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by rememberlenny 1940 days ago
"The Lyft app has hundreds of duplicate files, the largest consumer of space is a single asset catalog copied 73 times in separate bundles. Another asset catalog that is virtually identical except for the timestamp at which it was created is copied 67 times. Each of these contain nothing but 482 colors (colors can be stored in asset catalogs to simplify management of dark mode). With each one taking ~250kb these quickly eat up 35mb."

I read this as: Lyft installed Dark mode for 35mb. I can only imagine what my JavaScript modules are doing behind the scenes.
1 comments
trevor-e 1940 days ago
My biggest complaint with iOS development is how confusing Xcode's build system is. Extracting code out to shared frameworks is a confusing process and I can understand how so many of the top apps get it wrong. Also, it's clearly not a priority for Apple because they don't provide easy inspection tools. Best case for them is the user buys a new phone with more storage.
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sond813 1940 days ago
Yep this is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve! A lot of large app companies have switched from Xcode to third party build systems like Buck or Bazel. This can make things faster but even more confusing. I've found analyzing the actual build products to be the best solution to make sure nothing unintended is happening.
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tomasreimers 1940 days ago
Interesting! Are you interested in going back into the build process to try and thin the app directly? Or just in helping developers identify the sources of app size?
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sond813 1940 days ago
Currently identifying sources and offering suggestions for how to make improvements. For many apps this can reveal a lot of opportunity!
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saagarjha 1940 days ago
I agree that it's not necessarily the most straightforwards, but I would think that in the hundreds of engineers they have at least some have figured out how it works to the point to which they can do this…
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rememberlenny 1940 days ago
I’m curious - does React Native/Expo do any better job at this, with tree-shaking and package building?
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jamil7 1940 days ago
Expo produces ridiculously huge bundle sizes. I Would steer clear of it.
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