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Comment by magicseth | Hacker News Reader

The first part of this article is all about apps doing unnecessarily large network requests. The lack of gzip, optimized images, and redundant requests are more a sign of developers having not enough time or knowledge in the area of bandwidth optimization.

The second half of the article is much more interesting with a discussion of the horrible security practices in apps (or lack thereof). It is an indichtment of Facebook, flurry, and any other app that is leaking data (including passwords) without the user's permission.

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It got me wondering if it might be possible to compete with a similar app by just illustrating how much less bandwidth your app uses. Except for Sprint and people on grandfathered plans, people pay per GB for bandwidth on their mobile devices. If you can show your app uses 10% of the bandwidth of another would that make an impact on the typical buyer?

The security stuff is really worrisome. Apple ought to be vetting this stuff in their review process, as having a bunch of high profile identity theft start happening to people using iPhone apps is not going to do anything good for Apple.

Finally, I've added flurry.com to my /etc/hosts.

> It got me wondering if it might be possible to compete with a similar app by just illustrating how much less bandwidth your app uses. Except for Sprint and people on grandfathered plans, people pay per GB for bandwidth on their mobile devices. If you can show your app uses 10% of the bandwidth of another would that make an impact on the typical buyer?

Sadly, I doubt the typical user cares that much. Unless the bandwidth difference were significant... (in MB, not %).

I find it very interesting that apps are downloading images that are an order of magnitude larger (in file size) than they need to be. First we use expensive bandwidth to download the image, battery life to use the radio longer, and then more battery life to resize this image on the device. One easy thing they could do is resize and optimize images server side.

Why bother with that? They could just make the images the correct way to begin with.

The script would be for huge amounts of images that may change, if they are provided from a third party. Most thumbnail scripts implement caching, so effectively they are only doing the work once too.

That's a good point. My values would require that I run the thumbnail script myself and not the first visitor to see the image. Shoot, a Photoshop action could much the same thing.

But that's just me.

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