Let's take a look at why the @SantanderUK iOS app is at a whopping 613.3 MB and how 35% of it does nothing for the user 🧐
Right off the bat, it looks like most of the app (587.6 MB) is dynamic frameworks
Dylibs let you share code between targets, but are larger than static frameworks b/c static let's the compiler strip dead code. It's likely that Santander doesn't need ALL of those to be dynamically linked
Also, note the "String Tables" in the dynamic frameworks— these are unnecessary binary symbols that can be stripped out and save 215.5 MB (35% of install size) for Santander UK 🤓
Another day, another "How is this app so big tweet" 🤓
This time its the @DJIGlobal iOS app, which comes in at 1 GB
A lot of the comments speculated that the app was large due to assets & while there are 155 MB of .mp4 video files, the bulk of the size is coming from ML models
There's 264 MB of .mlmodelc files - these are compile Core ML Models which are designed to run on Apple devices. Some of the biggest models 👇
Here's a top level view of the latest version of LinkedIn
300 MB for just dynamically linked frameworks & Plugins is...a lot. In fact, just the Dylibs & Plugins today are bigger than the entire app was back in November 2022 🫠
And the Plugins and Frameworks seems to be where the greatest inefficiencies lie. Here is a more detailed look at the LinkedIn Plugins + the dynamically linked VoyagerLibs.framework