Why is the Oral-B iOS app almost 300 MB? And why is Colgate's app even bigger..?
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I wasn't born with an innate ability to know how to brush my teeth or how to shave (my electric razor also has an app), I had to learn how. If the devices I use can tell that I'm using them wrong, and there's a better way to do things, it's nice to have it tell me.
To my knowledge it does not know where you are in your mouth when brushing (positioning via accelerometer/gyroscope), so a synchronized start would likely give similar results.
I don't care for an app-connected toothbrush personally. But suggesting that just because it can't keep track of your diet overall means it can't possibly give any insights in health is overly reductive. A workout tracker app can't keep track of your food intake, but that doesn't mean it can't help the user be healthier.
Apart from the I go to the dentist 2-3 times a year, they do a great job telling me what area of my mouth I need to focus on. A toothbrush wouldn't really be able to give me that info anyway.
Say I have an app with 1M downloads. Who do I sell 1M email addresses and the fact they've bought a toothbrush to?
Think about how many companies have pivoted to burning cash on adding "AI" to their products. How many of those cases are going to end up actually being a good business decision? Probably very few. It's likely the same with everyone just wanting "data" to "analyze"--even if they have no idea how it might be useful.
tl;dr IDK but they don't do it without a profit motive.
And yeah, the usual electric toothbrushes are terrible slow since the brush heads are in the size of one teeth, instead of 3-4.
Step 1: collect data
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
Hopefully you sell the company between Step 1 and 2.
Competitive brushing!
Hey, now oral b know where you are all the time, who you know etc
"We noticed that brushing takes you X seconds longer than usual. Do you want to buy new bristles for your tooth brush?"
"We noticed you haven't used our tooth brush in a while. Do you want to buy our new tooth brush?"
"We noticed that you started brushing your teeth earlier than usual. This probably means that you started a new job and can afford our new deluxe premium tooth brush."
"We noticed that you brush your teeth later than usual. That probably means that you met with someone who you can recommend our amazing tooth brush to."
"We noticed that your tooth brushing times are all over the place, so you probably had a child. Buy our new baby tooth brush."
And that is just from the time you brush your teeth. However, the app also collections "Health and fitness and Device or other IDs" according to the app description:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.o...
That means that Oral B can link that data with the data harvested from other apps or data brokers, so they probably know everything about you. Health data seems especially creepy to me. I wonder if it is possible to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement from the heart rate data. At least they can definitely tell if you brush longer after seeing their latest Oral B add on TV/YouTube/some website.
* Collect data on brushing frequency and thoroughness, and sell that data to dental insurance companies. Perhaps not even anonymized, so they can raise your premiums if you don't brush as often or as well as they'd like.
* Nag you to buy brush replacements after a certain amount of time or certain number of uses.
* Use dark patterns to trick you into giving access to other, unrelated data on your phone, and sell this data to third parties.
* Market their other products to you, or even perhaps suggest other things (sold by marketing partners) to buy, like different kinds of toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, etc.
Shit's already fucking happening with car insurance. Install their app to reduce your premium! It's only a matter of time before it's the other way around.
sell that data to dental insurance companies
They've pivoted away from that to general benefits management (basically every flavor of job-connected insurance that isn't major medical), FWIW...
You get permissions to whatever you ask for. The unsavvy user will click yes.
You get a push notification channel that can interrupt the user ANY time of day or night and get their immediate attention. Suggesting products and "deals".
Use your imagination. Think like an asshole.
But honestly I'd say that it's probably more about them being able to market their own products to you by displaying ads and sending you push notifications on new deals on brushes, rather than selling your data to third parties.
That's just an example guess, but the bloat is there for a purpose... I'm pretty sure the app gets updated on intervals too, just like so many others under the guise of "security or functional updates".
We're in an era where data is weaponized for profit maximization... The most simple and seemingly benign data sets when combined strategically can work against consumers deeply.
We need app audit boards now, maybe even on a government level, and specific detail of everything apps do to be displayed in app stores. There should be serious consequences if apps are found to do things that are not detailed in their release/update descriptions. This collected data can persist forever, and be used in some of the most destructive ways.
Device/OS makers also need to do better at preventing/partitioning non-essential apps from collecting data they don't need access to...
Likely reasons why this isn't already in place is because most don't know how it happens, and many others are invested in these companies, so they turn a blind eye on regulation of them.
1. I highly doubt that's done on device
2. how are they supposed to link you to your bank account? AFAIK cross app tracking is opt in, at least on iOS so unless the user explicitly opts in, you're not going to get a cross-app identifier.
I think you're overestimating the competence of the shops that develop those apps. I bet that 90% of the code is just company's standard set of frameworks and advertising SDKs they put in every app without even thinking about it.
I'd buy a toothbrush that did that, even if it had "AI" in it's name.
But no, I think it just logs the brush duration and for the more expensive models the "coverage", or something like that.
- Brushing pressure
- How long you brush
- When you brush
- Where you brush (tracking orientation and motion)
With that, you might see some trend of "you brush your left-back-bottom teeth a little harder than the rest, and you're not quite getting your front middle teeth very well".
Now, if that data is actually useful logged and analyzed is another question.
I've got a toothbrush that theoretically has bluetooth connectivity support. I've never used it. But I do like there's a colorful ring that lights up to show the brushing pressure and I do like the 30 second timer feature to help ensure I brush each area of my mouth about the same amount of time. Neither require bluetooth and an app though.
People want to log and track your health data.
[1] https://www.vox.com/23901293/dentist-delta-dental-insurance-...
But it's fine; we call it insurance anyway, and everyone knows what it means, so there's no problem.
“When you look at the dental insurance model, it doesn’t protect the patient from financial risk. It’s the opposite,” said Marko Vujicic, chief economist and vice president of the Health Policy Institute at the American Dental Association. “Once the benefit runs out, the $1,400 or whatever it is, all of that financial burden is on the patient. So it protects the insurer, they’re limited on their exposure.”
In other words, there is no real benefit to offering a "good brusher" discounts.
/rant
Personally I just used it once and ended up removing it, but I can see some people using it to ensure their brushing is efficient.
Anyway, it's completely optional, you can just use the brush ignoring the existence of the app.
I’m not tracking my meals. I did use MyFitnessPal for a bit but I didn’t find it useful.
What if you (for whatever reason, doesn't matter) only ate on the left side of your mouth for dinner? You'd spend plenty of time on the left side, but the app might tell you you've done a bad job on the right. Further, depending on what you ate, it might take longer than whatever their predetermined time is to clean the side that had a disproportionate amount of food on it.
What if you have had a tough time with a couple of "problem teeth" that need a bit more love? Is the app capable of tracking where those "problem teeth" are and ensuring that you're spending extra attention there?
I dunno... to me, it seems like it's a no brainer to me when my teeth are clean - I can feel it. Unless a toothbrush has some detailed sensors in the head, I'm gonna seriously doubt its ability to tell me when my teeth are actually clean.
Then I envy you, because the only thing I feel that's different before and after brushing is a generalized "my mouth is sticky on the inside" feeling. I definitely lose track of how much time I spent cleaning each side relatively, and I'm sure there are areas I rarely reach because I don't know the brush isn't touching them.
I'd love having a toothbrush that would monitor if I reach every spot as a baseline; I can handle my problem teeth or any eating side imbalance on my own, especially that there is no rule saying you need to brush exactly 2 minutes (or 2.5 or whatever) and not a second more - I could do my baseline and spend extra 30 seconds or so in the problem areas.
Right before I sleep I also do 4-7-8 interval breathing in bed that slows down my heart rate and gets me calm and sleepy. I use a simple app called iBreathe for that. This breathing session also lets my Apple Watch give me an accurate reading for my heart rate variability (HRV) that gamifies this for me.
(I imagine a system like this would need at least two accelerometers - one close to the tip, and another one in the grip area; the second one would be used to cancel out the movement of users' head and body, allowing the first one to effectively operate in a mouth-relative coordinate system.)
Maybe not from brushing one tooth but brushing the whole mouth you'd get a pretty good picture I'd say. The app would justify itself if it did give you a rough map of how you brushed your teeth and suggest areas that you're missing/if it's being done incorrectly.
How does it even have a census of your teeth?
Some people have wisdom teeth, while other people don't.
Some people have been on the losing end of a bar fight with carneys, and some people haven't.
Also I doubt it’s AI, just doing something fairly basic with the accelerometer data
I decided when I bought it that I would never ever ever install that app or make use of these features (it's tooth-brushing, for crying out loud), and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
I'm sure the company just wants to collect data about my brushing habits in order to sell it to... someone, who knows.
(Something is up with the world when you're thinking about toothbrushes that respect your privacy. It's like something out of a Douglas Adams book.)
It wasn't worth it to me to spend more time on it to see if I could find something without the connected crap.
(And I do wonder if the connected crap makes the device cheaper, since they're hoping to make money on selling user data.)
Perhaps the answer is to put the toothbrush in a different room!
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Conclusion
Using the same brushing force and a highly abrasive toothpaste, manual toothbrushes are significantly less abrasive compared to power toothbrushes for an 8.5—year simulation.
So when you're using an electric toothbrush, you don't need to brush as long, or as firmly. It doesn't help that many people tend to brush with way too much force anyway.
But in general if you spend 2-3 minutes brushing with a conventional toothbrush, that's going to be good enough if you're also seeing a dentist regularly to remove tartar and check for cavities.
The problem most people have with a regular toothbrush is they brush like a madman for 20-30 seconds and that's just not enough. That's another advantage of the electric brushes, they run on a timed cycle which is a lot longer than most people would brush on their own.
It's like many tools we use: sure, doing it the old-fashioned way will work well enough if you do it properly, but the new tool makes it easier and more foolproof (and maybe faster), in exchange for higher cost. This doesn't make the new tool bad.
What happens with the data that is collected is NOYB (none of your business).
It's partially because of developer laziness and partially because Apple tools sux - there is no tree shaking or dead code removal from compiled cocoapods or swift packages. Apple probably don't care and more than happy to sell you the next shiny device with more storage or subscription to iCloud.
Resources, architectures, languages, are only downloaded as needed, but it also gets further into a few domain specific things such as game asset texture compression formats[0], so not only do phones only get the textures they need, but developers can publish in multiple formats so that users can get the best option their device supports.
There's also on-demand code module downloading and installing too. This means you can, for example, pull your registration process out into a separate module, install it at the beginning, but then offload it after the user has registered, reducing the installed size (and reducing the chance your app gets uninstalled for taking up too much space). One developer has a multi-megabyte VOIP module for customer support, but doesn't actually download and install it until a user opens the support screen in the app, which means most users never have it installed.
[0]: https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/asset-delivery/...
I can't believe anyone not affiliated with it would post it. Awful tool.
the interstitial only seemed to appear on first load, and didn't take very many seconds..
the interface is clean and allows me to see the entire thread without being logged in, unlike x..
I had to log out of X to test this, but I can see the utility, and am not understanding the hate.
I've found that this instance works perfectly once you're past the bot wall. I'm not affiliated with it, but I use it daily and post it instead of x.com every single time I share a tweet.
Not what I was expecting. I was expecting it to be more like the Colgate app mentioned later in thread.
Takes a lot of models and instructions to burn hundreds of megs that way.
But they should still be pulled on demand.
For reference, my own photos downscaled to 3840x2560 AVIF for sharing purposes range from 500KB to 2MB depending on how "busy" the image is. The off-camera 6000x4000 JPEG is ~7MB in comparison.
I stand by my opinion that a few hundred KB per image is plenty at the required resolution for model photos in an app.
So only twice the size of your JPEG example. Looking at the area chart of the files, it looks like the majority of the assets are less than that 2-3MB.
https://xcancel.com/pic/orig/media%2FGWAYmxabsAApjwu.png
There's probably over 200 or so assets in that 233MB archive.
That's slightly less than half the height and width of your phone's screen respectively, so a decent representative of a model photo dimensions (which are usually widgets smaller than the screen).
Model images would compress much better as they are edited to be much cleaner with smoothed solid colors and either solid or transparent backgrounds, and for something like a toothbrush you'd have an incredibly narrow image geometry making the final image likely much smaller.
Even if you'd consider this image too small or too low resolution, bumping those would not push us past 150 or maybe maximum 200KB.
(That repo has plenty of examples of other configuration examples if one is curious.)
Otherwise they save all the traffic and put it on the appstores and users and when they use some service for analytics they don’t need to run any server themselves. Oral-B probably sells worldwide putting everything in the app instead of fetching it maybe saves them good money.
But why can’t they be vector images? The pictures in the tweet looks like they could easily be replaced by vectors and the difference would be nearly unnoticeable.
I mean, if it has vibration or sound, you might be able make it talk or play music.
Say what now? Oral-B? World events news feed?
2 minutes feels incredibly long for a lot of people. Doing something that feels productive or provides 2 minutes of entertainment while simultaneously operating as a timer seems like not so crazy of an idea.
The tiktok generation. What happens to good old sand timer technology?
There could be other modes that aren't accessible from the buttons, but none that I'm aware of.
He's a professional chef now, the first in our family to finish college, so I think it turned out pretty good.
That’s the really valuable stuff. The app’s purported aim is simply to get it installed onto your mobile device.
Fortunately for me I put my toothbrush on its own VLAN
All of it with their "consent" (you installed the app and likely accepted their ToS/PIvacy Policy), under the pretense of providing them a service like counting the time/frequency of your interaction with the product or reminding you to use it (something you would already do anyways, maybe less accurately, if you are a functioning adult).
¹ I'm not suggesting these particular companies aren't selling customer data.
BTW, I stayed over at a friend's place one time, and he donated me a new electric tooth brush. How can people even use this? I found it extremely hurtful on my teeth. I would not use it if you paid me.
> Connection failed: User 'u327838624_unroll' has exceeded the 'max_connections_per_hour' resource (current value: 500)
> Connection failed: User 'uxxxxxxx_unroll' has exceeded the 'max_connections_per_hour' resource (current value: 500)
(Is that a MySQL error?)
Seems like it, but why would a website have such a (low) limit for mysql connections.
(i'm wish i was kidding: Phillips seems to publish firmware updates for the sonicare a few times a year)
The crappier the companies software security is, the larger their apps are.
One of the large companies I work with takes software security seriously and has internal employees that make most of the software, and internal security teams that audit it. Outside of having low defect rates, their software is also small and streamlined. They just don't have tons of external libraries they pull in unless it's for a legitimate reason.
Another large company in the same industry has almost everyone making their software as an external contractor. Employees turn over all the time and no one stays on a team long. I swear they make software by running 'npm install *'. Their software binaries/release are much much larger than the first company. Their defect rate is huge, which causes huge delays in releasing software because there are always a pile of showstopper security tasks before release that anything that's not showstopper gets ignored.
It reads quite a bit differently now :D
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/...
- no internet connected thermostats
>> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
>> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
"I'm holding it wrong."
So, I don't use them.
More seriously, at this point, any idiot who downloads such invasive apps deserves its consequences.
Most people aren’t aware of how invasive these are. That doesn’t make them idiots. Instead of ignoring them you should do the exact opposite: have empathy for them and let them know what’s happening. Only when enough people know what these companies are up to and say “no more” will anything change.
Y'all will back smart watches that know all your vitals, and pendants that listen to everything you say, but log how frequently and thoroughly you brush your teeth, and suddenly there's an outrage.
As for why they are 300MB? It sounds like it was just poorly packaged assets. That's stupid, but also not a big deal.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.o...
I don’t know about the Oral-B app, but the Colgate / Kolibree at least had some mostly accurate mapping of brushed areas (when using one of their "smart" toothbrushes).
I remember when my Atari ST had 60 MB hard drive space in total, and I could fit every piece of software I owned on it.
1. an agency probably built these apps, an arena where I've worked or contributed to for 15 years that is defined by arbitrary quarterly client budgets and flavor of the month tech stacks evangelized by a rotating cast of characters (including random contractors), due mostly to high industry turnover, mis-allocation of project 'resources' (human beings), moving goalposts often dictated by client whim, etc etc, all in the pursuit of technology deliverables that are intentionally crippled by analytics libraries and conceived almost entirely by creative departments that "ladder up to the dynamic storytelling and next-gen digital transformations that Brand X will deliver holistically to its army of advocates and consumer clusters who crave end-to-end digital alchemy and mindblowing content journeys on socials".
(don't forget, we sell electric toothbrushes)
You can imagine how in that environment it's Thunderdome, anything goes! :-D
And of course I'm being actively silly in my description, but it's worth painting this picture to articulate that a lot of these projects are moving too fast and have too many things literally bolted onto to them to ever find themselves in a place where you could package and release a 10MB app again.
2. after throwing that industry under the bus, I opened Xcode to interrogate one of my own iOS apps, of which I'm the sole and only contributor, painstakingly birthed from scratch with love.
IT, TOO, IS 300MB, much to my surprise!
The app itself does a lot of things:
- beautiful onboarding screens that you likely only ever see once (graphics, video, etc)
- complex notification receipt and display
- full-featured audio player
- embedded HTML webviews and code for audio visualization
- custom iOS Sticker extension
- integrated image editor
- iOS widgets
- Apple Watch support
- tvOS support for a completely unique second-screen experience
- a bunch of frameworks and libraries, leveraged for different reasons (Messages, WidgetKit, SwiftUI, SPPermissions, Haneke, MarqueeLabel, NotificationBannerSwift, Reachability, SDWebImage, Shift, SnapKit, SwiftAudioEx, SwiftQueue, SwiftyJSON)
But realistically, the app actually only does two things: plays some tunes and lets you know when some new merch is for sale. The rest of the stuff is shiny toy territory. Then you compile and package it up, and voila, 300MB.
Turns out, I'm just as culpable for the bloat as any agency or poor soul making apps these days -- you're gonna reach for libraries and include giant assets and do all this stuff that's probably not sane, while in the pursuit of fun, beauty, innovation, or I guess even just collecting intrusive metrics on people's dental habits.
Don’t dis it until you try it.
Some people have limited storage space remaining on their device. Some people have slow Internet, or capped Internet.
Fuck you. A "toothbrush app" which shouldn't exist in the first place CANNOT justify AI anything.
What an indictment of our entire industry, nobody stopped this at any point. Nobody said "no we can't justify doing this to our customers", nobody said "this is an insane waste of the resources of everyone", nobody said "this is atrocious". APPLE didn't say "No you can't do this to the people we supposedly lock the garden for".
The management of our entire industry needs to be re-educated.
Also, how is it POSSIBLE to ship duplicate files in such an ecosystem? Apple could trivially and invisibly duplicate files in the file system and app submissions.