One of these lovely discussions again. I’m firmly on the devil’s advocate side here: some install bloat isn’t a big deal.
1. Believe it or not the LinkedIn app is huge in terms of the amount of things it does. It’s basically a super-app for professionals. News, social interactions, an entire chat app, a job board, recruiting and sales tools, etc. Of course it relies on a lot of frameworks.
2. You don’t need a “high end” phone or expensive data plan to have this size of install be reasonable. A brand new $159 Samsung A03s phone can take a 1TB SD card which itself only costs $60 from a reputable brand. You can get an unlimited data plan for $30/month from Mint mobile. Basically, the poorest consumer in the US can “afford” to install the app. Mobile download speeds in the US are far into the double digit Mbps. I’ve seen speeds go up into the hundreds of Mbps. Of course the option exists to have your apps update over WiFi automatically and use no mobile data at all.
3. Install Size != Slow performance. Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware.
4. Those criticizing LinkedIn for having a large development team that has to rely on frameworks rather than custom-building tightly integrated functionality are just on another planet entirely. The app is optimized for ease of development, not install size or perfect performance. LinkedIn isn’t going to hire a bunch of expensive, impossible to find 10X developers just to over-optimize their app so that somebody will notice that it only consumed 50MB of space instead of 500.
> Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware.
I mean you're not wrong that install size != slow performance, but GTA5 is a funny example for being the game that had 6 minute loading screens to start online mode until someone reverse engineered it and found it was mostly from parsing a giant 10MB JSON blob, and reduced the loading time by 70% with a small patch.
Very possible the bad priorities lead to both the ginormous install size and the fact that no one internal was tasked with fixing the load times.
I forgot about that incident! I guess a better example would have been Baldur’s Gate 3.
Perhaps it’s still a decent little business lesson: the highest earning video game of all time had an egregious loading bug and nobody cared for years.
I'm suspicious that long initial loads and things like login queues are actually an advantage.
The user doesn't want to end there session until they are sure that they won't want to play for the next hour. They might quit a fast loading game after 15 minutes because it's so easy to start again when they want to.
The app may do a lot of things, but what fraction of users use all of the things? Even if I use 10% of what an app is capable of, I still have to store 100% of the app on my phone.
I see the effect most with friends/family who aren't that technical wondering what to do when their phones run out of space. I don't think they expect that the most effective way to free up space is to delete a handful of apps, and instead they go through hundreds of photos trying to free up 5 MB at a time.
1. Believe it or not the LinkedIn app is huge in terms of the amount of things it does. It’s basically a super-app for professionals. News, social interactions, an entire chat app, a job board, recruiting and sales tools, etc. Of course it relies on a lot of frameworks.
2. You don’t need a “high end” phone or expensive data plan to have this size of install be reasonable. A brand new $159 Samsung A03s phone can take a 1TB SD card which itself only costs $60 from a reputable brand. You can get an unlimited data plan for $30/month from Mint mobile. Basically, the poorest consumer in the US can “afford” to install the app. Mobile download speeds in the US are far into the double digit Mbps. I’ve seen speeds go up into the hundreds of Mbps. Of course the option exists to have your apps update over WiFi automatically and use no mobile data at all.
3. Install Size != Slow performance. Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware.
4. Those criticizing LinkedIn for having a large development team that has to rely on frameworks rather than custom-building tightly integrated functionality are just on another planet entirely. The app is optimized for ease of development, not install size or perfect performance. LinkedIn isn’t going to hire a bunch of expensive, impossible to find 10X developers just to over-optimize their app so that somebody will notice that it only consumed 50MB of space instead of 500.