Emerge Tools Profile picture
Oct 3 9 tweets 4 min read Read on X
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
In total, we see 25 MB of duplicate files, mainly coming from the SGPKitPackage_Mocks.bundle

Additionally, Trainline could cut 18 MB from removing binary symbol metadata and 11 MB from optimizing images

That's 54 MB of low-hanging fruit to reduce app size by 15.8% 😮‍💨 Image
Back to that .sqlite file, this accounts for 10% of install size (34 MB)

Looking into it, this looks like data about all the cities and stations in the Trainline app— data like names, latitude, longitude, timezone, etc.

This probably lets people use Trainline features even in unreliable network conditions (like when you're traveling on a train through mountains), so that's pretty cool!

You know what else is cool? Making your app smaller & easy to download in poor network conditions 😏Image
And lastly, we found various images regarding Trainline + sustainability ♻️

It's great to see that a company like Trainline is putting sustainability front and center 👏 Image
Image
Friendly reminder that app size does have a tangible impact on CO2 emissions— there's a cost of every byte transferred 🌱

For an app the scale of Trainline, low-hanging size optimizations can actually make a big impact! We have a blog post about this too👇 emergetools.com/blog/posts/Cos…
It's always fun taking a deeper look into these apps— feel free to continue tagging @emergetools for any of your app size questions! 🫡

You can see the full @theTrainline analysis here emergetools.com/app/example/io…
And here's the link to the original tweet 🐥

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Emerge Tools

Emerge Tools Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

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 👇

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 😅

🧵 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 — one with a vignette and one without. Are both images used in the app? Only Yelp could answer that 🕵️ Image
Read 8 tweets
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
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
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
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

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(