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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> it is fair to say this area of app development is complicated to understand.

Not really, but it's also actively suppressed. If they can make as much money with a 439MB app as they can with a 10MB app, why would they waste any time or effort trying to save you a few minutes of download time? If anything, I expect this to get worse, as management is constantly pushing for adoption of frameworks that (in their imagination) speed up time-to-market.

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The size of the app is hurting their on-boarding funnel, they just can't see it. The most likely place you are going to download the United App is in the airport just before your flight, on mediocre free wifi.

United really wants that download to be fast, so customers can get the app before getting on the plane. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of grumpy people your that your flight attendants have to deal with.

Flight attendants don't report to software engineering managers though.

Yes, its an organizational problem, but one that a healthy company should be able to figure out.

It's likely to also be one of the first apps I decide to uninstall when my phone's storage becomes somewhat limited.

I’ve been able to download the app over plane WiFi for free. It used to be a little-known hack for free internet once upon a time.

That'd probably work a whole lot better if the app wasn't 439MB.

I've been on a few budget carrier flights that have skipped the headrest display for an airline app. They haven't had external Internet access, as it's just served over a local WiFi connection from an onboard server, so you must install the app before you take off.

They spend a lot of money trying to offer competitive features on their flights - like maybe watching streaming videos on the plane enabled by the app. To the extent that passengers can't finish a 439MB download of the app just before they board, the app size wastes investments in services of the airline.

You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager. How does this factor into this year's bonus?

Increase of passenger engagement metrics on app delivered video services?

If more people download and run the app, then surely you can justify further investment in the product?

Southwest has a webapp, lol.

Don’t these airplane steaming services have a local copy of all the movies on some storage device inside the plane?

I wonder how crazy it would be to cache the iOS app… like maybe they run a caching transparent proxy on the plane… or some crazy relationship with a CDN that treats each plane as an edge node.

I dunno, it would probably be pretty be way to expensive to set up something like that to be worthwhile.

Apple content caching is built into MacOS. A Mac mini connected to the in-plane wifi would likely do the trick.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204675

You still need an initial internet connection before the caching though.

Actively suppressed by whom? Is there some shadowy cabal of executive saboteurs gleefully cackling at the idea of getting away with a bloated app? Because it’s plainly obvious that a bloated app benefits neither the consumer nor the business.

It costs consumer time waiting for a large app to download, and it wastes consumer money by burning up quota on metered connections. It costs the business because apps have a size limit, and hitting those limits means no more features until you can reduce that size.

> Is there some shadowy cabal of executive saboteurs gleefully cackling at the idea of getting away with a bloated app?

Yes? Have you actually seen this space?

There are tons of shops that get this stuff outsourced to them.

They have executives who gleefully cackle at the idea of hiring the bottom of the barrel developers who wouldn't even know to strip symbols, and cackle at the idea of cracking whips at them so that even if they did know they wouldn't have the bandwidth to do it. All while charging hundreds of dollars per billable hour.

Looking through the old texts I have from my phone provider, it would cost me €4 to download even 10MB over roaming data if I was in the USA ("Welcome to USA ... data is €0.40/MB"). That might be worthwhile in some cases.

If I'd perhaps been connecting from a different country with United flights, there's no way I'd download it over roaming data "Welcome to Jamaica ... data is €3.05/MB".

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