Good question @VishalMalvi_ ! Here's what's going on behind the scenes of the @gmail iOS app 👇

We're hosting the first Agents Anonymous SF 🕵️‍♂️ at @Sentry's offices on January 15! ​​ If you've been experimenting with tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, this meetup is for you. Spots are limited so make sure to RSVP ASAP 🎟️ https://t.co/oWTkDpFMjU

https://t.co/dBjmZLVqom

rip...even though we forgot this existed one of our better thumbnails if you ask me

This time it was CNN, which we recently wrote about why their Android app is bigger than their iOS app (universal APK) https://t.co/7JKWjdnMLM

Seeing an Android App in the year of our lord 2025 shipping a universal APK causing the same image to ship multiple times

If you want to try out the Size tooling from the screenshots, is in early access at @Sentry & free to use! https://t.co/Pmp0LWCnDw

This is a whole other can of worms, but Weedmaps recently switched from native → React-native You can see the big size spike here (this is not all moving to RN, this is also when the 23 MB splash video was introduced) But right after changing to react-native, the app switched

More detail about AAB vs. universal APK here, but TL;DR Weedmaps Android users are downloading ALL Weedmap’s resources, even if its not needed for their device / locale https://t.co/7JKWjdnMLM

A few other nuggets on Weedmaps For an app where feasibly people are downloading it on the go, a really easy size reduction would be shipping an AAB instead of a universal APK

The result: Weedmaps dropped 20 MB w/out quality impact for users 👍 Small plug time, w/ @Sentry Size Analysis, it’s easy to see that this video took up a ton of app size & this optimization could have been made in the PR it was introduced, rather than several versions later

What we’re seeing above is that 1348 kbps was enough for a quality video, but when we take it 50 kbps, the quality drop is visible So Weedmaps appropriately switched out the high-bitrate video for a lower bitrate video that still looks good

Let’s visualize how different bitrates impact quality Here is the weedmaps video, but with different bitrates Left: 18980 kbps (original video in weedmaps) Center: 1348 kbps (new video in weedmaps) right: 50 kbps (extreme edit)

Bitrate controls how much data the encoder can spend per second A simple video can use a lower bitrate and still look good b/c there’s less data needed If you have a complex high-res video with lots of colors, motion, or detail, then it will need a higher bitrate to look good

Bitrate is the amount of data (bits) over unit of time, most often measured in kilobits (kbps) or megabits (mbps) per second Actual bitrate for the two Weedmaps splash videos: big video: 18980 kbps small video: 1348 kbps 18980/1348 = ~14

In the first post, we spliced together the two videos, which are visually indistinguishable, but the one on the right is 14x smaller than the one on the left That’s because its bitrate is 14x smaller

First, a little context A recent version of the Weedmaps Android app reduced its size by 16.6 MB Most the reduction came from splash_video.mp4 going from 23.4 MB → 1.7 MB

It’s Friday, we do have a job, and we do have things to do But we’re going to tell you about bitrate today Why this @weedmaps video on the left is 14x bigger than the one on the right, despite looking the same 🌿

link to @sdw's original post 🙏 https://t.co/3zPaAtjZ6R

And if you’re interested in binary symbols, we just wrote about them in our EA announcement blog on @Sentry, where we cut 50 MB of binary symbols from the Firefox iOS app 🥲 https://t.co/Pmp0LWCnDw

That’s the bulk of where the app size is coming from, if you want to learn more about dynamic vs. static frameworks, you can get the basics here https://t.co/kPOOjRZABj