Emerge Tools Blog

Emerge Tools | Full-Time | Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Lead) | Remote (USA preferred) | $140k-210k + 0.1%-0.5% equity Emerge (https://www.emergetools.com/) is a suite of developer tools designed to supercharge mobile apps and the teams that build them. In less than three years, Emerge has already been adopted by many of the best mobile teams in the world such as: DoorDash, Square, Airbnb, Duolingo, Dropbox, Bumble and Stripe. Emerge is backed by top VCs like Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Haystack Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures. Our whole team likes to contribute to the frontend, but none of us are experts. We're looking for someone to lead Emerge's frontend development and design. An ideal candidate - Thrives in a fast moving, self-starter environment (we strive for a culture similar to Gitlab, but adapted for a small team) - A strong eye for design with the ability to balance practicality, functionality & aesthetics (Figma experience is a plus) - Extensive experience with React, Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel, Typescript Job posting: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/61922/

On Android vs iOS, it's worth noting Android apps are smaller than iOS apps. The details are complicated but this report says after installation Android apps take up about half the space as iOS. https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-research/ One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-really-that-mu…

Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog

We've seen this happen with system fonts as well, apps sometimes bundle the San Francisco font with an app instead of relying on a system font. There may be some reasons to include the font or sound file, such as if it changes in different versions of the OS. Of course that would make the app inconsistent with the rest of the OS, which may not be the best behavior. We discuss some other tradeoffs with bundling these system resources on our blog post which covers the Spark app: https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/7AppsThatCouldSaveYou500MB

1.15 GB for me - dear god. There's a comment in the article with two helpful links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail The bloat? Mostly "localization".

To be exact, that's what they call the X-Ray in their product speech, the breakdown is also there if you click around. But very nice data! Do you know how these examples are made? Is there a way for free uploads of apps or at least browsing those they have? My Web search found https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/android/bumble for Android which I am more interested in. No, I am not an app developer. Not considering buying a license just out of general engineering curiosity.

Breakdown of the app is available here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xeWx

Sorry, there was a minor snafu with the deployment pipeline - new URL is at https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/make-your-ios-app-smaller-with-…

It looks like UIKit, the static analysis [1] shows numerous ViewControllers (eg IGSundialSingleVideoClipEditorViewController) with various UIKit lifecycle methods like viewDidLoad, rather than SwiftUI. There's also a surprising amount of Objective-C, in fact it looks like mostly Objective-C, at least all the IG-prefixed classes. Unusual for 2023. [1] https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.burbn.barcelona

> A page will be loaded in if any part of it is useful. Given that functions will be laid out more or less randomly throughout a shared library, and programs use a randomly scattered subset of the functions, I think its safe to say that you'll get a lot of bytes read in to ram that are never used. We have order files for this purpose so that functions are not randomly scattered: https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/FasterAppStartupOrderFiles . This technique is widely used by well known apps.