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.
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.