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Comment by bognition | Hacker News Reader

Really interesting thanks for sharing. Its not surprising to see the size of iOS grow so dramatically over the last 10 years. Some may so bloat, but i'd say it reflects the iPhone/iPad's evolution into a device that is integrated deeply into our lives.

Just look at how much space fonts are taking up in iOS14. My hunch is that reflects a growing set of emoji and support for hundreds (thousands?) of alphabets. It's hard to call that bloat.

Also initially I was surprised to see the networking code take up so much volume, but that also makes sense. I can only imaging how much custom code is needed to ensure a solid connection with the hundreds of wireless carriers around the world.

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A long time ago I was part of a team that did a competitive analysis of the first iOS when it came out. One of the key takeaways from that report that the team decided on was how much Apple had wasted space with unnecessarily high quality UI elements.

Even at the time, I remember thinking this is what makes it look so special, we shouldn't write it off just because we're used to scraping for every byte at the cost of shiny graphics.

Sadly the optimization masters won the day, and didn't see the writing on the wall that Apple did.

Where was this, a competitor like Nokia?

> My hunch is that reflects a growing set of emoji and support for hundreds (thousands?) of alphabets. It's hard to call that bloat.

I find it incredibly easy to call emojis bloat.

I actually use some emojis in my notes to make them a bit more visual, and doesn't require to import an image so it's dead-simple to backup.

Emojis are incredibly well-loved by many people and used all the time. So bloat for you, perhaps, but a critical feature for many!

No kidding, it's the reason many people update their phones.

> it's the reason many people update their phones.

Not being able to install new fonts and being forced to ‘upgrade’ (in a non-modular fashion, being forced into a whole bunch of new ‘features‘ that push older devices to early deaths - planned obsolescence - which leads to tons of toxic e-waste [1]) is peak corporate black-box fuckery.

And before someone says “don't use it then, no one is forcing you to use it”, just remember that corps like Apple kick away the ladder they climbed up themselves: blocking others to create alternatives by privatizing and monopolizing new discoveries (often originally funded by government grants [2]) through the use of Patents and Copyrights and other ‘intellectual property’ protections given by the Intellectual Property office.

Public money, public code!

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

[2] https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

I think Apple is behaving reasonably here, at least, I don't think they're deliberately breaking older devices w/ updates, so I wouldn't apply the phrase "planned obsolescence," exactly. But I'll conceded that normal programmer laziness (i.e., optimize just enough to make it run acceptably on latest hardware) ends up having the same effect.

Software patents & much of copyright seem to me to be to be hurting more than they are helping.

I'd love to experiment w/ ditching those.

While we're at it, we should legally mandate that devices are open to 3rd party app stores and be "jailbroken" by anyone that cares to do so.

(It's pretty crazy that the dominant artist medium of our time is controlled by a single, outrageously censorious entity. Thank god we've got the web, at least. (For now.))

For me I think emojis help more clearly show the emotion of text being written.

Sometimes it’s not obvious in which way text can be interpreted so it helps give context that’s missing in non-face to face chat

We were constantly told in school "sarcasm does not communicate well over text!"

Between , , and WrItInG lIkE tHiS, the situation has greatly improved since then.

EDIT: Aparently HN is not displaying the eyeroll, facepalm and upside down smiley emoji.

> EDIT: Aparently HN is not displaying the eyeroll, facepalm and upside down smiley emoji.

IIRC HN strips out most things not in the BMP.

Why is it that you think emojis 'clearly show emotion'? Do they have well-defined meaning? Where does one look up the emotional context that a specific emoji adds?

> Where does one look up the emotional context that a specific emoji adds?

emojipedia.org or similar emoji dictionaries. Like words, meaning can vary based on context and audience, and linguistic drift can/does happen with emojis too.

You might find this interesting: https://slate.com/technology/2019/07/because-internet-excerp...

Do facial expressions have well-defined meaning? Where does one look up the emotional context that a specific facial expression conveys when you say a thing to a person in real life?

How can you be sure that emojis aren't conveying emotional context to you? It's not possible to rewind reality to the time before you received that text, and replay it again without the emoji to see the difference. I posit that emojis do in fact add emotional context, and if you could run that experiment, that you would have a harder time deciding sarcasm, self-deprecation, humor in general, and a whole host of other emotions. They are becoming part of the textual grammar just like facial expressions provide grammatical context for sign language and can totally change the meaning of the same hand sign.

Either you learn the emotional contexts, or you don't and suffer the social consequences. I don't see much that's changed, just that technology is still way behind in-person communication. Seems to be catching up little by little, though.

>Do they have well-defined meaning?

Emotions don't have either. That's why emojis show them well. Plus people have learned for millenia to read other people, and face emojis are basically glorified magnified face expressions...

Directly from the article on iOS 14:

“Fonts are now counting for less than 6 % of the size”

And I assume emojis are part of that relatively small percentage. (‘Apple Color Emoji.ttc’ takes up 208 megabytes on my Mac, assuming that’s how they implement emojis.)

You’d fault wallpapers for bloat before emojis. Those things are massive.

That bloat is responsible for getting manufacturers to support Unicode, and getting consumers to update their OS (and often get critical security updates in the process).

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