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Comment by gazab | Hacker News Reader

I want to hear the Android side of this story!

Android was a much easier story, Still had some binary size and method count issues but we were able to overcome them thanks to another brilliant engineer we had in the team in SF who worked on Android.

The Android apk is 56.9 MB for my device, while the iOS app is 331.3 MB. What accounts for the 6x difference?

Courage.

I assume that the constraints placed on the Android team are much higher, as that market seems like it would be much more sensitive of app sizes.

That is true, but what specifically is the iOS app getting in that extra quarter gigabyte? What couldn't they throw away to get under 200 MB at all?

I honestly have not been provided with a good answer beyond "we just didn't spent resources to do it".

Swift produces far larger binaries

APK is now more a delivery package format than a real executable format now.

On recent Android devices, the APK wil be recompiled to machine code on the device after a small number of runs (to gather code statistics).

So you are comparing an apple and a robot.

IPA is also a delivery package format. The big difference I am aware of is that IPA encrypts binaries, which will make them less compressible.

Bytecode is very compact compared to native machine code. Android converts on the fly on the device. That's at least a part of it.

https://twitter.com/ZacSweers/status/1337112019116453892?s=2...

(disclaimer: this is me)

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