Really wish the app store had a "only apps under 10MB" filter.
The fastest, least ad-filled and micropayment filled apps are usually the small ones. By downloading a 3 megabyte thermometer app you'll be much happier than a 150 megabyte thermometer app.
I remember there was a publisher in Play Store who had very small apps like single digit kb flashlight, sudoku, calender, etc. I can't find them now. Those apps were really small all within <200kb
This is something that really bothered me - I had an app that was small and worked fine on the latest Android OS, yet they took the app and account down because we hadn’t uploaded a new version in a year. Appeals didn’t help
Their reasoning is probably security. They're working under the assumption your app takes untrusted input in some way, maybe over the network. Which isn't a bad assumption, I mean almost all apps do. Very few apps are true self-contained applications, like a calculator.
So then if there happens to be some vulnerabilities in an older Android SDK then your app is susceptible. They could patch back security but that's expensive after a while. Easier to force app makers to update their apps.
3P app developers are also complicit. Often they deliberately cut off support for old OS's and old devices, because it's "too hard" to support them or whatever. Everyone seems to be working together to keep us on the hamster wheel.
Granted, it is hard. It's a whole extra version to QA on. If it works fine, fine, but if there are consistent negative user reviews on a version with < 5% market share, it's not worth it.
We don't support old iOS versions at all. We can't source new devices on old iOS versions so we can't reliably develop or test on them.
Exactly how I feel about every new React framework. It’s strictly worse than using any other framework and every recruiter continues to ask for it.
Don’t want to speak too negative in regards to the orgs which use it but definitely wouldn’t be the best choice from an engineering perspective for a new project.
Sorry I am not a front end developer. I am a general software engineer please don’t effectively sabotage my career because Silicon Valley wants to make the entire discipline a group of hamsters learning tools which aren’t used by the largest organizations.
> "It’s strictly worse than using any other framework"
If you actually believe that, consider yourself very lucky.
React, like any FE framework, can be implemented well or implemented badly.
React benefits from a very strong (imo the strongest) ecosystem, so if you set up your tooling and patterns correctly its fantastic.
Here's my personal preference: NextJS as the backbone, RTKQ as the central data retrieval/API calls/caching management, RHF for form handling, ag-grid for data grids, and MUI as the component library (can optionally switch this to any equivalent).
If components are designed sufficiently generic and customizable, RTKQ is used to keep data fetching on component instances, and central state storage is avoided as much as possible, it's a great system. Unless you just really hate JSX syntax or something.
There may not have been any. Individual app-store reviewers can block you any time they feel like it, the guy checking your appeal is the same, and none of them have any real pressure to behave unless you have money and corporate power behind you.
I'm no fan of Google, but it's slightly more complicated than that, there's a lot of security and privacy stuff that can't be enforced if your app was build 6 years ago and still slopping around.
Does that really matter for a local-only 5KB app that only talks with my phone‘s flashlight, or reads sensor data? Now, maybe for the 500MB adware-filled “flashlight” app that connects to 100s of servers and demands access to everything my device can do, but that would be banned on any competent app store anyway.
I don't know if this is still the case, but at one point the permission needed to access the flashlight also gave access to the camera. And there aren't restrictions on network connections from apps. (I'd love to have app network access restricted by permissions, but that would be a large change.)
And in any case, Android has had built-in flashlight support for a while now, for any phone that has a camera with a flash. Is the "turn the screen bright white" style still useful with modern Android?
No but enforcing policy is manageable. Enforcing reasonable security measures based on nuances and case by case situations is not manageable for an ecosystem of that scale.
I'm surprised to hear this. Fortunately it doesn't look like the source code itself got taken over [1], and of course F-Droid, which is always the best place to get any open source Android application, still has the same version as the latest Github release. [2]
These applications are blessedly feature complete, and I haven't noticed any issues being "stuck" on the F-Droid versions.
If you sold the app to the ad company, the terms of the sale are almost certainly going to prohibit you from building a competitor. You'd have to start a new venture in a different area.
Weird that their GitHub says "without ads", but the apps in the play store say contains ads. It looks like they're doing ads/paid model in the app store, are they ad-free from F-Droid?
That reminds me of one reason I got out of mobile app development, totally forgot about until now
Often times the hiring managers wanted to see something more akin to a portfolio, like an art project, for apps that many times didn’t exist anymore or have a production server up anymore
But the more arbitrary metric was trying to be sure that I worked on anything “big”
And the 8-12 megabyte package sizes - which I spent a lot of time optimizing with many competence inspiring techniques - would signal that the app or service or userbase wasn't big. Which had nothing to do with anything, could have hundreds of millions of downloads and users
In that space there is a huuuge incentive for bloatware
I have never experienced nor heard of a hiring manager determining the outcome of a candidate based on the MB of an app they worked on. I would run away from working for a company like that.
> I would run away from working for a company like that
although a form of affirmation about my experience, and caked in privilege, my experience is that a company that does one odd thing during an interview process isn't indicative of anything. actual job and team I’m on can be fine
I continue to be puzzled by how much smaller apps are on Android, ex. Took me 9 tries, including ads, to find a thermometer app over 7 MB. I've worked on both platforms for years and yet don't really know why. Only guess is Android has a much richer tradition of vector art over bitmaps, and Swift libraries had to be compiled in for years until ABI stability enabled using dynamic linking to OS ones
For reference the first app I got on Apple App store (ignoring the ad result) for "thermometer" is > 100 MB. Looking at the first ~dozen only 1 comes in under the <10 MB category. The two biggest offenders of huge app sizes are shipping cross platform runtimes (the kind that tend to throw in the kitchen sink, not the kind that act as a thin layer) and tracking/analytics bloat.
Because a thermometer is software and software is imperfect. Perhaps it made some assumptions that causes phones that were released after the app was released to drain the battery very quickly. Or it has a calculation error where over time it accumulates a significant difference between the measurement data and the data that is rendered on screen. Or perhaps it's using an API that we all thought was safe, but turns out it's not. Or it needs to use an API to get temperature data (thermometer can have different meanings) and the API no longer exists.
Even something as silly as an app that does nothing can run into these issues. The APIs and other interfaces used to run applications are imperfect. Sometimes doing nothing about it is a choice, sometimes the vendor doesn't deem that acceptable and then it is no longer a choice. Either way, the application will have to adapt or degrade (to the point where it degrades out of existence).
Hardware is also imperfect, but "good enough" is much easier to accept in the context of hardware. Good enough should also be good enough for software.
Changing from using one system API to another shouldn't push an app over an N MB filter anyways. If the user runs into an issue, they can update. Otherwise, if it still works fine just continue to use it.
The argument for updating to keep up with API changes can also be flipped against updating to protect against UI/UX changes. I have lost features from Android updates that I have never been able to get back on my phone, only recreate them on my GNU/Linux desktop.
A calculator app doesn't need that many megabytes of code and assets to be a calculator app. So if an app is way bigger than it should be, it usually means one of two things (usually!):
1. The app was not very optimised, perhaps created by a novice, containing a lot of things it doesn't need.
2. The app used to be really small, but a lot of extra code was added to serve you ads, profile you for better targeting or do sneaky stuff you didn't ask for.
If a trip to the baker took 172 days, there would be over 171 used days to justify; if it took 172 engineers to change a lightbulb, it would have to be a very special lightbulb or explanations should be in order. Besides uses of concern of the extra resources spent, it simply just makes no sense.
Early versions of Mathematica were only a few dozen MB and certainly have more functionality than probably most calculator apps you can find that are much bigger.
People arrived to this shore after having experienced that what they considered unbelievable and untenable is actually believed and held by some - who may not even seem to be particularly an uncommon tail of an emerging population.
And this is why a good '/S' keeps you safe from misunderstanding.
Tangentially related, I once wrote a literature review on why people play Flappy Bird. I was a graduate student in game studies at the time. Ultimately, I never pursued the academic route, just sharing it for fun.
I have always felt there is something fascinating going on behind Flappy Birds' infamous difficulty curve that warrants deeper study.
On the one hand, there is no actual progression or ramping of difficulty in the game itself. The difficulty level remains the same whether your current score is 0 or 10 or 100. But every new highscore represents a new summit that the player has to scale. The first and maybe the most frustrating summit to scale is scoring a single point. To get your score into the double digits, the player has to have basic mastery of the core mechanics - including the precise physics, and timings- and learn how to handle a certain number of scenarios. The obstacles on the path to triple-digit territory and beyond seem almost self-imposed. The fear and tension as you approach your own highscore is the biggest impediment to breaking your highscore. Once you break that highscore - the hand tremors magically disappear the next time you approach it, only for it to re-appear as you near your new highscore.
All this, when the basic concept of the gameplay is deceptively simple. Like i said, there are many layers to unpack for someone who is willing to look into it.
Look at almost ANY arcade game of the 70s/80s. Most of them weren't designed with an end in mind. You play as long as you can for the accolades that come with posting your initials on the scoreboard.
Asteroids is a quintessential example - relatively flat difficulty curve once you've mastered the game - it really comes down to a test of the player's endurance. Scott Safran set a record game that lasted a grueling 60 hours.
EDIT: Anyone who has EVER tried for a high score (whether a personal best, or a world record) is familiar with the natural nervousness that increases in direct proportion to how close you are to breaking it. That's not a Flappy Bird thing, that's a literal every game thing. Go watch a live stream of a speed runner that's got a heart rate monitor attached to the feed for example.
Many early 80s 8-bit console games worked this way. I'm thinking of games like Transbot for the Sega Master System. There are a few different levels, with various enemy configurations and scenery, but it has no ending and goes on forever without any real changes.
This was the case for me with Flappy Bird and also that old Temple Run game circa 2011-ish.
It's almost more of a game of focus or how much you will _think_, because once you're distracted a bit and forget those physics or timing just one time, you're probably done.
"It is surmised that conditioning is enforced via several cogni-
tive biases that trick a player into expecting euphoria (liking-
pathway), when instead frustration is yielded – with condi-
tioning being iterated to a point that the player is motivated
to interact with the game on a foremost instinctual level. We
posit that these stimulations of the wanting-pathway may
lead to players interacting with the game not only with-
out actually liking it, but also without knowing why they
are interacting with the game. Indeed, this calls for drawing
another parallel between drug addiction, and play behaviour
in which liking may be barely exhibited (cf. [16, 38, 40])."
A student of mine had an assignment to write a game using SFML, they wrote a FlappyBird clone and it was like a few hundred lines of code. It's not a very complex program to write. To be honest, I think 4k is too much :)
game.c is 800 odd lines. There are some optimizations you could do here and there (e.g load digit sprites in an array to avoid the switch case 1/2/3... stuff).
The bulk of the 3000 is fluff that you need because this is C on Android, not SFML.
I did something similar in Nim and published it in 2020 (less pretty graphics however). The difference is that I went deeper and actually wrote an assembler for the Dalvik bytecode and .apk files:
The code in the repo has unfortunately bitrotten. I am sometimes thinking to try and resurrect it Some Day™... from time to time I think of some simple app I could write if it was a bit more polished.
Also even the "pure" C one depends on Java, because Activities exist only on the Java side of Android.
In practice to be usable on a standard Android system, native code must always be compiled to a shared object, with JNI entry points to be called from Java userspace.
The only option is to write such native methods ourselves, or use one of the two predefined Activities for NDK that already expect specific functions to be present on the shared library.
Additionally, the zero Java part only works, if what NDK exposes as stable API is enough, and from Google's point of view, that is only for games, or faster compute, everything else requires JNI fun.
As tip, it is easier to deal with Android IPC for Java <-> NDK communication, than going through JNI boilerplate.
Couldn't one simply make the boilerplate once, as a library, that takes the pertinent bits as arguments? In which case if your app is C anyways it would make sense to just keep it simple with that.
It was also made to work on exactly one hardware specification, with no operating system to speak of. This flappy bird clone works on an immeasurable number of devices, with varying hardware AND software configurations!
Well these days cosmocc -mtiny is more like 120kb, now that our binaries support ARM platforms too (like Android!) and all the code I've needed to add to make sure Cosmo works reliably for a longer tail of edge cases. But that's saying a lot, since unlike these APKs cosmo binaries don't need a gigabyte JDK to run.
I don't think so. OpenBSD 7.3 works great. Their latest release broke APE in two ways: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/1263 I'm not sure if something like this is an accident. We might need to shift our support to something like DragonflyBSD, Haiku, or SerenityOS if OpenBSD doesn't want us there.
That came to mind for me too, but unfortunately the name has already been taken by a few clones; the most notable being a trivial reskin that uses a floppy disk icon instead of a bird.
Yes, raylib does support android. I have a slightly incomplete build script I use for my raylib projects (obviously you need to take better care of signing, you probably want to build for other targets besides aarch64, your SDK is probably not installed in /home/denis, and I'm not sure whether I'm adding .so files to apk in a way modern android prefers, but it still works).
I think it can be optimized quite a lot by not using a stock PNG decoder library, because all images are quite simple and can be generated from non-pixelated smaller sprites (many images are pre-scaled by 2x, which can be done during the postprocessing) or from a simple algorithmic code.
Weirdly, I think the challenge would be more difficult going to Android than adding graphics while keeping the size down.
It would not at all surprise me to see a near perfect Flappy Bird under 4k (graphics and all) as a PC .com
I'd be curious to see what the minimum size of a simple C program would be.
Say something that displayed a pixel that bounced up and down as you tapped.
Nothing special. Many inconsistencies, e.g. inconsistent variable naming (mixes snake camelCase and PascalCase). What kind of codebases are you looking at? I have seen way better ones. https://git.zx2c4.com has better. OpenBSD is great, too.
Interesting to see what a Windows-based project looks like. I haven't used Windows for ages. Seeing the .bat files and vsproj files gave me nostalgic feelings.
This reminds me of code golf, an activity I had some good fun with as a young teen.
Coincidentally, one of my first contributions to the community was a low fidelity "flappy bird" clone in less than 0.5 kb of javascript. Maybe someone will find fascination in my old hobby and its surrounding community:
Do you still accept more optimizations? :-) I believe there are tons of mechanical substitutions that can be made there, for example `i%17?r+=z:r+='|\n|'+z` should simplify into `r+=i%17?z:'|\n|'+z`.
I think what's interesting about reading code like this is that it's just not very complicated. You might go in there expecting to see some kind of complicated code golf or some fancy tricks to keep file size down. But as always it's just a matter of writing simple, understandable code and just being a little thoughtful.
Great work! Good to see what only it takes to run on Android! On the other hand it also shows how much comes "for free" or made easier by using the provided sdks. For example volume control doesn't work while running this. Also resuming the game after switching away. Maybe that's relatively easy to save and restore state, though.
i realised recently, there is a correlation between the file size of a game and how likely i am to enjoy it.
the smaller the file size the more likely i am to enjoy it. and the opposite is true.
i think part of it is time investment. having less time. i dont see much value in 60gb of 4k graphics textures.
pac man on the atari or snes is maybe less than 100kb, while modern pac man could be easily 10gb or more. same for tetris or any game with the same gameplay that hasn't changed much.
I made a sub-100k Android app once (I am now banned from the Play Store, and I should be lucky they didn't delete my Gmail account too) and every time I opened the IDE (Android Studio at the time) it would automatically add a Google "support library" to the project that Google obviously wanted to force me to use. If I forgot to remove it and built the app, it would be closer to 10MB. So that was the minimum size of almost every Android app at the time.
Most Android apps are huge because they bundle tons of assets just to accommodate the “initial experience of the user”. Also, using bloat libraries and frameworks (any shipped by Google), increase the apk size.
Nowadays Google offers a solution for this problem called app bundling. It’s especially good if you build a mono app that behaves differently in certain regions. Instead of delivering a raw apk, you deliver a region specific app bundle.
On a technicality, yes, but I think most developers who use it do so because of the large collection of React-style user interface components which are built into it. Now that Jetpack Compose exists (which allows for traditional Java-based widgets to be used in a 'reactive' way), personally I don't see any reason to use Flutter. That 'drawing directly' aspect puts Flutter apps several years behind in terms of performance, accessibility and reliability, since pretty much everything in the Android API needs to be reimplemented in Dart.
It's a simple solution, but does mean that things are effectively capped at 60fps. The techniques in https://gafferongames.com/post/fix_your_timestep/ could be used to properly allow variable fps while maintaining constant physics speed.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but there's no actual graphics in this besides a yellow ball and green rectangles, while the OP game has actual textured pipes, a textured floor, a background scene. The score counter looks to use a basic system or browser font, while the OP game has a custom font. The OP game has also high score tracking, sharing, a proper main screen instead of just dropping you into gameplay.
It's a haha-only-serious joke about using a prompt to write it. Sort of impressive it's even that far along, but OP's effort is far more interesting to me
Yep it is not to OP really. Just observation how programming numbers works nowadays: I had my first useful miniprogram using about 3-4 cryptic bytes about 33 years ago, now you can make a playable game with <200 chars of human language. It is of course “compiled” to megabytes with a tera+byte scale interpreter, but meaningful source is in human scale (again).
That was a 20 megabyte page load for me even with all the ad cruft blocked...to load a game in a browser, which is already the most batteries-included application platform I can think of.
The fastest, least ad-filled and micropayment filled apps are usually the small ones. By downloading a 3 megabyte thermometer app you'll be much happier than a 150 megabyte thermometer app.