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Comment by firloop | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that the size of the app listed on the App Store is not actually the size of the app on device. Apple automatically removes unneeded assets [0] from the bundles based on the device that's downloading it. I just downloaded Facebook on my iPhone X and the app size came out to 314.5mb [1].

[0]: "App thinning" https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/qa/qa1795/_index...

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/lTJhMbx

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That's not a significant difference...

I would say so; it's more than a third smaller than the figure quoted in the OP's title.

It's well over half again larger than any other app on my device, even after "thinning". Yes, it's a big savings, but it's still ludicrously large. At that point, I think it meaningfully falls into the "distinction without a difference" bucket.

It's still the same order of magnitude, which is still way higher than is reasonable.

Tbh that is a significant decrease. Find me a compression algorithm that can compress already compressed binary data by 30% and I'll give you a million dollars (after I make a few million dollars myself).

Please, it’s a big drop in terms of percentage, but it’s absurdly large for what the app does.

Oh I completely agree it's bloated as fuck, but your statement that it's not a significant decrease is untrue.

Edit: sorry, just saw you're not the person I replied to.

No worries :) and yeah, i just don’t get it. I oversaw the development of a high ranking app for the last 6 years and it was a massive focus of ours to keep it small for as long as possible. We saw that conversion dropped as the app grew, we assume as the size grew it encouraged people to wait for wifi or their next months data before they would start the download.

Not so much for iOS as on Android, because Apple doesn't sell devices with nearly zero space; some people are constantly out of space -- you don't want to be listed high on sort current apps by size.

Our research indicated the issue was more around data transfer and access to wifi, less around storage.

Well, bloated af before, bloated af after... I guess you can argue about the definition of significant but at that point I think you’ve lost the argument by default.

> Find me a compression algorithm that can compress already compressed binary data by 30%

App thinning does not compress the app; it just pulls out stuff that doesn’t match the device the app is being installed on. And keep in mind that most application binaries are far from random data.

I know, I'm just using compression as an argument to show how significant 30%+ is.

Still way larger than reported Android `.apk`.

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