Almost certainly just a dependency graph pruning issue. They likely pulled in too much of the main app into the plugin, which no longer has the strict sizing requirements that it used to. They'll trim it over the next couple of releases and the binary size shrink will look good on someone's performance review. Any kind of quantifiable changes like this counts as solid impact, heh, even if it has no real impact on usage.
Let's be honest, nobody cares how big it is, so long as it doesn't force you to download over WiFi. Nobody sorts the App Store by 'size.' It's more important in the initial release to prove product market fit rather than spending time whittling down the share extension.
They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows, leaving you at their mercy to show you content. That would imply it's just a WIP shipped to nearly 100M people. It's doubtful it will ever shrink, given how much is missing, unless it's in there but not production quality. My guess is they shipped it in a hurry, and now there is enormous pressure on them to add all the missing features quickly, never a good plan.
Features are a looooooong second place to userbase. Hashtags mean nothing compared to having millions of users to interact with.
Launching in a hurry to capitalize on the mistakes of your competitors is an amazing plan. Better to ship without the feature than to ship the wrong feature and be stuck with the tech debt. Better to launch and acquire users when possible, and slowly add the necessary parts.
A far more important piece than hashtags is the ability to search posts. But even that is far behind the ability to have good image sharing on posts, and Threads already does that better than Twitter, as the carousel allows far better viewing.
The difference is simply in stage. Threads is 0 to 1. Twitter is legacy. If Twitter shipped a massive extension it would rightly be mocked as it, until recently, had a staff of folks iterating and improving on it. Threads is probably 15-20 people proving a concept.
The dissonance you’re pointing out is Twitter is being mocked for turning itself from incumbent to upstart when it certainly didn’t need to. It’s the stick in the spokes meme in corporate form.
Threads on the other hand is a proper upstart from a company that very much isn’t - and notably one that hasn’t shown itself particularly adept at building 0 to 1 products.
Meta is doing an uncharacteristically good job launching Threads and Twitter is doing an uncharacteristically bad job of maintaining and iterating on Twitter.
[edit] I can't help but feel like the Twitter changes are just like the Digg re-design that led to its relegation to archive.org, and if this had never happened, I seriously doubt anyone would have challenged Twitter, let alone Zucc.
I don't think it's biased to be a lot less impressed by "things" like dragging your engineers in over the weekend over the threat of termination if they can't make your own tweets more popular.
>His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs as well.
>Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person. Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions.
That's not impressive, it's reprehensibly poor management of people both as human beings and as company resources. There's no way I can figure how to view this story as a laudable effort to ship fast and iterate the platform quickly.
Isn't it far more biased to assume that anything Musk ships is good?
Features and shipping should be evaluated empirically by results, not by deciding a priori that the decision maker is good or bad.
So I think you might be projecting a bit with your bias. And for that matter, I didn't even mention Musk's changes at all, yet you seem to be grouping me in with people that have! (But for the record, I preferred the feature set of Twitter before Musk started changing things. Still, the feature changes are still a loooot less important than the user base. And by prioritizing replies by paying versus non-paying customers, the user base that I experience on Twitter has gone down in quality by a ton, meaning that it is far less useful. That and shutting down the site for a few days and letting me experience zero of the user base-or rather a feed refresh two reply threads before 600 tweets were hit-was completely boneheaded. Stupid. B-player move.
> They are missing substantial features like hashtags and follows
Indeed, they have. How the heck do you find anything? On the web thingie I could find no search bar, to say nothing of the hashtags that have not been implemented (?!). And, somehow, there are people here taking their side on this. Like, what the heck, how can you launch a social media app in this day and age with almost no discoverability?
Your comments vis a vis app size are not correct. App size (and battery consumption) have a strong, linear inverse correlation with initial downloads and engagement. There are a number of reasons users may not like large app sizes including being on a strictly data capped phone plan or having bad reception. Even reduction of megabytes showed big changes to engagement (often bigger than feature changes). Reducing app size was and I imagine continues to be a high level strategic priority at Facebook.
I agree with your overall conclusion however. Going to market with something is more important than optimizing for size.
Hard to tell from just looking at the static analysis. The size of Compose is relatively small compared to overall dex, but our guess is that a lot of that has to do with sharing code with IG
