Author | Nuka-Cola, Tina
Recently, someone in Hacker News pointed out that the LinkedIn app for iOS is bloated at nearly 500 MB, and that 300 MB of it is a framework and plugin for links.
This news sparked a lot of discussion among netizens, a large part of which was criticism of LinkedIn:
"As a guess, LinkedIn's most valuable users, those with sought-after skills, are supposed to be on high-performance devices. Therefore, they should not be too concerned about the size of the application. ”
"They can't test installs of 'bloated apps' against 'good apps', and they can't see why people aren't installing an app. And because of that, I've always installed as few apps as possible. Some apps are just bloated garbage. This negative impact can also cumulate. Even if LinkedIn takes the time to improve their app later and can't get rid of the negative effects of reputational damage, I still wouldn't consider installing it. ”
"Large manufacturers often don't care about the size of the application. Because users who avoid their apps because of size and/or performance issues aren't the target users with big wallets (or valuable data). ”
"For LinkedIn app developers, there's no incentive to create a great app. Their job is primarily to keep their product managers happy. LinkedIn apps can involve hundreds, if not thousands, of developers, who are often under tremendous pressure to 'get out there as soon as possible'. Some of them will take for granted strange practices, such as static linking to a repository – this may be due to a lack of awareness or competence, or it may be to cope with a performance review. ”
…
So why does the LinkedIn app have so much 500 MB? Let's take a look at the top-level view of the latest version of LinkedIn:
300 MB of that is a dynamically linked framework and plugin...... Quite "fat" indeed. In fact, the current size of Dylibs and plugins alone exceeds the full application size of the November 2022 release.
Plugins and frameworks seem to be the bloated part. The image below shows the Voyagerlibs.framework for the LinkedIn plugin + dynamic links.
Did you notice something was wrong?
First of all, both plugins and VoyagerLibs come with ArtDecolconsResources.bundle (about 8 MB), which is already in the Voyager Framework and should have been shared with the plugins...... But LinkedIn is still here.
再查看 TodayExtension、NotificationExtension 和 VoyagerLibs，就会发现其中包含大量重复的类名（如截屏部分所示）。
While we're not sure if they're duplicates of the public build analysis, they also appear to be a subset of the VoyagerLibs library.
Other notable additions include the fact that in March 2023, TodayExtension was less than 400 KB and now has about 60 MB......
Considering that Today Extensions has been deprecated, it's reasonable to wonder if the new additions make sense.
It's likely that LinkedIn is statically linking dependencies in the plugin, rather than calling resources in VoyagerLips.
If it does, then there must be a lot of non-essential content in the plugin (109 MB in total).
In addition, we found about 75 MB of insights.
For our full analysis of the latest version of LinkedIn, here are the details:
LinkedIn v2024.0321.2152 Analysis | Emerge Tools
Interestingly, we just posted a blog post on how to avoid plug-in bloat two days ago: "Tips for Cutting iOS Apps in Half: Using Dynamic Frameworks Properly"
Original link: LinkedIn The size of the app is bloated at 500 MB, and netizens are angry: Developers of large factories have no incentive to create excellent apps?!_Engineering_Nuka-Cola_InfoQ Selected articles