[HN Gopher] X vs. Twitter: App Binary Comparison
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       X vs. Twitter: App Binary Comparison
        
       Author : jakey_bakey
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2024-02-25 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.emergetools.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.emergetools.com)
        
       | falcor84 wrote:
       | > the single greatest change from Twitter to X is that the app
       | now ships five variations of the "X" logo, each around 1-3 MB.
       | The top-level asset catalog increased from 938 kB to 11.2 MB.
       | 
       | Funny, I would have expected the rebranding from 7 letters to 1
       | letter to result in smaller logos
        
       | russellbeattie wrote:
       | > _At this scale, even 1 MB can have a significant environmental
       | impact._
       | 
       | This links to an article - which the author obviously didn't read
       | - that says this:
       | 
       | > _This is not to say that making smaller apps will be a huge
       | help to climate change, quite the opposite. Despite all that
       | we've shown, most of the energy consumed by a mobile device is
       | gone before the user even gets a hold of it, in the manufacturing
       | process._
       | 
       | I'm not against helping to prevent climate change, but I am tired
       | of needless hand-wringing over something so trivial, as well as
       | demonizing the tech industry for something that is mostly caused
       | by things like cars, jets, cargo ships and tankers.
       | 
       | Reducing an app's size by 1MB is the equivalent to a single long
       | haul flight. Not worth the effort to even think about it, let
       | alone spend the man-hours to prevent it. In fact one could make
       | the argument that all the electricity and resources consumed by
       | developers would offset any potential environmental impact.
        
         | throwaway250224 wrote:
         | No, there is no environmental impact at all.
         | 
         | We can talk about optimizing apps, making them more performant
         | or lightweight, but there's nothing at all, whatsoever, related
         | to the so-called "climate change" here, absolutely nothing. We
         | have to end with this psychosis.
        
         | saagarjha wrote:
         | It's a blog post by the same company. What makes you think the
         | author didn't read it? The whole post is about how you can
         | spend a few minutes to have a measurable carbon impact.
        
       | saagarjha wrote:
       | If I remember correctly TwitterSPMMigration was the result of an
       | (IMO somewhat misguided) effort at slowly pulling apart the
       | _other_ monolith framework, T1Twitter, into smaller packages.
       | This effort was underway long before the takeover and I suspect
       | will never be finished. Probably for the best, really.
        
       | westoque wrote:
       | alternatively you can get away from the app size bloat by using X
       | as a PWA (progressive web app). in iOS, this would use safari as
       | the app container and you would just have the assets to download
       | for dependencies. it's sad however that apple is now trying to
       | kill PWAs. i wish people would use PWAs more as this actually
       | makes it easier to build apps.
        
         | giancarlostoro wrote:
         | Are they? That's a shame considering they were basically
         | pitched by Apple originally, or so is my understanding, all the
         | way back to Steve Jobs.
         | 
         | I assume them trying to kill them is more about total control
         | of apps on their platform. I think its a huge mistake if they
         | kill them off.
        
           | westoque wrote:
           | just basing my assumptions on:
           | 
           | - https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/
           | 
           | - https://itnext.io/apple-wants-to-kill-pwas-0895be2e497b
           | 
           | i really hope they don't as it does provide an acceptable
           | alternative to native apps. not everyone has a mobile team
           | that can build native. imagine a small team just making a web
           | app could now also provide a similar experience and value for
           | mobile out of the box.
        
         | jauntywundrkind wrote:
         | With a 220 MB app size, this seems incredibly likely to be a
         | remedy, yes!
         | 
         | Why is this post down voted? Do people disagree or think this
         | so wrong? Why are you down voting?
        
           | saagarjha wrote:
           | While I don't vote and I don't necessarily disagree, I think
           | that going for the web version of Twitter is probably the
           | wrong decision unless one of the following is one of your
           | primary concerns:
           | 
           | * Your phone has so little free space on it that you use the
           | web version, and periodically clear any data it builds up in
           | your browser
           | 
           | * You are concerned with the increased tracking area that the
           | app exposes
           | 
           | * You run web extensions that alter the Twitter experience
           | 
           | For most other usecases (features, battery life,
           | accessibility) the website is probably the wrong choice. I
           | suspect this will remain the case until the native app gets
           | an inevitable rewrite when X decides they don't want to
           | maintain it anymore.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-25 23:02 UTC)