Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Somebody posted a breakdown of Facebook.app earlier this year. Looks like a lot of duplicated assets in there (too many developers / teams working on different parts of the app?)

http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082491

View on HN

From what I understand the FB app is bloated because it's shipped with all experimental features that are toggled on/off with flags by all the teams that are working on the app. So yeah, that adds up.

And because nobody will uninstall the Facebook app because of that.

I did. Too much space consumption plus notification spam got me to delete it from my device. I'd get rid of Messenger, too, if it weren't so central to my social life.

I did

Facebook used to throttle devices once a week to make devs dogfood bandwidth in developing nations--I think it's much more top of mind there than we give them credit for.

I don't think Facebook forces them to download new versions that day. Because responsiveness is clearly more top of mind with them than download time/cost.

As a developer, I only use my app on 64kbps speeds.

At those speeds, the only webpages still working are a few blogs and HN, and the only apps still working are whatsapp, some special irc apps optimized for that such as quasseldroid or irccloud, some reddit readers, and, if you have a lot of time, imgur.

Most of these also have app sizes in the kilobytes to single digit megabytes, making downloading possible within of a few minutes on 64kbps (essentially dialup).

Those speeds are basically guaranteed anywhere in the solar system, and if your app works with that, it basically works everywhere.

The dark side of version pinning - many slightly different copies of the same thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com