This is certainly an great read, and working on it must have very interesting. That being said, in my experience things like these are invariably technical band-aids over social problems. Whenever I see things like this, often paired with statements like “there’s so many screens and feature flags”, usually the problem is not there but actually in many other processes: for example, the design team adds assets in a way that is not enforced by the usual tooling that checks binary size, or the build process adds duplicate files into the bundle that nobody notices. Sometimes the underlying issue is hard to fix, like if it’s code size explosion due to a custom templating engine, but they really should get addressed at some point. Changes like these don’t actually solve the underlying issues, which can be a benefit for a while, but eventually they become so complex that it is hard to maintain them and they start impacting productivity in harder to measure ways by doing things like increasing build times and reducing the quality of debugging information.
Usually, sure. But sometimes there is a lot to do, and if I may, Uber is not your usual app. At the point where you're being very choosy about the access modifiers on your classes, you probably thought about icon assets already.
Someone elsewhere in thread linked to a partial list of concerns the app needs to cover, many of which are location-specific. You might say "well split the app by geography", but that just trades one set of problems for another, and that new set of problems could well be worse for the business overall. Paying a team of people to do this junk may be a whole lot cheaper than suffering a reduction in customer engagement when they fly to a new country and don't have the right app anymore.
> At the point where you're being very choosy about the access modifiers on your classes, you probably thought about icon assets already.
You'd think, but many of the most popular apps accidentally ship these all the time. I think another comment mentioned that much of the code size seems to be coming from a code generation framework.
