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Emerge Tools Profile picture
@emergetools
Jul 9 • 11 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
Good question @VishalMalvi_ ! Here's what's going on behind the scenes of the @gmail iOS app 👇 Image
Here are the biggest chunks of the app

Main app target - 225 MB
Plugins - 99 MB
Dylibs - 46 MB
Localizations - 130 MB 👀
Image
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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
If you're interested in a deep dive in localizations and want to know how they can be optimized, well we have the thread for you 🤓

For the plugins (99 MB), most the size is coming from the ShareExtension at 70.5 MB Image
As far as optimizations go, one of the more interesting ones comes from the sheer number of files in Gmail

There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog

(again a reason why iOS apps are bigger than Android apps 🤷‍♂️)Image
Small files are actually something we've covered in depth before in the @CandyCrushSaga app + the difference in iOS vs. Android
emergetools.com/deep-dives/can…
FWIW, it seems like all the popular mail apps on iOS are big, but Gmail takes the cake 🎂

Gmail - 544.2 MB
Microsoft Outlook - 320.5 MB
Yahoo Mail - 300 MB
Here's a link to the original tweet, thanks to @SwiftDev_UI for tagging us!
Here's the link to our Gmail analysis, there's more goodies if you want to investigate 🔎
emergetools.com/app/example/io…
For people wondering what tools we used 🫣

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More from @emergetools

Emerge Tools Profile picture
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 👀 (more on this later)
23 MB Dynamic Frameworks

The rest is assets, localizations, misc. Let's start with the Plugins 🔌 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
Emerge Tools Profile picture
Sep 24
Do you want a paid wallpaper app from @MKBHD?

Maybe not? Well do you want to know how its made 🤓

🧵 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

Image
Image
☠️ 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
Emerge Tools Profile picture
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 frameworks— these are unnecessary binary symbols that can be stripped out and save 215.5 MB (35% of install size) for Santander UK 🤓Image
Image
Read 10 tweets
Emerge Tools Profile picture
Jun 24
Another day, another "How is this app so big tweet" 🤓

This time its the @DJIGlobal iOS app, which comes in at 1 GB Screenshot of tweet of the DJI Mimo app store with the text "New app size recrod"
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 Pie chart of app size showing 155 MB (15%) are coming from videos
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 👇

face_feature.mlmodelc - 68.7 MB
inpainting_l2.mlmodelc - 50.8 MB
pet.mlmodelc - 30.5 MB Screenshot showing .mlmodelc files in a treemap
Read 8 tweets
Emerge Tools Profile picture
Mar 25
These are the best 🥲... 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
Read 10 tweets
Emerge Tools Profile picture
Mar 8
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
Code snippet showing `emergeAccessibility(true)` on a PreviewProvider
Drizly Preview with annotations of VO 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
Read 9 tweets

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