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Comment by klondike_ | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they even need to release a "Lite" version of Facebook and Instagram is just a testament to how bloated and slow those apps have become.

This begs the question, why doesn't Facebook just completely redo their apps? I'm sure it wouldn't take long to achieve feature parity with the old app

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> This begs the question, why doesn't Facebook just completely redo their apps? I'm sure it wouldn't take long to achieve feature parity with the old app

It's hard to tell on the internet . . . you mean this as satire, right? It would take a hilarious amount of time and money to achieve feature parity.

I don't think it would take long at all for a company the size of Facebook. They already have the core functionality implemented

Ground up rewrites often look like a good idea but rarely are in practice. Much of what looks like cruft to fresh eyes is patches to bugs. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Maybe those bug fixes should be documented so that they don't look like cruft :)

Maybe they should have just written it right the first time! /s

They probably should but code as text has a lot of draw backs (and some benefits of course) one of which is that the only way to document a lot of edge cases is via comments in the text which people don't like and in large/long lived codebases immediately start rotting.

I've seen far too much

    // Workaround for <Foo bug> in <Browser no one has used for a decade and we haven't supported for five years>

I've often thought that code should have 'layers' that can be toggled on/off (comments and comments by category been one case), often when I'm writing code I don't want to see the comments while I'm writing it since I go back through afterwards and add them and they otherwise just get in the way, it would be nice if I could toggle them on/of rather than just folding them.

I've actually given some thought to how you'd implement it but I really need to hack up a proof of concept to see whether it's something I actually find useful (pass the sniff test).

With a js app packaged using babel, you can use the https://babeljs.io/docs/en/next/babel-preset-env.html preset to specify which browsers you want to support, and it will only transpile the features necessary to support those browsers. You can for example tell it you only want to support browsers with >0.25% of the browser market share, and it will figure out which browsers that includes and which features those browsers have.

It depends upon the execution. It can be undertaken as a parallel effort so that you stagnate the original app.

It also re-illustrates what we already knew- improved hardware leads to/permits code size & runtime bloat.

Cheaper phones simply only have space for one or two 21st century apps like Uber, Lyft, or Facebook. Saying those apps are bloated is misleading they are just built for newer Android's/iPhones. And lite apps are aimed at cheaper phones.

"21st century app" has to be the most bullshit term I have heard this week. You can build very small apps with a lot of features if you want. But when you keep pushing JavaScript technology into stuff just to rebuild what is already available on the platform (just in an "uncool" way), you end up with multiple almost 300 MB apps to share some images and text.

> But when you keep pushing JavaScript technology into stuff... you end up with multiple almost 300 MB apps to share some images and text

I would be hesitant to solely Javascript for the bloat of Instagram, and related apps. On phones, typically the WebView is used - not like using Electron where chromium + v8 is packaged with each application. A Cordova application can easily be in the single-digit MB range.

Facebook is a native app - and is 300MB+ in size. A breakdown is available here:

https://blog.timac.org/2017/0410-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap...

Mostly it comes down to the fact that app size is not a prioritization.

Agreed, expensive phones can have lots of big sized apps

Compare with ""20th century apps""; Apollo went to the moon with 36kb (kilowords) ROM, now it takes a thousand times that to hail a taxi.

(A lot of it is images, but still you have to wonder..)

What exactly is the amazing new experience that "21st century app" can offer that something running on 512 MB RAM phone cannot?

My phone is vastly more powerful than entire racks full of machines used to be. The idea that it's reasonable for it to barely be able to handle an app for getting a taxi is just ridiculous.

It's just bloated.

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