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 👇
We also see a `` inside `LCTAISDK.bundle` at 83 MB
There's also 25 MB of models w/ a `.mnn` extension, not entirely sure what this is, but found this repo that might be related. Anyone more familiar? localAiModel.zip github.com/alibaba/MNN
So how do we get to 1 GB?
Lots of ML files
A ton of videos
~150 MB of dynamic frameworks
110 MB main app target binary
There's about 120 MB of easy savings from Emerge Insights that we're picking up
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
Finding accessibility issues in an app is an incredibly manual task that can take hours depending on the size. Which seems like a perfect place for ✨AI ✨
🧵Surfacing accessibility issues in the @Drizly app w/ AI 🧠
A quick background - our Snapshots product turns Previews into snapshots. A recent feature gives the ability to use AccessibilitySnapshot w/ one line
You don't need to write test code to get snapshot tests or to snapshot VoiceOver elements
We can take snapshots for any app leaking Previews into production, which @Drizly (and many other apps) are. We were able to generate 86 snapshots for Drizly
We then fed these images into an AI we're working on to detect accessibility errors. Here's what we found
How did the @Twitter iOS app change over the last 6 months? Why did the latest release of Google Translate Android reduce app size by 1/3rd?
We try to make these questions easier to answer, which is why we're very excited about our newest feature, AI summaries of build diffs
Jumping right in - Twitter v9.59.1 vs. v9.34.6 (iOS)
Overall size decreased by 34 MB, but how quickly can we identify what changed?
The summary is pointing to removals of plugins and bundles, which is easy to see in the X-Ray diff
T1Twitter.framework is also highlighted in the summary. Searching through the diff, we can see that many assets were modified or removed to reduce its size
What happens to an app's performance when it goes from react native -> native?
The @peacock app just made the switch on iOS & Android and had a significant change in size and startup time
🧵 Performance impact of switching to native
A quick primer
RN let's you create mobile apps for Android and iOS using js & react. 1 codebase, 2 apps. It has an active community & there are certainly reasons you'd want to use RN
That said, if performance is important, native is going to be better
A few reasons
- JS is an interpreted language vs. native (Swift & Kotlin) is compiled
- RN is *mostly* singled threaded. Concurrency is complex and not as performant
- Native has easier access to device & OS features. RN requires more libraries to achieve functionality