72 MB is egregious for a Twitter-clone MVP. For comparison, the full-featured Twitter app itself is 40 MB. The Mastodon app weighs in at 1.6 MB.
I'm a little disappointed they didn't go purely React Native here. It would have been a great showcase as they ultimately own the React Native project.
The app's target consumer is advertisers, and the app is this way because of those advertisers and their concerns. I'm not sure the person using the app is a "consumer" from Meta's point of view, more like a "digital subscriber."
However, the RN architecture does make it incredibly easy to bind to components written in native code - or use react native components from within native code
It was never Meta’s intention that something would not contain app-specific native code
The official Mastodon app weighs in at 70MB on my iOS device right now.
The store listing puts it at 58MB: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon-for-iphone-and-ipad/i...
Nobody cares.
They say things like "my internet cap is reached", "my battery is drained faster", "my phone is slow" and a million other things that oblivious and clueless programmers don't hear because they can only hear when someone talks about megabytes, cpu cycles, RAM etc.
"The customer is always right in matters of taste."
Downloads are one thing. People are curious. Will they keep it?
1. The vast majority of the world now has access to very high or unlimited data packs. This is hardly the big issue that HackerNews makes it out to be.
2. Threads' main user base is Instagram. An hour of watching Instagram Reels is more data than the entire Threads app. I highly doubt Instagram users are data strapped.
> "my battery is drained faster"
App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out. If you're saying Threads is not optimized, I disagree. And again, considering the main targeted user base is Instagram and Twitter, Threads is going to be significantly better than either app in terms of battery life (little to no video options right now)
> "my phone is slow"
Same as above, basically.
Source? This seems like a really first-world country thing to say.
I live in Canada which has some of the worst data plans, and even on the 5GB plans I wouldn't bat an eye on using an app like Threads.
First world countries tend to have lower data caps and higher cost per GB on average: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cost-of-mobile-data-worldwi...
Those users already have Instagram. Threads is competing against Twitter clones.
> App size has nothing to do with how much battery is drained out.
Larger apps use more radio, use more CPU for decompression, use more flash writes on updates. All use battery. Decompression and writes for background updates slow the phone. The additional flash writes lead to wear causing storage to become slower even when the app is not being used or updated.