This is a perfect example of why the problem isn’t the stack, native vs web, or programming languages. I’ve been saying this for ages when people bash JS for being slow, or the web for being bloated.<p>Yes, you pay a bit for the sandboxing, GC, rendering, built in accessibility. But that’s a rounding error when businesses, especially large ones, go on a PM-centric feature frenzy. You get out exactly what you put in. Performance, security, user experience..<p>Whether it’s frontend, backend, embedded, whatever, the engineers are alright. Generally. It’s when you stop listening to them, or punish the grumpy ones in favor of the people-pleasers, that this crap happens. That’s worrying, because it’s become so prevalent.
The short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.
Another question: why does the feed reload when I go 'back' to it? This happens on the website and the app whenever I click into a link and then go back to the feed. It just spontaneously reloads! If I wanted to comment on the link or even just like the post, I can't (unless I remember who posted it, go to their profile, and go to their recent activity, which I almost never have the patience to do).<p>I uninstalled the app recently because I find it maddening that I can't get notifications about comments on my own posts unless I also accept notifications for 'person X and person Y like such-and-such random post'.<p>I find it maddening and unjustifiable that these two types of behaviors would be categorized under the same notification toggle. Then I remember LI is now owned by MS, and it makes more sense.
I'm probably not the only person who misinterpreted "gig" in the title as "job", as in "side gig", instead of "gigabytes" as was intended.<p>(Makes sense considering LinkedIn is about jobs, but "half a side gig" makes no sense which should have been a clue.)
From the reply<p>>300 MB for just dynamically linked frameworks & Plugins is...a lot. In fact, just the Dylibs & Plugins today are bigger than the entire app was back in November 2022<p>>Here's something else that jumps out - in March 2023, the TodayExtension was < 400 KB. Today its ~60 MB...<p>>Seeing as Today Extensions have been deprecated, its doubtful that they added THAT much functionality to them
TL;DR: There're few global incentives for a LinkedIn app developer to make an overall good app, as opposed to making their PM happy.<p>In detail: This is how death by a thousand papercuts looks like.<p>I've had the (dubious) pleasure of observing a roughly similar BigTech app project.<p>There are likely 100s-1000s of app developers involved in the LinkedIn app, and they are likely under immense pressure to Just Ship Already (tm). Some of them consider it conscionable to do weird things like statically linking to an asset library - whether through unawareness/incompetence or just by wanting to make it through the next performance review.<p>In smaller projects, there's some kind of a feedback that can make it through the system to make sure local and global incentives are aligned, but at the LinkedIn scale that would have required the people in charge to be engineers and not suit types.<p>One interesting solution to this very problem that I actually saw in action was employing a team of top-tier systems hackers (in this case: people with a security research background) to hack through the build process. This solution naturally premises on such individuals wanting to work for an app project, incentivizing them along the right global metrics and giving them the go ahead to push back on egregious violations.
The LinkedIn app on Android clocks in at using 351 MB on my phone, but 187 MB of that is cache and 13 MB is data. The app itself is "only" 151 MB.
That's great. Now do one on why Microsoft Teams grinds away with 100% CPU on my laptop for a few minutes just to bring up my calendar, or why Outlook on Android freezes for a minute or so when looking at a single small email.
One of the products my company offers is an SDK and we are happy and proud to shave away 10s of kilobytes on it whenever possible, as large SDK sizes seem to lead to loss of opportunities with potential new customers. and then there is this. What I want to say is: Some companies DO care how big their apps are.
I don't have LinkedIn installed, but it's hardly the only app guilty of this. My phone has probably a dozen apps or so that take up much more space than I would expect (400 MB for the iRobot app that runs my Roomba? 250 MB for Firefox Focus which is now the same size as 'full' Firefox?)<p>For many of these apps, I use them frequently enough that the space tradeoff is not a concern.<p>For many others though, they're in that awkward middle zone where I use them once every month or two. But because the apps are so large, I don't want to have to waste a quarter gig of data to download them on the fly, so instead I keep them on my phone. And collectively they take up 5-10 GB of space.
Because LinkedIn is run by people who do not care anymore. They have a monopoly and nobody is interested enough in that boring industry to disrupt them.
One of these <i>lovely</i> discussions again. I’m firmly on the devil’s advocate side here: some install bloat isn’t a big deal.<p>1. Believe it or not the LinkedIn app is huge in terms of the amount of <i>things</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Original Tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1772350918534582525" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1772350918534582525</a>
Don’t know about the app but LinkedIn website is a piece of utter shit.<p>Any time my laptop fan starts spinning fast, is due to LinkedIn tabs using high CPU in the background, confirmed every time using Firefox task manager.
> Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy. In a startup, you're not just trying to solve problems. You're trying to solve problems that users care about. -pg<p>Is app package size something users care about?
Why does the web page presenting this complaint take 140 requests to serve and transfer 10Mb?<p>Same reasons - bloat over time, developers with powerful machines and network connections who don't notice the impact, users with huge devices that don't care about 500M space for an app and management and corporate culture that don't care much about optimisation.
Here's a detailed answer (using ThreadReader so no Twitter login necessary): <a href="https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1772350918534582525.html" rel="nofollow">https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1772350918534582525.html</a>