Re:I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app
by potatolicious on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @02:22PM
(#30445134)
Not to mention the surface area of the app is often larger than it appears to a single user, especially for companies this large whose customer bases are this wide.
It's tempting to think about the United app as something very simple:
- Search for flights
- Run through the booking flow for flights
- Look up existing bookings
- Change existing bookings
But this ignores a lot of scope that's actually critical for a company whose products are very complicated:
- ID verification for international travel
- Custom functionality for large institutional cu
stomers (government, corporate)
- Functionality for ancillary services: in-air streaming entertainment, in-airport services like lounges and baggage checks, loyalty program, loyalty-tier-specific functionality like priority connections.
- ... etc.
In this case the lack of stripping symbols seems like a very easy win and definitely is an example of sloppiness, but the idea that the binary should definitively be < 100MB seems to ignore a lot of scope.
It's tempting to think about the United app as something very simple:
- Search for flights
- Run through the booking flow for flights
- Look up existing bookings
- Change existing bookings
But this ignores a lot of scope that's actually critical for a company whose products are very complicated:
- ID verification for international travel
- Custom functionality for large institutional cu stomers (government, corporate)
- Functionality for ancillary services: in-air streaming entertainment, in-airport services like lounges and baggage checks, loyalty program, loyalty-tier-specific functionality like priority connections.
- ... etc.
In this case the lack of stripping symbols seems like a very easy win and definitely is an example of sloppiness, but the idea that the binary should definitively be < 100MB seems to ignore a lot of scope.