This is really unacceptable and so easy to solve, had they even bothered.<p>But it has been known for years that Facebook just cannot (or will not) manage its application development process. I remember reading somewhere that they developed build tools that take multiple versions of the same static library and mangle the symbols so that all versions can be linked into a single binary and there are no symbol collisions - all this to allow developers to use whatever version they started of, and god forbid, require some sort of review or cooperation between developers.<p>It is very sad to me that so many companies (start up or otherwise) aspire so much to have the same work methodologies as this company.
There must be a lot of people out there with 16GB iPhones that are constantly out of space. I don't think Apple publishes stats, but I guess >50% buy the cheapest model. The Facebook app also likes to use 500 MB for cache with no way to clear it other than deleting the app.
Why do you have to download all localizations? Isn't it possible to download only the required one after install? As far as I know Waze does this, for example.
(Honest question, I'm not a mobile developer)
I thought our apps were fat, this is ridiculous. But clearly they belong to the school of never rewrite just keep adding more and more and more. Eventually you wind up having no idea what you are shipping and the quality goes in the dumpster. At least you can use the web if you hate the mobile app (I do).
This is a side-effect of the current app business model, which sacrifices software quality to deploy it fast to the market... who expends 1 month optimization while a new app comes every 6 months ?
I find it fascinating that they managed to get to this much disk footprint so soon without any of us having much of an idea about what is going on below the good.<p>Despite weekly updates with nonsensical generic descriptions we still don't have actual features like support for devices like the iPad Pro.<p>Especially with all the frequent A/B testing bull they're pulling recently, the quality and usability of their software is dropping on a weekly basis. It just seems like a bad combination of everything on a level Microsoft at their worst couldn't even come up with.
This is exactly what happens when you don't bother to have any coherent architecture.<p>And is why you shouldn't get a job at Facebook if you really care about what kind of work you do.