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Comment by micampe | Hacker News Reader

This didn't really tell me why Facebook needs 400 people to work on the iOS app and 75 commits per hour.

Facebook doesn't have a dedicated iOS team, rather each product team (feed, photos, search, messages, etc.) commits code to the app. This allows updates to be made faster and more consistent since there aren't multiple product teams for each product for each platform, but it also leads to having a large number of contributors, commits and duplicate code.

What's crazy is that WhatApp has 4 Android engineers and 1 billion downloads.

I would suggest that WhatsApp does a whole lot less.

I agree, and I think that focus is actually a strength of the product.

> What's crazy is that WhatApp has 4 Android engineers

Interesting. Any source for this claim? And also what's the full size of Whatsapp team?

Jan Koum on Twitter when their app crossed 1 billion users on the Google Play Store[0]. Not sure what their current team size is, but it seems like it's around 40-50. Last year at Startup School, Jan said the backend team 7-8 people on the backend[1].

[0] - https://twitter.com/jankoum/status/575740639444336640

[1] - https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=1272

Surely most of these commits are either automated, or similar in nature (i.e., adding some static resources to some file).

> Here are the stats for the week starting 24 August this year.In that week: 429 unique contributors 2823 total commits

Right below it:

> Doesn’t include commits to bump version numbers, add translated strings etc - actual number is over 4,000

Any way you slice it that is a chaotic pace of change.

I doubt they have 400 people dedicated to the iOS app. I think it's more that 400 people happened to have touched the iOS app.

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