Emerge's Bits & Bytes: January 2024

Big news in the Apple world: Vision Pro preorders (with every Emerge member getting one 🎉), Mac turns 40, and third-party app stores in the EU. Our TL;DR of Apple's rules for third-party app stores 👇

And for Android, the big news is that it's not a total shitshow.

What we're building

We are (probably) not building an Emerge Tools App Store. Here's what we are building:

Reaper, our tool using runtime analysis for dead code detection, landed a significant number of improvements:

• Reaper now finds the specific file(s) unused classes are in, making it even easier to delete unused code
  
• Reaper now detects dead code in all frameworks linked to the app. Previously, Reaper only reported dead code in the main app binary
• Reaper is now available on SPM or Cocoapods (link to repo)
• Improved onboarding experience

Track competitor apps on Emerge and see how your size compares against their most recent versions. You can also see Emerge's analysis pages to see how they build their app. If you're United Airlines, you can see that the American Airlines app is 15% bigger than you, but Delta is 43% smaller.

FWIW, Alaska is one of the smallest airline apps at just around 100 MB, blowing the doors off its competition in app size.

The UI revamp focused on making results more clear to users, including:

• Embedding the video of test iterations on the UI when the video is available
• Syncing the video with our iteration details graph
• Surfacing more logs to users
• Improving error messaging
• Decluttering lesser-used elements

Performance test video next to iteration details graph

Logs are easier to find and more clearly labeled

What we're writing

What does the search for extraterrestrial life have to do with software engineering? Emerge co-founder Noah Martin discusses scale factors in his Swiftable talk on "Searching For Aliens."

We detail how AllTrails, the iPhone app of the year, changed from 2022 to 2023 + explore an uncommon change in the Android app.

Ever wanted to see a year "wrapped" for mobile development? We went in-depth on the Acorns app, which completely overhauled the iOS app in 2023.

What we're reading

• AnyView’s impact on SwiftUI performance
• Finding dead code in Go
• How Meta built the infrastructure for Threads
• Making Rust binaries smaller by default

Open-Source Sponsorship

We're thrilled to be sponsoring the Swift Package Index once again. Apple rarely provides support for any tool that isn’t made by them, but Swift Package Index isn’t just any tool. If you’re looking for a Swift package, look nowhere else. Huge thanks to Dave & Sven for all the great work they do!

Leaving you with this food for thought — have more optometry appointments ever been scheduled in a single week?

Until next time, hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️