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Comment by osteele | Hacker News Reader

2GB is 1.5% of the storage for a mid-range (128GB) late-2016 iPhone; or 6% of the storage for the lowest-end (32GB) iPhone SE.

Any decent product team – which I assume these apps have – is tracking this, and is continuously setting direction for the tradeoffs among space optimization, speed optimization, bandwidth optimization, battery life, usability, stability, server costs, feature velocity, and probably a half dozen other factors.

The implication of some of the comments here is that they've been making these tradeoffs incorrectly. I'd be interested to hear more about the reasoning behind this conclusion.

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Individual rank-and-file employees don't get promoted for not building features. So there's an inherent incentive for the app size to grow, whether or not that code is useful to 99% of its install base.

Between writing a single line that includes a 100 MB library and writing a hundred lines that include just the code needed; many people will pick the former. Just look at usage of GPUImage or other libraries.

I call it Promotion Driven Development.

It would be interesting to see the chart of size of the org working on the app next to the size of the app itself. I suspect they are highly correlated.

I'd be shocked if they were making those tradeoffs correctly. The people making the decisions are not paying all of the costs, and they'll naturally favor saving only the costs they pay directly.

Not exactly. If e.g. an app using more space antagonizes users to the point of not using it, any competent PM would mitigate that.

Sure, but there's no particular reason that cost would line up with the cost of additional storage they're imposing on their users.

This is probably true for your "average" app, but how many people are gonna uninstall Facebook (the #1 app, according to TFA) just because it's taking up a little more space?

I doubt the total installed size of the FB app is very high on their list of concerns.

Especially since space is fungible, so deleting 300MB of other apps will have the same effect. Facebook's wastefulness here could be causing users to abandon other apps.

Latency definitely antagonizes users to the point of reducing use, and from what I can tell very few tech company PMs are “competent” at keeping latency of their apps/websites down, when faced with competing pressures like shipping new features, rearranging everything in the UI, switching front-end rendering strategy, gathering increasing amounts of invasive analytic data, or cramming more ads in.

Certainly not the ones at Facebook, Google, etc. Nobody gets promoted for “we shipped less new features but our latency remained constant”, or “we shipped less new features but reduced device battery use by 10%”.

> Any decent product team – which I assume these apps have – is tracking this, and is continuously setting direction for the tradeoffs

Key word right there. One criterion you didn't explicitly list: development time.

Pruning and deduplicating dependencies takes time and effort that could be spent elsewhere - e.g. all the criteria you listed - and so the question becomes, what benefit is there to improving that? There's an argument to be made for onboarding, of course, but between the prevalence of WiFi and the proportion of users with the app installed to those installing it, I suspect it's tough to make.

Actually, he explicitly called out "feature velocity" as a factor.

I'm not sure if Facebook is making the tradeoffs correctly. But both my wife and I removed it from our phones and just use the browser and are very happy with the decision.

Eight gb phones were the doorbuster deals in 2016, they're not that old, or rare.

from when a 128GB iphone is mid-range? i paid around 700 euro for iPhone 6 16GB and is still damn good. what is not good is a stupid app taking 2GB.

I guess you don't get many pictures or constantly offloads them. sure 16gb model is fine for standard usage plus maybe a handful apps, but hd videos eat lot of space.

Why would anyone not offload pictures and videos taken off their phone?

To be able to see and show them everywhere without having to download them.

OK, sure. I'd count that as local caching---ie still offload as soon as possible, but keep the local copy for as long as you have space. Though aren't connections in the developed world fast enough that you can just download/stream them on-demand?

(For lots of pictures and videos, you can keep a lower quality version on the device as a compromise---but not sure whether Google Photos or Apple does that by default?)

Though aren't connections in the developed world fast enough that you can just download/stream them on-demand?

The problem isn't so much the speed but the caps, if you're not on Wifi. I don't know anyone who has more than 5GB/month, and HD video will eat that in less than an hour.

I'm on a nominally unlimited pay-as-you-go plan in the UK for about 25 GBP a month. I regularly do 20+ GB over 4g a month.

The UK isn't ahead of the rest of the world here, is it? (Google paid for my mobile data in the last few years before that, so I am out on the loop on general prices.)

yes and I used to do that when pictures didn't count towards your icloud storage cap, but then got fucked by Apple change of policy

On the other hand, the iPhone5s is still current and will be getting iOS11 later this year, and the base model has ~12GB usable storage out of the box, and 2GB is a sizable chunk of those 12GB.

Cellular data plans have caps. Usually relatively small ones. Download 10 100MB apps—the maximum size for an app downloaded over a cell connection—and you've blown a 1GB data plan.

I'm not sure if a 5c user would get that 2gb app or an optimized version. But if the question is tradeoffs, and that 2gb number holds that is 1/8 and 1/4 of the 8gb and 16gb phone. Also, iirc I only had ~5gb after the OS and apple preinstalled software. >40% is not a possible or sustainable portion of storage. Worst case they get dropped, best case intermittently installed and deleted.

The thing is having your app be 200 MB is not actually a big issue in the real world. So why do space optimization? Time is limited and there's always other things to be worked on.

It is if it can only be downloaded on WiFi -- I see that as a big motivating factor to keep your app below 50 or 100mb (whatever the Cellular data limit is).

My team was discussing the embarrassment of customers not being able to download our app in our own stores. Plus there is actual real world data showing smaller apps are downloaded more.

Just ordered an iPhone 7 with 32GB, to go to 128GB is another £100.

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