The Apps are Too Damn Big | Hacker News Reader

The Apps are Too Damn Big

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176 pointsburnblue125 comments

I have a feeling that Apple might just start to run into the kinds of realities MS and others have been living with for years. Either they choose to piss off millions of users of older devices or figure out how to allow for evolution without causing problems for the installed base. Or, maybe they don't.

As an iDevice user I am glad that I chose to buy all my devices with the absolute max storage available. Everything I have has 64GB. So, we are good for a little bit.

As a developer I cringe at the situation. I am currently working on an app that has about 400 graphics files that will ship with the app. If you do it their way you have to produce each one of these files in four different resolutions. This means that the image directory is now huge. It is three times larger than a scenario where we would have app bundles customized for each device.

In looking at the problem we decided to do the following. All of our files are produced at what would be @2X resolution but are named without the @2X. We are going to ship the app with just 400 files at a single resolution instead of 1600 files at four different resolutions. In the end, if you do the math, your app bundle will be significantly smaller due to the significant reduction in size of the images directory.

As far as performance is concerned, the images work very well all they way back to iPod touch v2.0 devices. No issues there. So, that's the plan.

Maybe what Apple is pushing all of us towards is a scenario where we are forced to detect device type and capabilities and load resources accordingly on app first run. Think about this for a moment. Now their servers don't have to push out so much content and you will have to foot the bill for your free graphics-intensive app getting three million downloads. I could be off base here. But, I just don't see a way to deal with this unless you are willing to ship your app with thousands of files, most of which will never be used by the device the app is installed on.

I also think it's high time that apple put out an iDevice with the ability to expand memory capacity in the field. I know, I know, they want to control it all. They are big enough to have custom Flash chips made with all the encryption they want so people can't move the flash chips from phone to phone and steal software.

Happy coding.

The first thing to go is always small size. In the modern age of cavernous storage and plenty of memory, it is nearly always the first thing to completely throw out the window. I don't expect Apple to reverse this.

400 graphic files! It must be a game of some sort, right?

Yup. It's probably closer to 500 files, but about 400 are affected by the quadrupling of files issue.

"detect device type and capabilities and load resources accordingly on app first run."

That is not sufficient. You also would have to detect the case where a backup is restored to a device with a different resolution (could even be a lower resolution)

"you will have to foot the bill for your free graphics-intensive app getting three million downloads."

Not necessarily. The App Store could have provisions for doing these kinds of downloads. Because of the backup issue, I even think it would have to have support there, given that Apple would want to prevent the cases "sorry, cheapGames.com's server is awfully slow" or "sorry, junkSite.com's server has disappeared; we cannot get you the graphics for that game you bought anymore" (site names made up; if they exist in real life, the name match is coincidental)

Can't you do some sort of custom image compression? Bundle app with the highest resolution images, then scale them down, arithmetically subtract from the respective image and pack and ship the difference. Just gzip or paq it, and see what the savings are like. If it works (and my gut feeling is that it would), then reconstruct lo-res images on the fly when they are needed.

iOS already supports PNG8+a, which is much smaller than regular PNGs and a"CgBi" PNG variant that Xcode uses.

PNG8 is 256 colors, that's pretty limiting in very many cases. CgBI - I just looked it up - appears to be a speed optimization rather than a space one.

At least in web apps, a good part (I'd say 60-80%) of image assets can be converted almost lossly to 8-bits, including gradients/shadows (you can have alpha transparency).

Automatic scaling doesn't work very well. You can find numerous design blogs showing you in great detail why it looks slightly shoddy if you scale from 512x512 down to 128x128 or 64x64, and how below 64x64 you just get into illegibility. For your app to look great you need hand tweaked assets for most resolutions. http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/708404794/ios-app-icon-sizes http://bjango.com/articles/designingforretina2/

No, you don't understand. Of course, automatic scaling doesn't work.

Prepare two images - 512x512 and 32x32. Scale first one down to 32x32, subtract it from the second one and this will yield a arithmetic, per-pixel difference. Compress it. Now store 512x512 image and the compressed diff with an app. With these two, you will then be able to recreate original 32x32 (by scaling down 512x512 and applying the diff). And I am making an (educated) guess here that the compressed diff will take less space than the actual 32x32 image.

If you did dynamic downloads you cold then run out of storage while doing this,mwhich would be a terrible experience.

Vector graphics help in some cases.

Would it be possible to ship with 1600 files, and then delete all assets when the download is complete, or at first run? That way you have one version of your app, and are ensured that the right size gets on your client. The download will remain large, but the storage requirements will only be high a short period of time.

Nope. The assets are part of the app bundle, which can't be modified. Doing so would break the code signature (DRM).

That is unfortunate.

I see people suggesting going with SVG or resizing a high resolution image, but there was a good post not long ago about the problem with SVG and blindly resizing. You really need your images tweaked on a per-size basis.

I can imagine you can get away with automatically resizing iPad HD -> iPad, but going down to the relatively tiny sizes for the smaller screens would be a bad idea IMO.

> I have a feeling that Apple might just start to run into the kinds of realities MS and others have been living with for years.

Why would they run into these realities now? Apple's been around just as long as Microsoft, and they have been pissing off their customer base with poor backwards compatibility the whole time. The scale is much larger now, I'll give you that, but the relentless forward-thinking is what has allowed Apple to get into the dominant position they are in now. Microsoft by contrast, got bogged down with the enterprise where large IT departments put them between a rock and a hard place by refusing to upgrade if they didn't support whatever byzantine legacy application infrastructure they were running. Even to this day where Microsoft realizes they need innovation, they are still forced to hedge their bets with this hybrid Windows 8 Metro crap.

Mark my words, this problem of app size is a tempest in a teapot. Given current trends, most iPads will be 3rd gen within a year, and in a couple years, the first iPad will fall off the iOS upgrade cycle. For every customer that Apple loses because they demand backward compatibility, they'll gain ten with the latest new shiny.

The reason Apple will not do anything this problem is not out of planned obsolescence or greed. All else being equal they would be happy for you to have unlimited space on your iPad. But to solve it is non-trivial and does not push their product forward. To the contrary, it adds complexity that will inevitably slow their product development, which runs directly contrary to their modus operandi.

This comment is brilliantly introspective into the culture of Apple and in the benefits of leaving behind obsolescence.

Of course, I agree with what you are saying.

What I am saying is that these issues will become more and more pressing now that they are operating at a much larger scale than in prior years. In the past they could piss-off their cult followers and move on. I am not sure this is the case today. I think it might be reasonable to assume that normal folks --the bulk of the people buying iDevices--, not tech guys or cult members, will not take kindly to their 16 GB iPhone becoming obsolete simply because Apple released an iPad with more resolution. They would feel that this is absurd, and rightly so. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with older devices. Techies are different. I buy crap I don't really need just 'cause it's cool and sometimes because I want to actively support the company doing the cool stuff. Normal folk are far more practical than that.

If a normal person has a lesser-storage iPhone and, overnight, half their apps go away because they wont fit, they will not run out and buy a new phone. They'll be pissed. This will be particularly true if some mainstream media outlet grabs ahold of the reasons that led to this and outs the story to the general public.

There's another angle to this as well: Trash. Now Apple is in a position to generate, quite literally, mountains of trash based on decisions to not support older devices. I am not an environmental extremist by any measure, but I certainly don't like the idea of millions of perfectly good devices ending-up in the trash bin due to a bad tech decision.

> ... will not take kindly to their 16 GB iPhone becoming obsolete simply because Apple released an iPad with more resolution.

The vast majority of normals will never even realize this is the case. Plus, even if they do, people are well conditioned to the obsolescence of technology. I mean more people buy a new PC before they re-install Windows when things get unbearably slow, and if we had a graph of how often people upgrade their phones, I don't think we'd see much to support your point.

Now if the media decides to latch onto this (which I wouldn't doubt given the fervor for a juice Apple scandal), then it might piss off a few people, but do you really think that people will be convinced to trade in their iPads for pitchforks over this? What percentage of people are really not going to be able to update their apps anyway? If this really became a media problem then Apple might move to address it, but I stand by my written and attributed assertion that this is a non-issue for Apple and will not affect their bottom line or move them to any action other than to perhaps go 32/64/128 for the next iPad.

"But to solve it is non-trivial"

No, it's trivial. Device-dependent DRM-signed packages. Either the common part is duplicated in each device's version, or app store downloads can consist of two packages.

Actually no it's not. Right now you have one package for an app, done. If you have multiple packages you have to think about getting the right one to the right device, so Mac => iOS syncing becomes more complicated. And that's just off the top of my head.

You are committing the common developer error of underestimating complexity. But when you get in there, I assure you, having one package per app is dramatically simpler.

I don't understand why "universal binaries" exist at all on iOS. On desktops where the app space is more "free" it has a purpose, but it's not like users are regularly moving apps from one iDevice to another -- so what on earth is the point of having three different things altogether? The much more intelligent solution would have been to simply allow developers to upload 3 different binaries, but only present it as one on the app store. Then the app store correctly downloads the correct one depending on your device (iTunes can keep all three if it wants or whatever), and then there is no need for the app store to muck around in your app internals or anything.

How many developers are willing to create and upload 3 different versions of their app? I seem to remember reading a thread here on HN complaining about that...

Would Apple allow an app maker to release their app for only newer iPads and iPhones, and not for the older devices? (I have no idea...)

It would require no extra work on the developer's part. The 4 binaries could just be bundled in a "super" bundle and still even look like one thing and keep the ".app" extension. So we could actually keep everything as it is (code and resource wise), then when you hit compile, it simply makes 4 copies: 1 for iPhone (non-retina) which includes the .xibs for iPhone and non-HD images, one for iPhone HD (same but with HD images), one for iPad (blah blah) and one for iPad HD. It then shoves those into MyApp.app. That gets uploaded to iTunes as normal, but then only MyApp.app/Real-iPhone-HD.app gets actually downloaded to your phone for when you buy it.

What I'm asking for isn't crazy: You can kind of do this today by shipping a separate iPad and iPhone app (you can't separate non-HD and HD). The main thing I'm asking for is for the App Store to recognize that they are the same thing without forcing me physically combine them.

> You can kind of do this today by shipping a separate iPad and iPhone app (you can't separate non-HD and HD)

And it's bloody inconvenient for the user who has to buy and keep half a dozen identical applications.

Right that's the whole point of my post. I'm saying its technically possible to separate them - Apple should then do the presentation work of showing them as the same on the store and pretending they're one app.

I never owned an iDevice so I'm not sure the analogy stands but I believe the Ubuntu Software Center does something similar to what you're describing. You get the same 'app store' whatever version of Ubuntu you are running but when you install an 'app' it silently downloads the package targeted at your Ubuntu version.

Google Play supports this, which is mainly used for tablet vs phone, but could be used for different ARM architectures.. http://developer.android.com/guide/market/publishing/multipl...

There's an increasing number of MIPS based Android devices out these days, so hopefully they can handle that too...

I thought all Android apps ran in a Dalvik VM. What do you mean by "could be used for different ARM architectures"? Isn't Java bytecode independent of the underlying architecture?

The Android Native Development Kit allows you to write normal C code and compile it for ARM devices.

Good point, though I'd say different architectures rather than different ARM architectures, now that we have Android/x86 in the wild, too.

Yeah, but Ubuntu is professional, well designed, and well made - by people who truly care about their users. You can't hold Apple up to the same high standards... they're just not in the same league.

I suspect that the real problem is that some people download every app that interests them with the words FREE and LITE in the title.

No, we have less than 4 pagefuls of apps on our (admittedly 16GB) 1st-gen iPad, and space is pretty tight. No music and we only keep around about 1-3 hours of video at a time.

Games are by far the worst of course, but I'm sure part of that is down to the higher-res textures for iPad2/3 which are useless on the first iPad's much weaker GPU. (the difference is likely even worse between iPhone4S and iPhone 3GS or older) Adding a higher-res mip level for each texture in a game will increase the size of all textures by about 155%[1]. So in principle a 16GB/32GB non-retina iPad could store at least as many apps as a 32GB/64GB retina one, respectively. (not counting savings from losing all the iPhone/iPod touch assets, which will be big for non-OpenGL apps)

The iOS app update mechanism is also pretty broken when you're low on disk space: to update large apps, you have to delete the old version (deleting any of your data in said app) and reinstall with the new one, if both of them don't fit side-by-side on your device.

And as an app developer I'm already so used to jumping through ridiculous hoops to get apps onto the app store, so tagging files for different device types seems straightforward enough (and would help a LOT for reducing the size of one of the apps in the store that I developed - in fact, pushing it below the 3G threshold vs the current wifi-only size).

[1] http://wolfr.am/HUOxZ1

Whenever someone comes at me with this topic, I can't help but think of the greatest George Carlin quote of all time, "Simplify."

Specifically?

This would definitely require more work on the developer's part!

Right now the situation is: toss whatever you want into the bundle and it's there everywhere. For what you're proposing to have any benefit it would have to be: add files, annotating them with whether they are needed for iphone/ipad, keeping those annotations updated as you work.

These annotations already exist and developers already use them. As stated in the article you have to use the @2x naming convention to label double resolution images. Similarly you have to use the ~iPhone and ~iPad naming conventions for xibs and any other resource that's different on iPhone and iPad.

When making a universal app you are already forced to do this. Take a look at the Twitter app: it is completely different on iPad vs iPhone. These labels are how it knows what interface to load on each device -- yet the code and resources to load either exist regardless of what device you are on.

There's a png in the project. Is it an icon that's used by both iPhone and iPad? A background image used by only one? A texture they share? The nib and @2x annotations don't handle that stuff.

Yes they do: If its an image that gets used in both situations then you don't annotate it. In fact thats the common case. You only annotate the few resources and classes that are different on each platform. It's not complex, and it's also not a system I've invented, it's the system developers are already forced to use by Apple: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#documentation/2... (scroll to "updating your image resource files", you'll see it handles all the cases you mentioned, and the same applies to xibs)

And it works fine except for the fact that it chooses the resource at runtime. When you ask for resource "x" it looks for all the resources that start with "x" but may end with @2x or ~iPhone or whatever. It then decides which to return based on what device you have. There is no reason it cant make this determination at compile-time and just not include the resources it knows it won't be using in four separate builds. There is literally no difference with this system except when it chooses to ignore resources.

Oh. I didn't realize you could apply a device modifier to an image. Thanks.

Apple has historically not given the slightest fuck about what is an inconvenience for developers. Even more so when what's good for users is the opposite of what's convenient for developers. And in this case (if they ever do decide to enforce multiple binaries) that would be a good thing.

I see your point, but users don't need to be moving apps from one device to the other. They just need to DL it on one and have it delivered to others, which is standard icloud procedure now. It's the same for backups, especially for apps that you want a copy nevermind what happens down the way (the app is deleted, the news version is crap, you can't connect to the store etc).

As a matter of price, for the reasons above I am OK to pay more for an universal app than have two different ones I'll have to manage separately.

You totally missed his point. He's not saying the experience should present to the user as anything but what it does now - but behind the scenes there isn't any reason for the universal binary to exist. The phone or tablet should just download the binary it needs.

I talked about backup and multi distribution of the same app to different devices in one batch. Isn't that enough "behind the scenes" related? I understand he wants the better of both worlds, a light download for each device and still full compatibility with each. But just thinking about it 30 sec and there are plenty of cases where the magic breaks and you find yourself in a corner with only one version when you need the other. You can say "throw the edge cases away", but it' unrealistic to think that you can keep the same usability in everycases while heavily cutting on the data you transmit to your users. Let's be honest about the compromises.

> But just thinking about it 30 sec and there are plenty of cases where the magic breaks and you find yourself in a corner with only one version when you need the other.

Name a single one an end-user would encounter. They wouldn't.

This dilemma isn't limited to iOS, or mobile apps. It's all user-facing software. Everything that ships to users these days -- traditional desktop software, web apps, even static blogs -- is much larger than it needs to be to achieve its functionality.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a huge tradeoff between size of the product and development speed. We've switched to a pattern of bundling lots and lots of large libraries with everything we ship, and tons of static resources, and tons of translations, and on and on. And it makes everything huge.

But it means you "full-stack engineers" can knock out full-featured, money-making web apps in hours/days/weeks instead of weeks/months/years. Most of the "look at the monetized product I wrote this weekend!" posts that show up on HN could be a fraction of their size, but would have taken much longer to develop.

The link is specifically complaining about resource files, which are probably easier to manage than libraries, but it's still probably not worth the effort for Apple. By making it as simple as possible, developers don't waste any time worrying about how they are going to structure resource usage for their app. Just throw everything in there and get on with it.

At work, I develop for platforms with <1MB of RAM, and we can do plenty with them, but development time is ridiculous. You can knock out a full online dating site in 4 hours, eh? It takes that long to print "Hello World" on a serial port of a new microprocessor... maybe longer.

My side projects are in horribly wasteful monstrosities like Python and Objective-C/Foundation because, in my spare time, I like projects to actually get finished... to hell with binary size.

I agree with all the cynics saying that Apple doesn't care. Even if app sales go down because of full devices - please keep in mind how their profits are split between hardware and software/services.

I would go even further: They wouldn't even change it if it were free and easy to do. If they filtered out Retina graphics for non-Retina devices, the old iPad could hold more apps than the new one! If you upgraded to the new iPad, you would have to trim down your collection. It just doesn't make any business sense for them.

I guess everyone with a jailbreak will rejoice, this sounds like something a Perl one-liner could fix over ssh. And it could remove the builtin apps while they're at it. I am honestly jealous.

I think this is a bigger question of backwards compatibility. Surely Apple could find a technical solution to downloading Retina assets to non-Retina devices, but at the end of the day, what does this accomplish? It means that users of older devices will have a slightly better experience, at the expense of a nontrivial amount of work. Were such a scheme to be implemented, the developer would likely have to mark Retina files manually and Apple would have to add infrastructure on their servers. All this for something that will be pointless in the near future when Apple stops selling non-Retina iOS devices.

I don't mean to assert that Apple shouldn't attempt to separate out Retina assets, but I think it's worth considering the opportunity cost. There are a lot of other things Apple's engineers could be working on. Should this be their top priority?

This is the company that simply yanked out floppy drives when they decided they were no longer necessary, so it's probably not a priority at all. It doesn't directly cause breakage, and a few years down the line, Retina will be everywhere.

I don't think we're talking about a "slightly better experience" -- this is the difference between having 20 apps and 40 apps (for example). Space is at a premium on these devices...

I have something like 400 apps. They total around 20 gb with the median app being 20 mb. This is more like the difference between 95 and 100 apps. If having a lot of app storage is your deal breaker presumably you didn't buy the device with the least storage making it a small issue.

In other words, last month's devices are legacy.

Funny how that's a big problem when talking about Android devices, but with Apple it's magically a non-issue.

No, these are completely different problems. First of all statement about last month's device being legacy is false. iPhone 3GS was almost three years ago and still supports the latest version of iOS. This is the problem for Android—just compare adoption rate and share for the lastest versions of Android. Even some new Android devices just about to be realased don't support ICS.

Probably because the vast majority of apps still run fine on the legacy devices. My wife has a 3GS (almost 3 years old now), and apart from Siri and a tiny amount of high-end games, it does everything my 4S does - if a little slower, and slightly less crisply. They both have the latest OS version, and every app I have on my phone runs acceptably on hers.

Can Android say the same thing?

I agree that it's a bit of a pain having to have both the low res and high res graphics bundled in a single app version, but this issue isn't one of legacy - it's the same on a 2 year old iPad 1 as it is on a brand new iPad 3. If you've only got 16GB on it, you're possibly going to run into space issues with these new larger apps.

Retina graphics are already marked @2x. They could have implemented split bundles however Apple has never been one to maintain complete backwards compatibility. And I do agree Garage Band is obese, same as the OSX version which I had to uninstall from my MacBook Air because it took up way to much of the very limited SSD space.

The comments I see are about technical solutions. I think Apple's happy that there's finally a reason for people without humongous music collections to pay $200 for 64MB of flash memory.

My cynical side agrees with you. It seems like an absurd markup, between 16GB and 64GB.

I've looked briefly into stripping an app: the ipa format is just zip. There is a plist with hashes of the assets. Don't know if that plist itself is hashed, but I'm thinking probably.

Yes. Because no one has video on their iPad.

If Apple really cared about pushing people to the 32/64 GB devices, why would they offer iTunes Match?

I like this author's thoughts, and there are some creative solutions offered by him and the commenters there on how to thin the assets. However, I would be interested to see how the assets' size stacks up against the actual binary.

Some of the biggest apps on my iPhone are iBooks (57.9MB) and Nook (51.3MB). I doubt their pretty little icons take up the lion's share of that size. I mean, Kindle does it in a measly 23.5MB (sarcasm, still big). I wonder, for instance, how much language support weighs in at. There was a mac program I used some years back called monolingual that would remove other languages, you know because I'll never need my laptop to work in Farsi, and thin the binary architectures. Saved many a GB when they were much more precious.

I'm assuming that most of these apps are made with some fancy service that generates an app for every platform under the sun from one app creator program, and as such, each native app is way bloated.

But, the consumers don't notice or care, so app creators are just going to be as inefficient in the interest of jamming new features into an app over optimizing it.

(edit: spelling, added parenthetical to Kindle app)

Checkout Google books, they did it right, ~3MB total size.

You'd be surprised: the assets take up about 50% of the total. It's simple enough to examine the contents of an IPA file:

iBooks used to be under 20MB. Over time it's expanded to its current size of 50.8MB when it's uncompressed (the extra space it's taking up on your device is probably the books themselves).

The vast majority of that is images. Apple have at least been somewhat smart about it, choosing in certain cases to use lossy JPGs rather than PNGs where the user won't notice (the startup image, for example).

The app also ships with some custom fonts, which take up a few of those MB. The languages, which you suspect take up a lot of the space, actually don't represent that much: each language is about 45KB.

The executable itself is 25MB: so basically, 50% of the app size consists of assets. The percentage is probably higher on most other apps, because the iBooks executable is rather large (unusually so).

That indicates that shipping separate executables for armv6 and armv7 alone would save over 10MB. Holy shit. (yes, latest iBooks still works on the iPhone 3G)

As an app developer myself, I've (recently) just began using ImageAlpha + ImageOptim (http://pngmini.com/) to compress all my PNG images. These really do the job better than PNGCrush (Xcode's default) and cut them down to 50% of the original size without losing much quality.

From one app developer to another, if you're adding retina assets for the new iPad like me, remember to use ImageAlpha first!

P.S. If you're unsure of its advantages, check out this case study of ImageAlpha + ImageOptim used on Tweetbot: http://imageoptim.com/tweetbot.html

This is device fragmentation, like Android and Windows face. SVG might help in some cases. Apple's SDK should accept the best quality assets and resample for app versions for each device. Some apps will still benefit from targeting devices more specifically, though.

It's far from ideal, but it's a long way from the Android fragmentation (can't comment on Windows Phone, never been involved in dev for that).

With Android, there could be any one of dozens of resolutions (iOS has two basic resolutions, with a relatively simple 2x multiplier version of each of those), you could have a keyboard or not, you could be a device with a resistive screen with no multi-touch (or even no touchscreen at all), your OS version may dictate whether you can install on the SD card or not - or have one of many other significant differences - and the device may not be able to upgrade to a more up to date OS version, etc etc.

When we launched our app recently, we tested it on 3 different iOS versions (a 3GS, a 4S and an iPad 2), and about 20 different Android ones. I can't remember a single major issues that appeared on only one model of iOS device - and I can't think of any that have appeared in the wild either. On the other hand, we had dozens of "only occurs on Android device X with OS version Y".

With Android, you usually provide 3-4 different sizes of PNG/JPEG etc. It's the same on iOS.

That solves a tiny percentage of the issues on Android, whereas it resolves the majority on iOS. That's the difference.

You're right that there is a big difference between them for now.

We're currently seeing around one new iPhone and one new iPad coming out of Apple each year, though. Don't forget iPod Touch, by the way. Sometimes they come with new features not available to older devices. They get released with three different storage capacities, and only some of your users will have 3G/4G on their iPads. The point is that in a year or two this is going to be a worse situation even for iOS devices. It's reasonable to assume that Android fragmentation will also get worse.

Where does that leave us? Well, I think Android is taking an interesting approach. A couple of the things in the Android SDK that help deal with fragmentation: - Standard UI components (eg. Action Bar for actions/navigation, Fragments for generic slices of UI, Layouts for providing guidance on how Fragments are to be arranged on different devices and screen orientations) - They provide a support library that can be bundled with apps using features from newer OS versions so that the new features also work on devices running older versions.

I agree it will get worse, but I don't yet see anything that suggests iOS is going to get close to the fragmentation that Android already suffers with.

Things like storage capacity and network availability are challenges, it's true. But they are things that can affect any device (you can fill up a 64GB device, and you can be in an area with no network), so they aren't really fragmentation issues unless your app requires huge storage or depends on a specific network type being available. Android by its very nature is always going to have a far wider variation than iOS. This is not necessarily a bad thing (there's more choice and more cutting edge options in Android), but it does create a fragmentation challenge of a totally different scale to iOS.

I'm curious - How many of those "only occurs on Android device X with OS version Y" issues were actually problems with the device X / OS Y combination versus how many were actual bugs that (for whatever reason) were only showing up in that particular case?

According to the ZipLine CEO here:

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/02/zipline-ceo-stop-whi...

most of the issues they saw along those lines were general problems that happened to be manifesting in a particular situation. I'm curious about whether or not that experience is typical or, for instance, if ZipLine saw that because they were working on a framework first and a specific game second.

There was certainly a fair amount of the latter - couple of examples off the top of my head were things like layout on one screen sometimes being screwed up on a phone with a tiny display, or unexpected character entry because someone was using a device with a physical keyboard that sent keys that the used couldn't have entered with the on-screen keyboard. There were also a few caused by different OS versions (I seem to remember one that had something to do with either different encryption or storage behaviour on one old handset - not sure of the detail, I wasn't the developer, but it wasn't saving encrypted data on one specific device).

However even if it is a bug, bugs do happen and if it's a bug that only shows up on one out of 20 OS/handset/network combinations (if you're lucky enough to have that one specific combination in your test labs) is going to be one that's going to be a lot harder to spot than one that either occurs on all devices or not at all.

I'll absolutely agree that bugs that only show up on particular device/OS/network/etc combinations are harder to detect, diagnose and fix. But when those bugs are generally applicable (and the particular combination is just surfacing the underlying issue) I'd say it is better to be thankful they came up instead of frustrated by fragmentation.

After all, when it is a general bug that just happens to be masked most of the time, it is a buried bomb just waiting to explode when the surrounding context changes. In my opinion, detecting and defusing more of these issues sooner rather than later is a good thing.

Personally, I'm reminded me of the issues I run into when writing cross-platform code (or code that needs to work with multiple versions of tools and libraries). The upfront effort to multiple environments (or the effort required to add the new environment) is usually significant, but I'd say the improvement in code/software quality is an often unrecognized benefit (over and above the reason you're supporting the new environment in the fist place).

There's a standard naming convention, iOS load image@2x.png on retina and image.png on non-retina but it's not strictly enforced so apple couldn't delete all the @2x images on a non-retina device. Plenty of universal apps use the @2x iphone target images for the iPad display, for example, and this suggestion would break those apps.

As a developer, I've been more and more often leaning towards using tools like paintCode or just writing code for custom widgets instead of trying to make the 4 different images for iphone/ipad/iphone@2x/ipad@2x. This is a win/win because it looks better (except at very low res) and keeps the size of the app down.

Having the app store serve different apps for different target devices opens a can of worms. For example, if you backed up on one device and restored on another, you could get the wrong one. I think Apple made the right choice in preferring to make sure your apps work everywhere rather than save storage at the cost of complexity. And if that means they're nudging the consumer to upgrade to the lastest and greatest, I can't blame them for going that route.

Garageband is big primarily due to the sound sets of samples that it comes with- not because of the program itself or the UI.

Although this is true, I just unpacked it to investigate, and removing @2x images reduced the filesize by 30%.

I sympathize with the problem. Some of the apps on my iPhone have become bigger since they're universal and now include the retina iPad graphics. I agree with some of the other commenters here that the ideal solution would be to not download/remove the unnecessary graphics once on device.

But as I've run down on space, I've started to notice how odd various app's sizes are. There seems to be very little correlation between what I expect and the actual value. Here are some examples from my applications:

First, some apps that have sane sizes

  Infinity Blade - 1 GB
  Rage - 830 MB
  Ghost Trick - 531 MB
  Groove Coster - 154 MB
  Steambirds Survival - 60 MB
  Doodle Jump - 20 MB

But many apps seem to use way more space than I would ever expect:

  Worms 2 Armageddon - 688 MB
  Worms - 209 MB
  Catan - 171 MB
  Boggle - 104 MB (really? REALLY?)
  XFinity (Comcast App) - 41 MB (has downloaded another 50 on my device)

This doesn’t address the root problem, but liberal use of Imageoptim and ImageAlpha can drop file sizes for images by 50-60% in extreme cases. As a web guy when bandwidth matters I’m very familiar with these techniques, but maybe they haven’t got traction in the app world?

When creating iOS apps part of the process of transferring the app resources into the app itself involves compressing the images even further. There are ways to improve this, but at the base line you have it done for you.

Only using XCode’s compression, which isn’t very good. More info at: http://imageoptim.com/tweetbot.html

There is a solution to this: PNG8+alpha format. It's 60-70% smaller than 32-bit PNGs.

Most apps' size can be halved this way: http://imageoptim.com/tweetbot.html

So here is the big question: Are you going to buy less apps because of this "issue"? If not then there is no incentive to really fix it, nor for developers is it a problem that will be addressed.

When the same thing (at much smaller scale) happened on my Nexus One it definitely stopped me buying apps. In fact, to stay current with updates I had to start uninstalling apps I had paid for.

It will certainly make me think twice before buying new apps, yes. In some cases the app simply won't be worth the extra storage required (I'm thinking music apps in particular, since I like to play with them but don't use them seriously).

On the iPad is it possible to download an app and somehow cache it onto some other storage medium (i.e a PC or Mac HDD) so you can uninstall it, backup all your personal files and then sync it back over later (via LAN or USB)?

I ask because I was thinking of getting an iPad3 in the near future and was tempted to get the 16 GB model because I have many TBs of storage elsewhere on my PC/NAS/Servers so I'm not going to use it to archive anything long term. Plus an extra £70 for 16GB seems steep when I could get a 64GB SSD for the same.

Yes. iTunes on your desktop machine can store (and update) apps that you are not currently syncing to the device. Then, when syncing the iPad, you can check a box in iTunes to indicate that the app should be included on the device.

I think ~Yes/No~ is the better answer. You can remove apps and sync them from a backup later, or even download them from Apple, but AFAIK the only way to restore an app and its user state ('where was I', login info, preferences, etc) is by doing a full restore of a backup (all apps installed at a given time and their stare, plus all device settings from that time)

This isn't just in mobile apps, it happens on the desktop too; and it's a tricky problem. In general one has to blow up the size of an app to preserve a good user experience in other areas.

Consider download complexity. How many "versions" of your app would you need to have to give each user the optimal installation size? How often do you want to deal with people downloading the wrong one and having a bad experience? What about 3rd party distribution...any number of other sites may choose to offer download links and you have basically no control if they screw something up.

Another is problematic upgrades. Suppose you optimize a download for a user's current machine. Then they buy a new machine. They won't really try to understand why your app is now looking strange or misbehaving; they'll just think your app sucks.

On the Mac side I've chosen to go the oversized route. There's no doubt that my app bundle is 2-3 times as big as it ought to be (and unfortunately two thirds of the binary bloat goes towards supporting systems that few users are likely to care about at this point). But then downloads are simple: just "click here for the new version" and whatever your system you see something that works.

It does seem to me like this "space issue" is a very annoying an unethical way for Apple to automatically and slowly force people into buying newer devices with more storage (for whom the old 16GB versions were enough), and it comes as a surprise for most who start running out of space on their device and can't do anything about it. Also (and this is not Apple's fault) the new hi res photos and recorded videos contribute a lot too.

One possible solution is having apps ship with 1x graphics with an optional download to have 2x. That solution, however, is not something I would like as a developer or as an user.

Over the next few years, we'll probably go back to having just two screen sizes (Retina iPhone + iPad). This is just a side effect of the transition to retina, and it will go away soon.

Though from Apple's perspective it would make more financial sense to have you go buy a 64GB iPad. :)

If only things were done with vector graphics...

Might not be so easy. http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...

That is a good article.

Well, small-size icons are not going to be the source of the application package size issue, are they? I mean if pixel-perfecting 16x16, 32x32 and 64x64 icons is something we do already, using svg against the other end of the scaling problem (1024x768 -> 2048x1536) is a good solution.

I skimmed the article to get the tl;dr, which seems to be that there is an appropriate level of detail (LOD) for icons of different sizes, and that therefore vector graphics won't work.

True, and false. All you would need is a vector graphics format with a per-element LOD specification. Here's an example of one format and editor which does that:

http://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon-...

Typically, when the App Store complains about lack of space to update all, you can still update them all one at a time, or do the big ones first, then, update all. That's because when you update apps, you've got two copies of an app on your device until the old version gets deleted, and when you click 'update all', it checks if you have enough space for all the apps in question to be duplicated.

Settings > General > Usage.

You're probably going to get very comfortable with this settings at some point, if you don't have a 64GB iPad.

A lot of graphics on these devices are vectors (Inkscape SVG, Illustrator, etc.). A possible solution would be a cache on the device where each app has a slot. The app can store data in this cache (i.e. images rendered on-demand into bitmaps). The total size of this cache would be limited (user adjustable, maybe). When the cache runs out of space, data from least used apps gets purged. That means, when I want to run my least used RPG on my iPad 3, after maybe a month of not using it or so, maybe I have to wait 1-2mins for it to turn all the graphics back into bitmaps. But i'd never run out of space for games that use assets that can somehow be described more lightweight that using bitmaps.

Let me just say I enjoy the angst the pad-folks are encountering, once they find out their portable device is not all it was cracked up to be.

To an embedded developer, the hype about 'the desktop is dead' and 'all apps must go portable' was ludicrous. Speed, space, resolution, connectivity all suffer in the mobile environment. No amout of cool design will fix this, wishful thinking aside.

Poor developers! You have to work hard to fit into the space available. And maybe abandon wasteful tools that squander memory and cpu, in favor of tools that make you face the hard choices. Guess what? Its called software engineering, and you're supposed to have the skills to do it. Stop complaining!

Given the evidence presented here, the courteous thing to do would seem to be to host the images remotely. However it makes sense why developers would default to frontloading the image loads as there's per access latency and overhead associated with hosting the images remotely vs. a one time hit for downloading the images from the App Store.

Instead of using a CDN and eating the bandwidth cost of retina display-ready assets, it sounds like apps companies are publishing the cost onto users for increasingly resolute image assets.

That or people should buy Apple's larger models if they expect to do serious computing on the iPad.

I find the discussion over profanity in posts on HN interesting. When I initially read the post, I expected similar comments about professionalism and unnecessary vulgarity.

Instead, just about every response (save one on the actual linked page), addresses the issue at hand. It seems to suggests that there is an appropriate level of sensationalism to get your message heard. Anyone have some sort of algorithm that rates a post for how attention-grabbing vs. off-putting its words are?

Wait, 6gb for 20 apps? If they are already using 4gb (sounds reasonable from the numbers), that would mean 500mb per app. Unless they are all games, something isn't right.

I don't know why we're not moving into vector for these type of things. Should definitely help with the resolution explosion we've been seeing occurring.

Wouldn't an SD card slot help?

Apple adding a SD card would mean shooting themselves in the foot - no reason to sell overpriced Flash inside the device anymore.

Can someone clarify, is this behavior on iPad3 or on previous generation? Because iPad1 and iPad2 clearly don't display such behavior. I have around a hundred apps on iPad2, and before and after mass updates went out they took relatively same space, 15Gb or so. Nice indicator is RealRacing2HD - 1.1Gb in size before and after upgrade. 6Gb apps triple in size? Really?..

I am very thankful that I am not alone. If I could roll back the clock 3 weeks I would have bought the 32gb (at least) instead of the 16gb model. I've already seen this pain point coming after chewing through 6gb in one evening of app shopping (with Infinity Blade 2 at a whopping 900mb). Not to mention the available capacity on the 16gb is realistically 13gb.

I've also ran into the issue of not being able to update all my apps so now only tend to pick and update those apps that I use frequently.

As it only takes one large app to disable the whole update all process, it'll be interesting to see how this impacts the overall update numbers.

I think if they did this app developers would need to sign and submit four different binaries (iphone, iphone_2x, ipad, ipad_2x). Technically you can already do this. I guess if it's a paid app, the user would have to pay for each device type.

anyone who does HTML5 / PhoneGap style development have a solution? I'd imagine one would be able to have the app detect which resources it required and have them be downloaded and cached during runtime.

Thinking some more about the problem I concluded that I don't personally have a problem with the creation of multiple versions of the artwork. Most of it can be done through batch processing and some hand tweaking. No big deal. The issue is with app bundle bloat and the download of a huge number of files into a device that will not use them.

Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head potential solution:

Update Xcode to sensibly handle file structures within a project. You know, the blue folders. We currently use blue folders for all app assets because, well, can you imagine maintaining 1600 files all in on directory?

The problem with blue folders today is that they needle you with pain. You have to remember to do clean builds (scripts during the build don't seem to work reliably) and, in general, be very aware of them. Once they are part of your process its not a big deal, but I think it's high time that Xcode come to this century and do something that most other development systems have been doing for, I don't know, decades?

Anyhow, once that is in place, you could have a directory structure such as this one at the app root:

  App Resources
  App Resources @2X
  App Resources ~ipad
  App Resources ~ipad @2X

I then want to include a JSON file at the app root level that points out the root directories for each device category. Maybe something like this:

  {
    "ipod 1":    "App Resources",
    "ipod 2":    "App Resources",
    "ipod 3":    "App Resources",
    "ipod 4":    "App Resources @2X",
    "iphone 1":  "App Resources",
    "iphone 2":  "App Resources",
    "iphone 3":  "App Resources",
    "iphone 4":  "App Resources @2X",
    "iphone 4S": "App Resources @2X",
    "ipad 1":    "App Resources ~ipad",
    "ipad 2":    "App Resources ~ipad",
    "ipad 3":    "App Resources ~ipad @2X"
  }

Now provide for a way to load this JSON data into the app and have relevant methods, such as "imageNamed" use a device specific path. My guess is that you'd want this to be by extension rather than modification so:

  + (UIImage *) imageNamedAndKeyForPath:(NSString *)name  key_for_path:(NSString *)key

Obviously the key would be used to retrieve the value from the JSON file or, preferably, a value already stored in memory when the JSON file was parsed at app start time.

Apple then, would have a mechanism to only deliver the appropriate resource files during an in-device installation. iTunes could download the whole set and also be intelligent during to-device installation. They'd use the JSON file to have the developer tell them which files to deliver.

Any files left outside the designated directories would be treated as they are today: Everything goes to every device.

Also, other methods that take a path, such as "imageWithContentsOfFile" ought to have a version that uses the aforementioned mechanism while --and this is important-- letting me specify relative paths from the device-specific folder. If I have something like this:

  <device specific folder>
    + character
      + arms
      + legs
      + head
    + background
      + trees
      + rocks
      + clouds

I ought to be able to access the path structure relative to the chosen device-specific directory of assets.

On first inspection this sounds like a good solution. I haven't thought it through entirely. I'd be interested to hear of what holes the idea might have.

Something like this could have a striking effect on app bundle size, particularly on older devices. I don't think that it places an undue burden on developers either, if anything it makes things easier. Heck I'm sure Apple could even find a way to make it a marketing point: "Four times as many apps in the same space".

Another interesting point about using a JSON file to map to device-specific resources is that the concept could be extended for future devices.

Let's say that a future iDevice comes with a better audio engine. Maybe it can do 5.1 surround? You could extend the JSON structure to include a section to define where the 5.1 surround files would be for the new device. Older devices wouldn't have to waste storage and download audio files that they can never use.

I feel like this is an overengineered solution by somebody who is not quite familiar with what the platform has to offer.

1) UIImage already handles choice based on asset name. Apple could use the same asset choice logic server-side for each device, without the developer having to corral his assets into directories. It just needs to be expanded to handle ~ipad and ~iphone (which UIImage does not natively, but if they make this a standard, they could.) The fallbacks would, of course, be most-specific to least-specific: scale and device before common. One downside here is that direct path access to an image will not be fixed, but they already do static analysis for message names, you can find calls to bundle methods and keep those assets lying around.

2) JSON?! We have property lists, they're way more Appley and have framework support through-and-through.

3) While this might provide the ability for a developer to choose which resources are used where, Apple is not in the business of giving developers (or users) choices.

In other words, I don't think the onus should be on developers. They should be free to do what they do best: innovate about the real problems, not the platform's solvable deficiencies.

The above listed can also be applied to all existing app bundles, were Apple feeling adventurous. Parent's method can not.

> an overengineered solution by somebody who is not quite familiar with what the platform has to offer.

Geez, thanks.

UIImage's handling of assets based on file name is a horrible band-aid.

Also, one has to think workflow. And, to make things more interesting, exaggerate. Let's make it 5,000 files in one directory. That's a mess. With device-specific directories an artist could create a workflow leading to easy maintenance and creation of files. No need to engage in funky naming conventions. The per-device files are simply located where they need to be and a mechanism is provided to identify which path serves a particular device type.

Another problem with UIImage is that there is no way to communicate to Apple which files are to be delivered to, say, an iPod touch. So, an external mechanism is required in order to encode that information. Hence the proposal for an external JSON (or whatever) file.

Why JSON. I like it. Supported by iOS 5.0 as well. Easy to maintain and exist externally to Xcode. This also means that I can write scripts or automation tools on a PC or Mac to automate the creation of assets and their placement within the proper structure. The file used within the app to communicate the per-device directory structure would also could also serve external purposes that cannot be covered with plists. In our case, as an example, all of our assets are being produced on PC's, not Macs.

> Apple is not in the business of giving developers (or users) choices.

That's another matter. Although my proposal wasn't about providing choices as much as it is about a mechanism to only deliver the necessary files to a device. Only the developer can make decisions about which files are appropriate, not Apple.

Ultimately, I don't care what technology might be used in order to enable something like this so long as it works and is reasonably open. Right now I'd love to be able to deliver only 1X files to iPods and ~ipad@2X files to the new iPad rather than forcing a huge download of 1,600 files to every device or the current project on our table. That's just silly.

I have a question about localization: Does Apple deliver all language files to a device or only those based on the localization settings? That could be another area of app bloat.

Also, keep in mind that localization can also exist in graphical assets. You could have images with built-in text that need to be switched in based on localization. So, an English version of the app uses this set and an Italian version another set of assets. This might include sound files.

Depending on how this is handled it can start to explode the app bundle in impressive ways. Start with 100 images. Now you need 400 to cover all device display configurations. Then you need to replicate this on a per-language basis. If you cover, say, five languages, you are up to 2,000 files potentially delivered to every single device regardless of applicability. I realize that this is a corner case where all images need to be localized. No need to point that out.

I have not done any internationalization yet, so I don't know how this part works. For some cases it might not be practical to release a separate app in different languages. For example, a kids app that is able to operate in English and Spanish and sold through the US app store.

If your ipad has become too small, i guess you'll have to buy a newer model. Now /that/ makes a lot of sense to apple.

Also, don't forget that on-the-fly changes to the .app bundle would break its code signature.

You're right it wouldn't

That wouldn't solve the problem at all.

Updates are the more frustrating aspect of this situation. Sure, get a zetabyte storage card for future Apple formats--that won't fix the fact that a user may need to download dozens of megabytes of unused data for every update

Use vector art for assets wherever possible.

This is also ONE of the MAIN reasons why iPhone users use WIFI from often than Android Users. This is also ONE of the MAIN reasons why Network is chocked because of iPhone.

Apple to save a penny, costed heavily for everyone else involved.

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