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Mar 25 β€’ 10 tweets β€’ 4 min read β€’ Read on X
These are the best πŸ₯²... breaking down why @LinkedIn iOS is half a GB

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 🫠
Emerge X-Ray of LinkedIn App showing 187.5 MB of Dylibs, 109.9 MB of Plugins, and a 110.6 MB main app binary
Size tracker of LinkedIn iOS app showing the app was 292.9 MB in November 2022 and is now ~450 MB
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

Notice anything fishy?
Treemap of VoyagerLibs.framework. Many of the nodes are in a dark red, indicating duplicate resources
Treemap of two LinkedIn app extensions. Many of the nodes are in a dark red, indicating duplicate resources
First off, the 2 plugins + VoyagerLibs are all shipping ArtDecoIconsResources.bundle (~8 MB). This bundle is already in the Voyager Framework, so it should be possible to share with the Plugins...but LinkedIn is still duplicating it A highlight of ArtDecoIconsResources.bundle (7.9 MB), which is included 3 separate times in the LinkedIn app.
If you look into TodayExtension, NotificationExtension, & VoyagerLibs, they share many class names (one example in screenshot)

While we don't know for sure if they are duplicates from public build analysis, it appears like the extensions are a subset of the VoyagerLibs library Screenshot showing duplicate named treemap nodes across plugins and framework
Here's something else that jumps out - in March 2023, the TodayExtension was < 400 KB. Today its ~60 MB...

Seeing as Today Extensions have been deprecated, its doubtful that they added THAT much functionality to them
Screenshot showing Today Extension was 372.7 kB in March 2023
Screenshot showing Today Extension was 60.8 MB in March 2024
It seems there's a chance that LinkedIn is statically statically linking dependencies in their Plugins rather than using the resources from VoyagerLibs

If that's the case, then the Plugins (109 MB total) have a significant amount of unnecessary size bloat
Separately, here's ~75 MB of insights that we're picking up Emerge Insights for the LinkedIn App. In all, there are close to 75 MB of potential savings from: Stripping binary symbols (36 MB), removing duplicate files (21 MB), minifying localized strings (7.9 MB), removing binary symbol metadata (5.5 MB), removing unnecessary files (3.0 MB), and optimizing images (2.2 MB)
If you want to explore our analysis on the latest version of LinkedIn, you can check out this page
emergetools.com/app/example/io…
And coincidentally, @jacobs_handle wrote a blog post for us just last week about how to avoid duplication in Plugins

Please RT this thread if you enjoyed it 😁
emergetools.com/blog/posts/mak…

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More from @emergetools

Dec 17
We got tagged to analyze this app on Thre*ds so we're posting it here too 🀭

🧡 Let's take a look at why the @intesasanpaolo iOS app is 699 MB 😳 Image
A quick breakdown πŸ‘‡

448 MB (64%) dynamic frameworks 🫠
72 MB (10%) main app target
74 MB (11%) of assets Image
We first found some low-hanging fruit improvements to optimize install size, including

102 MB (15%) from stripping binary symbols
27 MB (4%) from optimizing images
10 MB (1.5%) from removing duplicates

That's 139 MB (20%) of size that could be easily reduced right there 🧠 Image
Read 7 tweets
Nov 11
We've got to stop meeting like this πŸ˜…

🧡 taking a look under the hood of the @Yelp iOS app Image
Install size weighs in at ~318 MB, but ~4 MB of that is the watch app ⌚️

High-level breakdown:

130 MB dynamic frameworks
47 MB assets
34 MB main app target binary
26 MB localizations

For reference, @GoogleMaps weighs in at ~296 MB (7% smaller) Image
Emerge found 245 images that could be optimized to help save 21 MB (~7%)

We found two nearly identical images of this woman with her dog β€” one with a vignette and one without. Are both images used in the app? Only Yelp could answer that πŸ•΅οΈ Image
Read 8 tweets
Oct 3
Did someone say app size?!

Here's why @thetrainline iOS app is so big 🧡 Image
Total install size is 342 MB

Basic breakdown:

115 MB of Plugins
109 MB main app target binary
34 MB sqlite file πŸ‘€ (more on this later)
23 MB Dynamic Frameworks

The rest is assets, localizations, misc. Let's start with the Plugins πŸ”Œ Image
115 MB for two app extensions is a lot 🫨

We see two Plugins that look almost identical (58 MB vs. 57 MB) with many of the same modules in each.

They can likely use a Dynamic Framework to share code between these two app extensions to help reduce total Plugins size Image
Read 9 tweets
Sep 24
Do you want a paid wallpaper app from @MKBHD?

Maybe not? Well do you want to know how its made πŸ€“

🧡 Looking inside the new @Panels_art app, starting with ads Image
🎀 Ads have been a big topic

Panels is using Google Ads in both iOS (GAD) & Android

On Android, is the largest dependency in the dex com.google.android.gms.internal.ads

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☠️ Looking at it another way, we're monitoring over 16k classes in the entire Android app with Reaper

Of that, 4,172 (25%) of classes are related to Google Ads 😬 Image
Read 11 tweets
Sep 5
Oohhoho this one looks fun!

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 🧐 Image
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 linkedImage
Also, note the "String Tables" in the dynamic frameworksβ€” these are unnecessary binary symbols that can be stripped out and save 215.5 MB (35% of install size) for Santander UK πŸ€“Image
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Read 10 tweets
Jul 9
Good question @VishalMalvi_ ! Here's what's going on behind the scenes of the @gmail iOS app πŸ‘‡ Image
Here are the biggest chunks of the app

Main app target - 225 MB
Plugins - 99 MB
Dylibs - 46 MB
Localizations - 130 MB πŸ‘€
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The Localization size might shock people, but its a frequent problem in iOS

When downloaded, iOS apps contain all languages that an app supports, whereas on Android, a user will only download the languages they need

This is *one* of the reasons that Android apps are typically smaller than iOS
Read 11 tweets

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