Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikeCapone | Hacker News Reader

I think the Stripe app is like 20 megs, Overcast even smaller than that.

Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB.

I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.

I have AdGuard on my phone at ~60MB, you might want to check that.

Strange, the download from the app store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...) is 100 MB, but my install somehow crept up to ~400 (logs, maybe?) over a couple of years of use. I don't have it installed any more, but it's wild how much this varies across devices. What phone do you use? I use a 2016 SE, I wonder if there's a bug that's consume extra space on a device as old (and likely untested by AdGuard) as mine?

My favorite iOS app, Decoupled, is 2.4MB. My favorite Android apps were 5-10x smaller.

Just for some perspective, the entire installer package for the Shareware version Doom took up about 2.39MB of space. This included the EXE and all art assets. The installer for WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) was about 3.6MB. The full on-disk footprint of Microsoft Office 95 was less than 100MB, including all documentation, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

I'm not entirely convinced value-per-byte is a measure of software quality that a lot of users care about, but it undeniably trends down every year.

The one I like is that the Finder icon on macOS is larger than the entire system on the original Mac.

DOOM2.WAD has always been my measuring stick for software size, as I remember how frustrating it was to download such a huge file (15MB!) in the dial-up days. I never did get it to complete - I couldn't justify to my parents that the phone line would be busy for a whole day :)

Thanks for recommending Hyperweb, you've just saved me a ton of space.

Keep in mind that even on the free version, you can add (unlimited?) adlists. I've added some of the most popular uBlock Origin default lists to mine to make the ad blocking even better. It is absolutely insane how many apps Hyperweb replaced for me, too!

I don't think the Stripe app is a good comparison. Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on. Typically with broad support for different currencies, languages, etc, etc. 439mb is obviously not right, but I would expect the app to be fairly large.

> Airline apps have to cover shopping, booking, cancellations, seat selection, loyalty programs, check-in, bar code generation and scanning, and so on.

All of that happens online.

That may be true for some airlines (webviews vs native), but it is not true for many. Boarding passes are probably a good example. It's very typical for that functionality to use something like Apple Wallet integration, and also native widgets to upsell cross-sell boarding/seat upgrades, etc.

While broadly fair, one minor quip, I believe all Wallet passes have to come down from the server. Apps can't make their own, can they?

Passes already in the wallet don't require you to be online. But, what I meant was that there was additional code, thus additional size for all the functionality and ui related to boarding passes, whether or not parts of it don't work offline.

At least the airlines I've worked with prefer native code and UIs for any flow that's either revenue-producing, or likely to create issues on day-of-travel. They tend to use webviews only for things that don't have to be working to sell a ticket or board the aircraft.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com