Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeeWEE | Hacker News Reader

Normal apps are around 10 to 20mb, which is still big. But the reason for this is support for different screen resolutions. Images of different sizes are bundled with the app, even though the phone only needs on of them.

Vector graphics will solve this, but is not mainstream yet.

The facebook android app is 88MB (zipped), i did check the APK of why its so big:

90mb of code 30mb of assetes (javascript, metadata, librtc, big json files (animations)) 30mb of resources (images)

View on HN

> Vector graphics will solve this, but is not mainstream yet.

Then you're trading off battery life vs. space. Vector graphics can be far more expensive to render than bitmaps.

Is it possible maybe to render out the vector graphics once (on the device) and then have them pre-rendered (cached) until they change?

I guess it would add considerable overhead for a negligible improvement in size (compared to just shipping all images) for most devices.

EDIT: Too slow...

Why vectors can't be pre-rendered and cached?

That's what a bitmap asset is.

Except that a cache is disposable, and disposed often in practice.

But you don't have to redraw them all the time.

Yep, agree with the image bundling issues. We have tried to keep our footprint as small as possible in our own product (3D modeling application https://3dc.io) and are clocking in at 8mb on iOS. Out of that about 3MB are icons/splash images and other media. Regarding vector graphics, we couldn't use them, as they cause bugs and flickering with css animations in iOS Safari. But we do generate everything we can procedurally (primitives, colorpicker etc.) which saves a ton of space.

I don't know the status of iOS, but Android has done some work on sending diffs on updates, so real sizes should be smaller: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/07/improvemen...

Doesn't do anything for size on disk, but should help network a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com