Top all-time · #4016
Emerge Tools Blog
Company blog · emergetools.com/blogprogramming
Emerge Tools Blog is the company blog at emergetools.com, writing about programming. Since 2021, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 57 times, most often “Emerge Tools is joining Sentry”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Emerge Tools posts and its example app breakdowns for iOS app size, such as Gmail, United, Santander and Threads, and for why apps bundle fonts or use dynamic frameworks. Commenters cite them as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Experience the future of mobile development. Join top companies like DoorDash, Square & Duolingo who use Emerge Tools to deliver the best app performance to their users.
Most-linked posts?
- Emerge Tools is joining Sentry2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-06
- /app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-06
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-25
- Are Android apps THAT much smaller than iOS?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-10
- X vs. Twitter: App Binary Comparison2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-22
- Optimizing app startup time with order files2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-31
- Symbolicating SwiftUI for the first time outside of Apple2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-07
- How the new Threads app is made2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-07
- Code Injection with Dyld Interposing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-24
- /app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xeWx2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-05
What Hacker News says?
https://www.emergetools.com/
Comment linking /
on “I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app”Submitted Xcode 14 unintentionally increases app size as a story · 250 points
HN discussionWe'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…
Comment linking /blog/posts/7AppsThatCouldSaveYou500MB
on “I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app”Submitted An analysis of the Rabbit R1 APK as a story · 113 points
HN discussionUsed Emerge Tools size analysis to analyze the binaries, here's some quick findings to answer some questions: [0] Fastmail: smallest of the apps but still could have room for improvement, could save almost 20% of the app size by optimizing their audio files. 71% of the app is the binary. Check out the X-ray here: https://emergeassets.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screen+Shot+... [1] Gmail: looks like most of their bloa…
Comment linking /app/example/spark?buildContent=insights
on “I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app”Submitted The Surprising Cost of Protocol Conformances in Swift as a story · 59 points
HN discussionI’m the founder of a YC company in the current batch focused on solving this exact problem! https://www.emergetools.com We parse Obj-C and Swift runtime metadata to determine size contributions of individual types and functions in your app. We use this analysis to post PR comments with granular size diffs to help devs write smaller, better code. I tried it out on the Uber app and immediately noticed a disproportiona…
Comment linking /
on “How Uber Deals with Large iOS App Size”Submitted X vs. Twitter: App Binary Comparison as a story · 28 points
HN discussionHere's Emerge Tools' size analysis of United's Android app: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/united-android As you can see from the breakdown: 34% of the app is native libraries, another 34% is dex, 23% is resources, and another 8% is assets. Unfortunately they're still not using AABs, have about 4 MB of download size savings from just image optimization, have 1.1 MB of Emoji gif files , and are not optimizin…
Comment linking /app/example/united-android
on “Android: Freeing up 60% of storage for apps by removing parts of the app”Submitted How the new Threads app is made as a story · 23 points
HN discussionTo 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 consider…
Comment linking /app/example/android/bumble
on “The Santander UK iOS app is 613 MB and 35% of it does nothing”Submitted Static vs. Dynamic Frameworks on iOS – A Discussion with ChatGPT as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> 1. Image recognition: many banking apps offer support for transfers via QR codes. The nice link https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xe... given elsewhere in this discussion reveals another functionality: Check scanning. Living in a country where checks have been abandoned some 30 years ago, I can only shake my head about the irony. Scanning checks with an alleged high-tech device...
Comment linking /app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xeWx
on “The Santander UK iOS app is 613 MB and 35% of it does nothing”Submitted Calling Hidden Swift Functions as a story · 8 points
HN discussionBreakdown of the app is available here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xe...
Comment linking /app/example/ios/examp_fCeiq7Z6xeWx
on “The Santander UK iOS app is 613 MB and 35% of it does nothing”Submitted App Deep Dive: Twitter vs. X as a story · 8 points
HN discussionEmerge 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,…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2023)”Submitted How 5 iOS apps could improve their startup time by ~28% as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIt 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.barcel...
Comment linking /app/example/ios/com.burbn.barcelona
on “How the new Threads app is made”Submitted The Cost of a Byte: do mobile app downloads contribute to climate change? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in specific examples, just let me know what apps and I can upload them and share public Size Analysis links from Emerge Tools Here's an example of a deep dive into Candy Crush on iOS/Android app size: https://www.emergetools.com/deep-dives/candy-crush-saga P.S. If you think Android is bad, just check out iOS ;)
Comment linking /deep-dives/candy-crush-saga
on “Ask HN: Why every Android app is at least 100MB in size?”Submitted Emerge Tools is joining Sentry as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSorry, there was a minor snafu with the deployment pipeline - new URL is at https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/make-your-ios-app-sma...
Comment linking /blog/posts/make-your-ios-app-smaller-with-dynamic-frameworks
on “Make your app smaller with Dynamic Frameworks”Submitted Make your app smaller with Dynamic Frameworks as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> 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/post…
Comment linking /blog/posts/FasterAppStartupOrderFiles
on “Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't”Submitted Code Injection with Dyld Interposing as a story · 6 points
HN discussion1.15 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".
Comment linking /app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail
on “Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?”Submitted Are Android apps THAT much smaller than iOS? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionOn 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-rese... One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-…
Comment linking /blog/posts/are-android-apps-really-that-much-smaller-than-ios
on “Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?”Submitted Async Await in Swift: The Full Toolkit as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
