Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I think the most effective way to fix this systemic problem would be for app stores to start charging developers for app size, both for storage and outbound transfer. And for desktop apps downloaded from websites, all hosting providers and CDNs should start charging for egress like the big cloud providers do, in acknowledgement of the fact that bandwidth isn't free. Yes, I recently migrated some of my company's infrastructure off of AWS, in part so we wouldn't have to pay for egress. I now believe the world would be better off if we didn't have that option.

View on HN

MS did this with the Xbox 360. Developers just stopped updating their games.

If app sizes trend down, it might serve the users well, but it would depress iPhone sales as fewer users would need to upgrade storage.

Which one do you think Apple cares more about?

If App sizes go down, its a win for Apple as well:

1. Faster update downloaded to devices compared to before & to Google/Android. That's a big PR win.

2. Most badly behaving apps have tons of unnecessary process & their binaries. Also storage is taken up by UI assets. If these are streamlined & reusable, the footprint goes down. That means less RAM can still do fine.

> big PR win

But it wouldn't move the sales needle. Nobody is going to switch from Android because they were waiting for smaller download sizes.

> less RAM can still do fine

That's bad for Apple because it discourages upgrading.

Regarding PR, it adds ammo to their oft repeated claim of "best mobile OS" (Not that I fully agree)

Size and RAM (and indirectly a modest battery life gain) will be a win for whoever uses, regardless of our personal views on this matter. When developers throw in big frameworks mindlessly, they assume best case use. Minimalist and efficient coding will actually win across the board whichever way you look.

As far as Apple devices go, they are getting support way longer than Android flagships. Apple is devious possibly in many ways, but they don't get to win by 'planned obsolescence'. Much rather the opposite: as new generations of devices come in with newer hardware, they don't have to crazily support a lot of firmware and instruction sets. Only the ones which satisfies the newer frameworks. If they did, they will turn out as another Intel (which famously supported a lot of opcodes all the way back to 386). Their fanbase has some (valid) strength based on a lot of older generation devices still getting OS upgrades which they might normally wouldn't have.

With the iPhone now ~silently deleting apps you don't use that often, and re-installing on demand I don't think this is as big a push as it used to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com