Comment by rty32
1 year ago
It could just be simply about a bad build system that does not efficiently trim out unused dependencies, or people are using unnecessary dependencies in the first place. Which happens all the time everywhere.
And to be honest, I can totally see why this is happening. Santander does not have a lot of incentive to improve this. The distribution of the app package is done by Apple, and they don't charge you by what your file size is or how much bandwidth this uses. They charge you a developer fee and 30% IAP. If there is no (direct) extra cost, and trimming the file size could mean additional work on the developers and may cause things to break if not handled well, someone could be blamed for it. So why take the risk.
And actually, it is possible that nobody internally at Santander ever looked into this problem.
How do I know? The build system at my company sucks -- tons of waste of build time, memory use, disk space, debugging time, communication etc. I myself have brought up many of the issues. Nothing happened. Why? Because things are working, and nobody wants to do something when there is only risk but little benefit (to them).
As of why people aren't being rewarded for saving CI costs, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
IMO Apple is partially responsible for that - in that linked twitter thread the mentions:
"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 ",
"Xcode 14 deprecated bitcode by default, which we've detailed a few times. Basically, bitcode optimizes production builds, partly by stripping away unneeded metadata (binary symbols)."
Something tells me Apple is quite happy with that - easier to sell iCloud subscription or upsell iPhone with bigger storage and also easier to scream to EU that running infrastructure for AppStore is very expensive with those heavy apps so they deserve their 30% cut.
Similar story is with Photos storage - so hard to recompress them to smaller - lots of very shady apps in app store. I really think Apple do this on purpose to sell more iCloud
Bitcode was there for support of multiple architectures. It’s not needed anymore and won’t provide any benefits moving forward.
https://arbyswift.com/why-does-xcode-14-deprecate-bitcode
Photos wouldn’t be a very good photo storage service if it was wrecking my photos by compressing them. I want more detail, not less. Also, you can choose photo quality very easily. Settings > camera > formats > photo mode
Videos takes plenty of space and you do can compress them without loosing visible quality.
Re Photos - yesterday I was helping to move my mum iPhoneX to iPhone 11 - she is not very tech savvy and mostly inheriting phones from her kids. iPhoneX had 75GB used out of 250GB but iPhone XS model has only 64GB. Not everybody needs the best quality so having a choice is good to have. I didn't have any choice, all video compressing app horrible as well, iTunes (or whatever is called now) is a living hell. I gave up and ended up buying her iCloud - still the whole experience in this case of backing up and moving to other phone was so bad with having no clue if this is gonna work or not. I had similar bad story where I had to help my sister upgrade iOS when she was running out of storage.
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There's no need to wonder what it "could" be about, it's all explained at the link. :)
I reported this size issue to them during beta test, and they ignored it. At the time I was on a limited cellular plan with no home wifi, so 600MB was a huge bullet. BTW, the old app was ~180MB and the one before that was ~50MB.
It wouldn't take much engineering effort to address the size issue, but somebody in a position of power would need to care about it.
> Santander does not have a lot of incentive to improve this.
There is some incentive. A not-insignificant percentage of users won't be able to immediately install it without going through the hassle of finding something else to delete first to free up storage space, adding onboarding friction.
This is funny: the idea that banks have the same concerns about “onboarding friction” as high growth startup companies.
You know who big banks don’t care about serving? People who are too poor to have free storage space on their phone.
Santander has a 9-figure annual ad spend, more than most startups are worth - they definitely care about acquiring new customers.
Poor people pay more overdraft fees.
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