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Comment by alien_ | Hacker News Reader

I also find it unbelievable to have so much code for a single app, this is approaching the level of magnitude of OS code bases: if you think that the entire Linux kernel is around 28M lines so roughly 15x the Uber app.

The binary size is also from the same ballpark as the entire Windows 98 needed for installation.

I'm glad Uber is doing something about this, but in my opinion Apple should tackle this across their entire ecosystem at the toolchain level, devices with less than 64GB of storage can quickly run out of space with just a handful of applications installed.

Unfortunately it's in Apple's interest that people buy devices with more storage, so I don't expect them to invest much effort in this.

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> I also find it unbelievable to have so much code for a single app

This point comes up in a lot of discussions about non-trivial software. My theory is that it's of the same nature as underestimating development complexity when planning your own work as an engineer. Project after project, everyone (me included) keeps forgetting that they _will_ spend 80% of their time (and code) dealing with small issues and edge cases in their product.

Who hasn't thought at some point that they can write a Twitter clone in a weekend, or hasn't been fascinated by the amount of simple bugs in someone's else product, thinking that they are obviously just bad engineers.

For both technical and UX reasons it's in Apple's interest to make app updates lightweight, and those likely far outweigh any driving force they might have to encourage people to move to higher storage sizes.

(1) if it takes a long time for people to update their apps, that's a crap experience that people are having on Apple devices, which goes directly against the grain of Apple's whole value proposition ("use our stuff and your life will be great!")

(2) For technical reasons, it's in Apple's interest to reduce app image sizes; less strain on infrastructure, easier to scale, etc. (300MB * 1.2M (# of app store reviews) = 360 terabytes transiting their networks whenever Uber pushes an update. All that has to be load balanced, CDN'd, etc.)

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