X vs. Twitter: App Binary Comparison | Hacker News Reader

X vs. Twitter: App Binary Comparison

emergetools.com

28 pointsjakey_bakey10 comments

> the single greatest change from Twitter to X is that the app now ships five variations of the "X" logo, each around 1-3 MB. The top-level asset catalog increased from 938 kB to 11.2 MB.

Funny, I would have expected the rebranding from 7 letters to 1 letter to result in smaller logos

If I remember correctly TwitterSPMMigration was the result of an (IMO somewhat misguided) effort at slowly pulling apart the other monolith framework, T1Twitter, into smaller packages. This effort was underway long before the takeover and I suspect will never be finished. Probably for the best, really.

alternatively you can get away from the app size bloat by using X as a PWA (progressive web app). in iOS, this would use safari as the app container and you would just have the assets to download for dependencies. it's sad however that apple is now trying to kill PWAs. i wish people would use PWAs more as this actually makes it easier to build apps.

Are they? That's a shame considering they were basically pitched by Apple originally, or so is my understanding, all the way back to Steve Jobs.

I assume them trying to kill them is more about total control of apps on their platform. I think its a huge mistake if they kill them off.

just basing my assumptions on:

- https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/

- https://itnext.io/apple-wants-to-kill-pwas-0895be2e497b

i really hope they don't as it does provide an acceptable alternative to native apps. not everyone has a mobile team that can build native. imagine a small team just making a web app could now also provide a similar experience and value for mobile out of the box.

With a 220 MB app size, this seems incredibly likely to be a remedy, yes!

Why is this post down voted? Do people disagree or think this so wrong? Why are you down voting?

While I don’t vote and I don’t necessarily disagree, I think that going for the web version of Twitter is probably the wrong decision unless one of the following is one of your primary concerns:

* Your phone has so little free space on it that you use the web version, and periodically clear any data it builds up in your browser

* You are concerned with the increased tracking area that the app exposes

* You run web extensions that alter the Twitter experience

For most other usecases (features, battery life, accessibility) the website is probably the wrong choice. I suspect this will remain the case until the native app gets an inevitable rewrite when X decides they don’t want to maintain it anymore.

> At this scale, even 1 MB can have a significant environmental impact.

This links to an article - which the author obviously didn't read - that says this:

> This is not to say that making smaller apps will be a huge help to climate change, quite the opposite. Despite all that we‘ve shown, most of the energy consumed by a mobile device is gone before the user even gets a hold of it, in the manufacturing process.

I'm not against helping to prevent climate change, but I am tired of needless hand-wringing over something so trivial, as well as demonizing the tech industry for something that is mostly caused by things like cars, jets, cargo ships and tankers.

Reducing an app's size by 1MB is the equivalent to a single long haul flight. Not worth the effort to even think about it, let alone spend the man-hours to prevent it. In fact one could make the argument that all the electricity and resources consumed by developers would offset any potential environmental impact.

No, there is no environmental impact at all.

We can talk about optimizing apps, making them more performant or lightweight, but there's nothing at all, whatsoever, related to the so-called "climate change" here, absolutely nothing. We have to end with this psychosis.

It’s a blog post by the same company. What makes you think the author didn’t read it? The whole post is about how you can spend a few minutes to have a measurable carbon impact.

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