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It's an edge case. No one is going to be deploying a Hello World App to the App Store. Try comparing code size for similar applications and then we might have something to talk about. Otherwise, this is poor argument.


Well, here's a few examples from the apps on my iPhone:

Tweetie 2 (very full featured twitter client): 2.8MB

Things (todo list manager): 983KB

Strategery (game, simple graphics): 6.3MB

Canabalt (game, slightly fancier graphics): 8.8MB

iOctocat (github browser): 749KB

Prowl (internet notification client): 351KB

Simplenote (Note taking, iPhone/iPad universal version): 853KB

Edit:

A cursory run-through of the flash apps listed by Adobe http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ indicates that they're all approximately 10-11MB.

MTV's South Park Avatar Creator is 9.3MB. Three other avatar creators that seemed similar in the appstore averaged about 6.5MB. Not a very scientific comparison, admittedly.


I wouldn't be surprised that they're bigger as it's generated code. Still, it doesn't seem to me like flash apps are going to eat up all your available app storage space.


I don't think app storage space is the problem.


Are you saying that a typical Flash app would be smaller, or a typical iPhone app would be larger?


I don't know which would be larger/smaller -- I'm saying that the size of a Hello World App is irrelevant.


I think you can safely say any Flash iPhone app is going to be larger than the Hello World app. The only issue in question is how much larger.


Again, the Hello World App is entirely irrelevant -- the question is whether a real world Flash iPhone app will be substantially larger than a native iPhone app that does basically the same thing.


To clarify the point with an example, a one line hello world python script when compiled down to an executable on Windows takes about 7 mb of space because of the runtime payload. But, a more complex 1000 line script wouldn't take up much more space - maybe 7.2 mb




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