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I do.

Habit shapes creation.

I use an SE and naturally design & build for it. (Plug: https://mro.name/ShaarliOS)

But when a former 500K ipa (objc) becomes a ~70MB upload (swift) that makes >300MB traffic submitting, you clearly know the culture behind it is not sustainable and has no future.

Apple doesn't care about the low end. Not in developer tools, not in OS (weekly big sur updates in the GBs) and so that's what designers get used to. Apple sells hardware. Software and services is the bait.

Those who do care are a few opinionated geeks. Not the mainstream, not where the money is.



> you clearly know the culture behind it is not sustainable and has no future.

It's not a culture shift, it's a technology shift. Systemwide shared-libraries are going away because they involve all-manner of versioning difficulties (DLL-Hell, etc). Simultaneously, computers have enough physical memory such that processes don't need to share libraries in-memory to keep usage low, and the security advantages of single-upgrades to shared libraries are wiped-out by programs breaking due to unexpected changes in their dependencies, and writing software is now accepted as a treadmill: ship regular updates (monthly? weekly?) where the only change is updating to the latest dependencies and ensuring tests pass - these 3 things combined lead to portable, self-contained software that can run on minimal platforms. Other examples include Go's single-executable statically-linked compilation. And so on.

But this is progress. I do expect eventually we'll have entirely dependency-free software where every redistributable is effectively its own self-contained computer system (basically, a VM): that has tremendous implications for long-term application support. Apple (rightfully) gets a LOT of stick for their lack of backwards-compatibility support, but if all software for Apple's platforms eventually becomes more like a VM image then we'll be able to run those VM images on Apple's future phones - and even non-Apple phones - and non-phones, decades from now - which is a refreshing change from where we are today where we can't even run games from only 2-3 years ago.


I'm a big fan of static builds. But cannot understand how a 15MB test IPA becomes a 70MB production IPA and takes 300MB to upload.

That's IMO software explosion and bloat as Niklaus Wirth ranted on decades ago.


I'm guessing you're using SwiftUI? When you do that, it bundles the entire Swift UI library, including all the parts you're not using, in your package - I think that's because they support runtime-defined UIs which means your app might use currently-unused Swift UI components in future...

I assume you've also seen this article? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/reducing_you...


No SwiftUI, backwards compatible to iOS 9.0, check the source if interested https://github.com/mro/ShaarliOS

Thanks for the link, I doubt it applies.




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