my apps small and lean.
lxgr 2y ago
I feel like it’s either this, or some super optimized app that weighs in at <10 MB and does what it should perfectly. I really wish there was a middle ground. Google Docs/Sheets/Slides are particularly infuriating. I’m pretty sure they all contain 90% identical code and assets.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  I like this for simple mobile projects: https://quasar.dev/ https://quasar.dev/ In some cases, going with an SVG icon pack etc. can save a bit of space. =3

PenguinRevolver 2y ago

Breakdown of the app is available here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xeWx https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xe...

usr1106 2y ago
To be exact, that's what they call the X-Ray in their product speech, the breakdown is also there if you click around. But very nice data! Do you know how these examples are made? Is there a way for free uploads of apps or at least browsing those they have? My Web search found https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/android/bumble https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/android/bumble for Android which I am more interested in. No, I am not an app developer. Not considering buying a license just out of general engineering curiosity.

rty32 2y ago

It could just be simply about a bad build system that does not efficiently trim out unused dependencies, or people are using unnecessary dependencies in the first place. Which happens all the time everywhere. And to be honest, I can totally see why this is happening. Santander does not have a lot of incentive to improve this. The distribution of the app package is done by Apple, and they don't charge you by what your file size is or how much bandwidth this uses. They charge you a developer fee and 30% IAP. If there is no (direct) extra cost, and trimming the file size could mean additional work on the developers and may cause things to break if not handled well, someone could be blamed for it. So why take the risk. And actually, it is possible that nobody internally at Santander ever looked into this problem. How do I know? The build system at my company sucks -- tons of waste of build time, memory use, disk space, debugging time, communication etc. I myself have brought up many of the issues. Nothing happened. Why? Because things are working, and nobody wants to do something when there is only risk but little benefit (to them). As of why people aren't being rewarded for saving CI costs, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Retr0id 2y ago
> Santander does not have a lot of incentive to improve this. There is some incentive. A not-insignificant percentage of users won't be able to immediately install it without going through the hassle of finding something else to delete first to free up storage space, adding onboarding friction.
- dangus 2y ago
  This is funny: the idea that banks have the same concerns about “onboarding friction” as high growth startup companies. You know who big banks don’t care about serving? People who are too poor to have free storage space on their phone.
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    Santander has a 9-figure annual ad spend, more than most startups are worth - they definitely care about acquiring new customers. Poor people pay more overdraft fees.

lxgr 2y ago

At this point I’m just assuming that the developers of such apps receive a large gift basket from Apple each Christmas… I’ve definitely upgraded storage sizes for this reason alone at least once.

jshchnz 2y ago

here's the unroll: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1831772650685018352.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1831772650685018352.html

RandallBrown 2y ago

This isn't a surprise at all. Most iOS apps have 4 or 5 analytics frameworks included that are probably at least 50mb each. Airship (maybe the defacto standard framework for push notifications) is over 100mb. Throw in a few pictures and videos and you're very quickly at 613mb.

msephton 2y ago
But that's not what is taking up 613MB here, the details are at the link.
- RandallBrown 2y ago
  Hmm. I must have missed the link. I'm just seeing a single tweet with no details.

usr1106 2y ago

I am old enough to remember times when 100 computer science students did their exercises on a VAX 11/750 with 4 MB of main memory. Admittedly it was a bit laggy when all 15 terminals were in use during peak hours. I don't remember disk sizes. Now main memory is a different story than application size. But in most cases your main memory must be significantly bigger than size of a single application. So for that 4 MB VAX running a 2 MB application might be suitable. Let's reduce the 15 users to one, that's progress over 4 decades... Now the question: What can that 2 MB VAX banking application not do, that the 613 MB iOS application can? * Cryptographic operations have developed. But I am not aware that those used by a banking application are particularly memory hungry. * The screen resolution is different, but banking on 80x25 characters would work just fine at least outside of CJK. * The touch input might be problematic, so we would need to use a Blackberry or Nokia Communicator with physical keyboard. That would not only be a disadvantage IMHO. (The last 2 items are largely influenced by the operating system. But of course that would need to be very different to run on a 4 MB computer.) What else am I missing in this thought experiment? Honest question.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> Now the question: What can that 2 MB VAX banking application not do, that the 613 MB iOS application can? Work on your iPhone? All the bells and whistles of that UI come at a large cost - memory. And why not? The iPhone's got it. A better question might be: why does App A on the iPhone take up about ~10x as much space as the same app on Android? And the answer is probably because iPhone users don't care... If they did, Apple would probably do something about it...
- usr1106 2y ago
  > And why not? > The iPhone's got it. And why not? Let's ruin the planet, we've got it. Apple is more unethical in their resource waste than Google. But Google is very very far from innocent.
  - dangus 2y ago
    How is Apple more unethical than Google on resource waste? Apple supports all their consumer hardware longer than Google. Apple will still let you sync your original iPod with your Mac and purchase music digitally “the old fashioned way.” Good luck using the Google Play Store on your EOL Android device. Google is the one that wasted a whole bunch of plastic and silicon on Stadia controllers before discontinuing the service and giving people an arbitrary deadline to convert the controllers into standard Bluetooth. In what universe is Google less wasteful than Apple?

philipwhiuk 2y ago

This is all a pitch to run Emerge tools in the CI/CD process. So from Santander’s side: Introduce a third party dependency * that has to go through the appropriate auditing * that adds a supply chain attack vector * that likely slows down internal development by adding an extra step to the build process (no you can’t just do it on release builds that would be crazy) * with an added cost All for something most likely no customer (or statistically no customer) ever complains about.

stefan_ 2y ago
Yes, the thing that people who ship 600 MiB apps have in common is an extreme attention to detail in their "software supply chain".
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  Yes, that is the sort of thing you have to care about in banking.
usr1106 2y ago
> This is all a pitch to run Emerge tools in the CI/CD process. True. But still very educational about the current state of computing.
msephton 2y ago
But they can fix the issues that are bloating the app without those tools now that they know about them. Plus, it would be possible to figure most of this out just by looking casually at the size and structure of the IPA they're uploading for distribution.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  > Plus, it would be possible to figure most of this out just by looking casually at the size and structure of the IPA they're uploading for distribution. Which they'd probably do if a statistically significant number of people cared.

is_true 2y ago

I'm a victim of the Santander app in another country and it's not only "large", lot of functionalities are there but when you try to use them it just says "this function is only available on our website". Also it super slow and I have to kill the app a couple of times a week. Except if I have to do a wire transfer I always use another app from a Fintech company.

southernplaces7 2y ago

Then maybe this is a problem with Santander in general, because my own Santander app for Mexico eats over 460MB despite only modest use and I see no reason why it should. I suspect a mountain of bullshit consume tracking bloat and other related nonsense while they offer you their "service" in the background.