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Emerge Tools Profile picture
@emergetools
Sep 5 • 10 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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
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Just for fun, we decided to look at a few other versions of the Santander app since it looks like they have one for each country they operate in

The app in Poland has an even larger install size than the UK one we've been looking at, coming in at 673.3 MB 🫨

The app in the US is a fraction of the size, coming in at 90.2 MB

So what are the differences? 🤷‍♂️
The Polish app seems to have the same issue as the UK app, where there are a lot of dynamic frameworks that include various string tables and metadata, leading to 204.7 MB of potential size savings

The US app looks very similar to Poland and the UK, just far fewer in numbers. Dynamic frameworks only make up 77.5 MB, but 8.8 MB could still be saved by stripping the binary symbols 😉Image
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We've outlined this before in previous tweets, explaining that these binary symbols used to be automatically optimized by bitcode, which has since been deprecated by Xcode 14 💔
So there you have it! All we're saying is that this is an issue @Santanderuk and Santander Poland could fix pretty easily with the help of Emerge Tools 😏
Anyways, here's a blog post about static vs. dynamic frameworks👇
emergetools.com/blog/posts/sta…
And if you'd like to see the full Santander UK breakdown, here it is 👇 emergetools.com/app/example/io…
TY for the tag @gingerbeardman! Link to original tweet here

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More from @emergetools

Emerge Tools Profile picture
Jul 9
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
Image
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
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
Emerge Tools Profile picture
May 23, 2023
Last week we wrote how @peacock reduced app size & app launch after moving from RN to native

By beautiful chance, another streaming app did the same this week. Did the same effects occur? Well, yes, no & it depends

🧵 Breaking down HBO's new Max app
So, HBO Max is now Max. New app, new bundle id, new logo, & entirely new codebase. Let's start by comparing the iOS size and architecture

iOS
HBO Max (old app): v53.20.1 - 60.4 MB install size
Max (new app): v1.0.1 - 108.8 MB

The new iOS app is 48.4 MB (~80%) bigger
Here's our X-Ray for the old HBO Max app. It consists of

~18 MB of images (top left)
~11 MB main.jsbundle (top right)
~15 MB main binary (bottom left)

The rest are misc frameworks, plugins, bundles, fonts, etc. Treemap of the HBO Max iOS ...
Read 22 tweets
Emerge Tools Profile picture
May 22, 2023
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? Image
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 ImageImage
Read 7 tweets

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