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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I get why smaller companies use generic janky frameworks to throw up an app quickly and keep maintenance costs down. But why doesn't Amazon have the most streamlined and elegant app on the planet? They have the resources, expertise, and scale for it to make sense to invest heavily.

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Amazon isn't going to care about the size of the app if consumers don't care. And the majority don't probably even realize.

But if 10% or even just 1% of users do care, it's absolutely worth it for Amazon. That's the point.

Will that 1% stop buying from Amazon, or will they just use the website instead? Gut instinct (and personal experience) says they're not really losing anything here.

If I had a choice between an app and a web site the web site almost always wins. ("app" rhymes with "crap")

Yes, I think people absolutely will buy less from Amazon if the mobile experience is just a bit slower or more annoying. We know from both other companies and Amazon's behavior that reducing friction has substantial impact on amount purchased.

Will you actually not buy things from Amazon due to their app size? If the answer is that you’ll continue spending money with them, you don’t care.

It would stopping app usage and promote website usage.

even if they buy less because of the bloated app, you're still balancing dev resources against profit margins. It might just not be worth the effort for that extra tiny bit of revenue the app will generate by being small.

But that's my point about scale: if the revenue-vs-developer-time tradeoff makes it worth it for any company to make a good app, it will be worth it for Amazon. They are so huge that a 0.01% increase in sales translates to many millions of dollars per year.

Everything else they do also scales though. Not proportionally to each other, but I wouldn't be surprised if putting their devs on, say, better product recommendations is much more revenue than app size.

Then they should hire more devs.

Again, the cost is likely not be worth it.

It would also be foolish to think we know the answers of how to make amazon more money from our comfy arm chairs.

The push to get everyone on the company app will be less so. Why they want everyone on the app I don't understand but whatever those reasons are they won't benefit from it

Again, have you ever in your life wanted to buy a product from Amazon but then didn’t because of their app size? If not, as far as Amazon is concerned you don’t care about the app size in any meaningful way.

I absolutely have given up on trying to buy something from them because their mobile app crashed, which is the kind of thing that could be due to them mindlessly lashing together a bunch of app frameworks rather than building something streamlines. I've also given up when trying to do something really simple like set precise price filters that are bafflingly not available on mobile.

Crashes are not what we are talking about here.

My comment that started the sub-thread you are replying to specifically generalized the question, and I did so because I think app size, stability, and general well-built-ness are tightly connected.

> I get why smaller companies use generic janky frameworks to throw up an app quickly and keep maintenance costs down. But why doesn't Amazon have the most streamlined and elegant app on the planet? They have the resources, expertise, and scale for it to make sense to invest heavily.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30613893#30614531

Another way to say this: the root reason for app bloat is something that causes general app badness, so the question "Why is the app so bloated?" is not well explained by your implied answer "Because users do not reduce purchases on account of app size".

Fair. And for what it’s worth I would very much like for the app stores to penalize apps that are bloated. Institute a 20MB limit on the app size unless it’s a paid app or has specifically applied for a large app permission and justified why it needs more storage. That would drive developers away from bloat.

But I think large apps and apps that crash frequently is correlated but not strongly. I have never seen Amazon crash. I have seen 4MB apps crash. Bloat by itself just means I have to buy a more expensive phone to fit everything I want, which sucks but isn’t the end of the world.

I don't have amazon on my phone due to the bloat and opt to wait until I get in front of a desktop. Which means probably 80% of potential impulse buys from my phone are forgotten by the time i'm back home and they've missed out on sales. It's lost opportunity that they can't measure and so it will forever be swept under a rug.

You might be the exception here but (a) Amazon.com is accessible from your mobile phone, do you not use that? And (b) “impulse buys from my phone” is indeed hard to quantify. How do we know that you’d make any impulse buys if the app was in front of you? Going to their website on a phone is as easy if not easier than using their app and the content is identical. Yet you don’t say that you make impulse buys that way. 80% of 0 is still 0.

I doubt even 0.1% users care.

I use the Amazon app regularly and my phone has enough storage to fit the app more that 600 times. It's not a particularly expensive phone either.

Given that I'm not sure why I should care as long as it works.

As a dev I agree it's technically interesting to find out why, as a user I think it just doesn't matter.

You have over 100 gig of storage space free on your 'old' phone? I just upgraded a year ago to 32 total gigs.

I can see why jumbo app wouldn't affect you.

I've got 7t on my desktop. Would you mind if chrome automatically updated to 1t. It's not a new computer pre-owned 2015

I don't know your exact context, but a ~$200 phone from Samsung comes with 64GB of storage...

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a32_5g-10648.php

You still can't fit 600 Amazon apps. You would need over 100 gigs.

Are we doing reductio an absurdum here?

Or just trying to figure out how we can do "smartphone death by a 1000 Amazon apps"? :-))

I have a Realme GT Neo2 which comes with 128gig at about 330€. Of course if it occupies a significant portion, it would be an issue. On the other hand when I look at the kind of updates that Steam and Playstation are pulling, 200mb feels like nothing.

I'm confident the same question has been asked countless times before when it comes to their website as well. I don't have any answers, I don't know either. Familiarity I guess?

Businesses don’t want irreplaceable anything, including engineers.

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