I also like the idea, but I think Android is a much better initial target,
as it is much more common in the low bandwidth market from what I gathered.
On Jan 31, 2015 8:52 AM, "Brian Gerstle" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Love the idea, and I agree with everything Monte said.  We might also need
> to drop some 3rd party libs to go super-ultra light, depending on their
> size.  Quick inspection shows the following:
>
>
>    - AFNetworking: ~500 KB
>    - hpple: 41 KB
>
> We'll need to be careful adding too many other frameworks to the light
> version, but we can use a separate target for it which doesn't link to 3rd
> party code.
>
> More importantly, we'll also need to thoroughly analyze CPU usage
> (primarily animations) and network efficiency—cache misses and extra round
> trips will kill the experience.
>
> Excited to talk about this next quarter!
>
> Brian
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 11:45 PM, Monte Hurd <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> (Oh, the splash images I'm talking about on the iOS app are only shown at
>> startup and only for the brief second it takes the app to load. The reason
>> they take up so much space is older versions of iOS made you include one
>> version for your image for each screen dimension and density - that is, one
>> sized for 3.5 inch phones, one for 3.5 retina, iPad & iPad retina, iPad
>> mini & retina etc...)
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 11:37 PM, Monte Hurd <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> That sounds like it may be the way to go!
>>>
>>> For iOS:
>>>
>>> Probably no time for a lite version this quarter, but maybe the current
>>> version could be made lighter?
>>>
>>> It could actually be a relatively simple thing to do. In fact, I just
>>> did a quick experiment:
>>>
>>> Our current iOS app weighs in at *4.38 MB*.
>>>
>>> By simply removing the splash images the app binary size drops to *2.37
>>> MB*.
>>>
>>> iOS 8 has some fancy new abilities to present non-images as splash
>>> screens, so I say we do this for iOS 8, drop the splash images for older
>>> devices, and pay very close attention to the change in binary size that
>>> results from any external libraries we use.
>>>
>>> We can also migrate a couple more images used by the iOS app to glyphs
>>> in our font - which is an easy process with the scripts I wrote a while
>>> back. This will save a bit more space. We could also do a couple spikes to
>>> see what other low-hanging fruit there is for trimming the binary size.
>>>
>>> I think we could get to under 2 MB without breaking a sweat, or even the
>>> need for a separate version.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 9:45 PM, Dan Garry <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>
>>>> Those of you who were at the Mobile quarterly review heard me mention
>>>> Facebook Lite, an app that's designed especially for the developing world.
>>>>
>>>> Notably, their app has a lot of optimisations which make it good for
>>>> users in developing world:
>>>>
>>>>    - It's only 252kB, good for limited data plans.
>>>>    - It supports down to Android 2.2, good for older devices.
>>>>    - It's data-efficient, good for 2G connections and for people on
>>>>    limited data plans.
>>>>
>>>> From a development perspective, some advantages are:
>>>>
>>>>    - You no longer have to support older versions of Android in your
>>>>    main app.
>>>>    - You can tailor the performance of the lite app to the older
>>>>    devices so it's faster.
>>>>    - You can tailor the features of the lite app to the developing
>>>>    market.
>>>>
>>>> So obviously there are a lot of advantages for our users if we do this.
>>>> And, selfishly, I can't stress enough how much dropping Android 2.3 from
>>>> our current app would speed up development. As an example, almost all of
>>>> the edge cases with lead images occurred on 2.3 devices, and they required
>>>> quite a lot of investigation and hacking to fix them up. Obviously we've
>>>> not dropped 2.3 so far because it's a very strategically important part of
>>>> our user base, which I'm sure Carolynne can attest to!
>>>>
>>>> I'd say that we should put some serious thought into whether we'd
>>>> prefer to have a Wikipedia Lite app for the developing world, rather than
>>>> our current "one app to rule them all".
>>>>
>>>> Comments? Questions?
>>>>
>>>> Dan
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Dan Garry
>>>> Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
>>>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Mobile-l mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Mobile-l mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> EN Wikipedia user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brian.gerstle
> IRC: bgerstle
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mobile-l mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>
>
_______________________________________________
Mobile-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l

Reply via email to