Eh, I disagree. High res images are big no matter what way you cut it, and my mobile resolution is 2550x1800 - I don’t mind the detail. But I don’t need that detail for 15 different toothbrush models.
JPEG at 100% quality makes very little sense - the goal is to dial it down to the lowest value where artifacts are still low enough to not notice. AVIF also has much better behavior in the artifact department, letting you go much lower without introducing artifacts - you simply loose detail, which is no issue in a largely smooth product photo.
For reference, my own photos downscaled to 3840x2560 AVIF for sharing purposes range from 500KB to 2MB depending on how "busy" the image is. The off-camera 6000x4000 JPEG is ~7MB in comparison.
I stand by my opinion that a few hundred KB per image is plenty at the required resolution for model photos in an app.
So only twice the size of your JPEG example. Looking at the area chart of the files, it looks like the majority of the assets are less than that 2-3MB.
That's slightly less than half the height and width of your phone's screen respectively, so a decent representative of a model photo dimensions (which are usually widgets smaller than the screen).
Model images would compress much better as they are edited to be much cleaner with smoothed solid colors and either solid or transparent backgrounds, and for something like a toothbrush you'd have an incredibly narrow image geometry making the final image likely much smaller.
Even if you'd consider this image too small or too low resolution, bumping those would not push us past 150 or maybe maximum 200KB.
(That repo has plenty of examples of other configuration examples if one is curious.)
Does it uses the pictures in some other ways like a list of available upgrades?
Otherwise they save all the traffic and put it on the appstores and users and when they use some service for analytics they don’t need to run any server themselves. Oral-B probably sells worldwide putting everything in the app instead of fetching it maybe saves them good money.
I think there’s nothing wrong with shipping the images, why should you need an Internet connection to pair your toothbrush (which of your using the app you must want to do).
But why can’t they be vector images? The pictures in the tweet looks like they could easily be replaced by vectors and the difference would be nearly unnoticeable.
the one reason I have used the app is for my kids. it plays animations while they brush and keeps stats and let's them pick avatar colors and stuff as rewards.
Not that I am the world's brightest parent, or anything, but trainiing your kids to do tasks with media consumption as a reward seems like a remarkably bad idea, given how influencing that can be.
No. I taught my kid that everything should not be followed by a reward, especially things like basic hygiene. Most tasks of that nature are things we all have to do to be members of a functioning society. He has a pretty good grasp on that as an adult.
He's a professional chef now, the first in our family to finish college, so I think it turned out pretty good.
(Hypothetical made-up example:) "Dental" chewing gum companies would pay $$$ for info on peoples' brushing habits crossed with demographics and geographical data: if the data shows that there's a particular city or county where people brush their teeth 25-50% less than the general population then there's a good bet they should increase their ad-spend in that area, because (let's say) people who don't brush their teeth are more ameneable to buying dental-gum to offset the damage of not brushing.
It’s not about data on your teeth, it’s data about your device and network… you can grab all sorts of interesting data on your spending and habits by scanning bluetooth, local network etc. as well as sending up your ip and geolocation every few minutes.
That’s the really valuable stuff. The app’s purported aim is simply to get it installed onto your mobile device.
To collect as much customer data as possible, to (hopefully) anonymize it and bundle it to sell them to data brokers and extract more money from their customer base...
All of it with their "consent" (you installed the app and likely accepted their ToS/PIvacy Policy), under the pretense of providing them a service like counting the time/frequency of your interaction with the product or reminding you to use it (something you would already do anyways, maybe less accurately, if you are a functioning adult).
Or less cynically¹, people just want to track how well they're brushing their teeth between visits to the dentist. Same reason we track our water intake, calorie intake, heart rate, exercise, menstrual cycles, etc. when we could just use analog tools to do the same thing (or not track it at all).
¹ I'm not suggesting these particular companies aren't selling customer data.
BTW, I stayed over at a friend's place one time, and he donated me a new electric tooth brush. How can people even use this? I found it extremely hurtful on my teeth. I would not use it if you paid me.
Not to be that guy, but you may be using it wrong, or it's a really cheap and not particularly well made tooth brush. I can't even imagine how it would hurt your teeth, it's just a tooth brush with small circular motions in the brush head.
It was definitely nothing fancy, but I found it hurtful. But maybe I just have sensitive teeth. I do get my teeth professionally cleaned every 6 months, but this is also nothing I look forward too.
They show you if you have spent sufficient time on the front, top, and back of each tooth. Electric toothbrushes are used differently than manual brushes (you don't move them back and forth).
>The only other nodes that jump out is the `Comino.bundle` (15 MB), which has files like `20class_seqlen26_6p5h_20200302-095627_comino_android_production` Guessing these are some sort of model weights
Fuck you. A "toothbrush app" which shouldn't exist in the first place CANNOT justify AI anything.
What an indictment of our entire industry, nobody stopped this at any point. Nobody said "no we can't justify doing this to our customers", nobody said "this is an insane waste of the resources of everyone", nobody said "this is atrocious". APPLE didn't say "No you can't do this to the people we supposedly lock the garden for".
The management of our entire industry needs to be re-educated.
Also, how is it POSSIBLE to ship duplicate files in such an ecosystem? Apple could trivially and invisibly duplicate files in the file system and app submissions.
Let’s say everytime you ask your GPT about liquor, get drunk and don’t brush teeth your dental GPT reports that and next time when you search for liquor you get a nice reminder to brush later with fitting dental advertisement.
to log how well you're brushing your teeth, so it can advise you on how to brush your teeth better, so you can have better teeth and not have to see the dentist. it's a late stage technology thing.
I wasn't born with an innate ability to know how to brush my teeth or how to shave (my electric razor also has an app), I had to learn how. If the devices I use can tell that I'm using them wrong, and there's a better way to do things, it's nice to have it tell me.
The idea is to help focus brushing on specific teeth or quadrants, and it uses Bluetooth to know when the brush is on or off. Maybe it signals when you push too hard and the brush pauses for a second as well.
To my knowledge it does not know where you are in your mouth when brushing (positioning via accelerometer/gyroscope), so a synchronized start would likely give similar results.
Except brushing is just one piece of an overall oral health. Flossing is another thing. Then you got your diet which plays a great role in your teeth health. How would one tracking app know all of this?
Tracking the temperature and time of cooking is only one part about grilling meats. There's still cutting the meat, ingredients in the rub, applying the rub, the cooldown, the final slicing, and so much more. Why bother having an app-connected remote thermometer if it can't do all of these things?
I don't care for an app-connected toothbrush personally. But suggesting that just because it can't keep track of your diet overall means it can't possibly give any insights in health is overly reductive. A workout tracker app can't keep track of your food intake, but that doesn't mean it can't help the user be healthier.
When I was a child we got taught that at school. They had a large model of the human mouth and an oversized toothbrush. Perhaps that's too low tech for folks nowadays, I don't know.
Apart from the I go to the dentist 2-3 times a year, they do a great job telling me what area of my mouth I need to focus on. A toothbrush wouldn't really be able to give me that info anyway.
And if we were in an alternate universe where we had reason to believe that the app did this analysis offline and never sent the data off to be sold to who-knows-who, that would be fine.
Honestly, even if it's not sustainable and never ends up profitable, I'd be willing to bet there are multiple entities that exist that would pay you some ridiculous amount of money for that info just to try to resell that info or attempt to monetize it directly "some day".
Think about how many companies have pivoted to burning cash on adding "AI" to their products. How many of those cases are going to end up actually being a good business decision? Probably very few. It's likely the same with everyone just wanting "data" to "analyze"--even if they have no idea how it might be useful.
How does that work here? Say I have that toothbrush, the app, and say I had to sign up to use it. What they know is how long the toothbrush is on. How are they going to monetize that data?
I'd always thought that it was about any other data they can slurp from your phone. Presumably knowing your hygiene habits is valuable when correlated with your facebook activty. Just having a list of people that overspend on this type of tech and have the app installed is probably valuable.
tl;dr IDK but they don't do it without a profit motive.
Like if the average user uses it for 15 seconds, it might signal them that the existing brushes need to be wider/longer/arced, so users can clean their teeth efficiently in that timeframe.
And yeah, the usual electric toothbrushes are terrible slow since the brush heads are in the size of one teeth, instead of 3-4.
Well, say the app requests access to your contacts... so you can link up with friends! Or your files... so it can save your data locally! Or your location... well i don't know. The app doesn't only check your bruhing habits, it's 300mb! At any point it could be updated to do any amount of spying and you'll never be able to tell
That is the first thing I see in this thread that has a remote chance of being a legitimate feature! There are people who have trouble brushing regularly, and perhaps it could help some of them.
What permissions does the app ask for? Most likely location for some bullshit Bluetooth feature, and no doubt they request other permissions like contacts and media so you can share with friends that you clean your teeth.
Hey, now oral b know where you are all the time, who you know etc
> What they know is how long the toothbrush is on. How are they going to monetize that data?
"We noticed that brushing takes you X seconds longer than usual. Do you want to buy new bristles for your tooth brush?"
"We noticed you haven't used our tooth brush in a while. Do you want to buy our new tooth brush?"
"We noticed that you started brushing your teeth earlier than usual. This probably means that you started a new job and can afford our new deluxe premium tooth brush."
"We noticed that you brush your teeth later than usual. That probably means that you met with someone who you can recommend our amazing tooth brush to."
"We noticed that your tooth brushing times are all over the place, so you probably had a child. Buy our new baby tooth brush."
And that is just from the time you brush your teeth. However, the app also collections "Health and fitness and Device or other IDs" according to the app description:
That means that Oral B can link that data with the data harvested from other apps or data brokers, so they probably know everything about you. Health data seems especially creepy to me. I wonder if it is possible to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement from the heart rate data. At least they can definitely tell if you brush longer after seeing their latest Oral B add on TV/YouTube/some website.
Yeah, regarding your first point -- the replacement brushes are also an Oral-B product, so prompting for frequent replacement of the brushes would be a way to make more money.
In my Sonicare, the brush heads have an NFC chip in them that stores the “runtime”. After xx uses an icon starts blinking on the handle and the app will tell you that the brush head needs to be replaced. But at least you’re free to ignore that and continue using it.
For now... Just wait, some bright-eyed underling will undoubtedly see this comment and then pitch their boss: "Man, oh man! I know how we can increase revenue, let's DISABLE brush heads when they hit 90 days and FORCE the user to buy a new one!" You've just doomed us all. >.< hah!
I'm surprised they haven't gone down the route of TaaS (Toothbrush as a Service), where they sell a crippled device, and for a monthly fee of a few dollars, it will unlock a premium 'Ultra Fast Brush Speed' a la Tesla.
From a marketing point of view, they don't even need your data. They just recommend/spam you to buy a new brush every few weeks. Als long as they have a way to get into your attention zone, reminding you of them and to push messages for you to keep consuming.
This is what Beam Dental did. They used to make a toothbrush and I'm betting they now license their tech to toothbrush makers and act as the middle man for dental insurance companies.
* Collect data on brushing frequency and thoroughness, and sell that data to dental insurance companies. Perhaps not even anonymized, so they can raise your premiums if you don't brush as often or as well as they'd like.
* Nag you to buy brush replacements after a certain amount of time or certain number of uses.
* Use dark patterns to trick you into giving access to other, unrelated data on your phone, and sell this data to third parties.
* Market their other products to you, or even perhaps suggest other things (sold by marketing partners) to buy, like different kinds of toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, etc.
so they can raise your premiums if you don't brush as often or as well as they'd like.
Shit's already fucking happening with car insurance. Install their app to reduce your premium! It's only a matter of time before it's the other way around.
I know of at least one startup that tried this the other way - started with a networked toothbrush and created a dental insurer that tracked how much you used it.
They've pivoted away from that to general benefits management (basically every flavor of job-connected insurance that isn't major medical), FWIW...
Having an app on someone's phone is a huge attention and data opportunity.
You get permissions to whatever you ask for. The unsavvy user will click yes.
You get a push notification channel that can interrupt the user ANY time of day or night and get their immediate attention. Suggesting products and "deals".
The app probably makes you enter personal information like age and location, which is already very valuable.
But honestly I'd say that it's probably more about them being able to market their own products to you by displaying ads and sending you push notifications on new deals on brushes, rather than selling your data to third parties.
That sort of data can be extremely useful to pattern someone. Most people brush their teeth either in the morning, or before bedtime (or both ideally.) So just knowing _when_ they're brushing their teeth you can determine their sleep pattern, and thus match that up somewhat to a timezone. On it's own this isn't incredibly useful, but combined with some other data it becomes a lot more useful to identify someone.
The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...
That's just an example guess, but the bloat is there for a purpose... I'm pretty sure the app gets updated on intervals too, just like so many others under the guise of "security or functional updates".
We're in an era where data is weaponized for profit maximization... The most simple and seemingly benign data sets when combined strategically can work against consumers deeply.
We need app audit boards now, maybe even on a government level, and specific detail of everything apps do to be displayed in app stores. There should be serious consequences if apps are found to do things that are not detailed in their release/update descriptions. This collected data can persist forever, and be used in some of the most destructive ways.
Device/OS makers also need to do better at preventing/partitioning non-essential apps from collecting data they don't need access to...
Likely reasons why this isn't already in place is because most don't know how it happens, and many others are invested in these companies, so they turn a blind eye on regulation of them.
To be fair, all of that tracking and data collection would still never add up to some 100MB. It's more likely that they have extremely unoptimized assets (images, icons, fonts, time zone data, sounds, etc) and/or are using one of these janky "frameworks" that let you slap together a half-baked "native" app in a few hours by translating your poorly-written JavaScript into poorly-written native code.
Yes, they likely contracted with a third-party development firm to build the app. They didn't pay or even think about optimization. They also didn't think about maintenance. Its likely that they will issue another request for bid when it is time to do another version and the next bid winner will build a new app that is even crappier.
>The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...
1. I highly doubt that's done on device
2. how are they supposed to link you to your bank account? AFAIK cross app tracking is opt in, at least on iOS so unless the user explicitly opts in, you're not going to get a cross-app identifier.
Or maybe it's because every other company has an app, just like every company had a hotline at some point. Even if few people will use it, you have to have all the communication channels covered.
> The extra code might there to determine your spending habits across other apps and your bank balance and then to determine where you're located so that it can provide information on regional affluence so they can price toothpaste & brushes higher in strategic regions...
I think you're overestimating the competence of the shops that develop those apps. I bet that 90% of the code is just company's standard set of frameworks and advertising SDKs they put in every app without even thinking about it.
- Where you brush (tracking orientation and motion)
With that, you might see some trend of "you brush your left-back-bottom teeth a little harder than the rest, and you're not quite getting your front middle teeth very well".
Now, if that data is actually useful logged and analyzed is another question.
I've got a toothbrush that theoretically has bluetooth connectivity support. I've never used it. But I do like there's a colorful ring that lights up to show the brushing pressure and I do like the 30 second timer feature to help ensure I brush each area of my mouth about the same amount of time. Neither require bluetooth and an app though.
The same reason they now have a toothbrush with AI. Because they are in a race to continuously re-invent the toothbrush every year to create new USPs, create new marketing angles and keep sales high.
As Arthur Schopenhauer said: “Buying books would be a good thing if you could also buy the time to read them” People think that everything can be solved by an app, “if you can’t do it without it probly won’t with it either”
I asked a similar question a while back on here regarding a toothbrush with an esp inside. I think one of the answers I got captured it nicely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ4W7yB9Mow
I'm surprised that health insurance companies haven't started offering "good brusher" discounts the way car insurance companies offer a "good driver" discount when you use their car data logging device/app.
Most regular medical insurance isn't really insurance, in the usual sense. "Classical" insurance only pays out when something goes wrong, in defined amounts based on what's gone wrong. And while certainly insurers like to find ways not to pay out when you report a claim, there are usually far fewer gotchas with things like auto insurance, home insurance, event insurance, etc., than there is for medical insurance, where you could be denied coverage just because the "wrong" ambulance company took you to the hospital. Not to mention that anything that pays for preventative doctor/dentist/etc. visits isn't really "insurance".
But it's fine; we call it insurance anyway, and everyone knows what it means, so there's no problem.
“When you look at the dental insurance model, it doesn’t protect the patient from financial risk. It’s the opposite,” said Marko Vujicic, chief economist and vice president of the Health Policy Institute at the American Dental Association. “Once the benefit runs out, the $1,400 or whatever it is, all of that financial burden is on the patient. So it protects the insurer, they’re limited on their exposure.”
In other words, there is no real benefit to offering a "good brusher" discounts.
I fucking hate this dystopian future we've already entered. It's only a matter of time until every car on the road is connected to the internet and has the "good driver" logging built-in and automatically sent to your insurer. They'll also know exactly where you've driven to and when via GPS. Then they'll offer you discounts on the restaurants and stores you frequently drive to, and everyone will love it and tell ME that I'm the crazy one...
People advertising such benefits are simply smarter than the victims of it. Same is true for loyalty coupons. Of course in the medium to long run you don't save a penny because advertisers know your price flexibility down to the last cent. You just fail to notice and have no reference to real values.
It's like those ads for coke or mcdonalds. They aren't giving anybody any new information. Instead it's to continuously put the logos, branding and name into the mind of the viewer/user. That way people should feel that brand is more familiar to them rather than all the other "unknown" brands and will be more likely to by said brand.
Same thing with the app. They get their logo/brand in your eyes every time you need to use it.
Takeaway: They don't even need to sell the data
That’s actually kind of cool. That’s exactly the sort of feedback that gets me to do things correctly. Detailed feedback has enabled me to consistently work out, wake up early and eat healthy. They’ve helped me keep those good habits going for 4 years now. I’m the kind of guy these apps are built for.
It’s not one app but a mix of different things. Alarms to take supplements at meal times, Amazon subscriptions set to the right intervals so I always have oatmeal for my breakfast, supplements before they run out etc., alarms that tell me when to stop eating and start eating again after a 14 hour gap for IF, shopping in bulk at Costco and making sure there is nothing in the house that’s “bad” for me.
I’m not tracking my meals. I did use MyFitnessPal for a bit but I didn’t find it useful.
But "detailed feedback" isn't "accurate feedback". I mean, it's pretty 'neat' that it can tell you which teeth have been 'correctly' cleaned based on the amount of time you spend in a specific spot, but is that an accurate gauge?
What if you (for whatever reason, doesn't matter) only ate on the left side of your mouth for dinner? You'd spend plenty of time on the left side, but the app might tell you you've done a bad job on the right. Further, depending on what you ate, it might take longer than whatever their predetermined time is to clean the side that had a disproportionate amount of food on it.
What if you have had a tough time with a couple of "problem teeth" that need a bit more love? Is the app capable of tracking where those "problem teeth" are and ensuring that you're spending extra attention there?
I dunno... to me, it seems like it's a no brainer to me when my teeth are clean - I can feel it. Unless a toothbrush has some detailed sensors in the head, I'm gonna seriously doubt its ability to tell me when my teeth are actually clean.
> to me, it seems like it's a no brainer to me when my teeth are clean - I can feel it
Then I envy you, because the only thing I feel that's different before and after brushing is a generalized "my mouth is sticky on the inside" feeling. I definitely lose track of how much time I spent cleaning each side relatively, and I'm sure there are areas I rarely reach because I don't know the brush isn't touching them.
I'd love having a toothbrush that would monitor if I reach every spot as a baseline; I can handle my problem teeth or any eating side imbalance on my own, especially that there is no rule saying you need to brush exactly 2 minutes (or 2.5 or whatever) and not a second more - I could do my baseline and spend extra 30 seconds or so in the problem areas.
Honestly it doesn’t matter, it’s gamifying the activity that makes the difference for me. At the very least I’ll spend the recommended amount of time cleaning each tooth.
I can't even reach all of my teeth with my tongue. The ones I can always seem to feel the same unless I just drank a can of Coke. How do I know if I got them all?
I use the wind down reminder on the Apple health app under sleep. This gives you a wind down reminder 45 mins before you need to be in bed. I built a habit to drop whatever I’m doing to start getting ready for bed at that point. I turn on sleep focus on my Apple Watch as I go to sleep and seeing that I’ve slept 7.5-8 hours under the health app (along with the deep/core sleep breakdown) gamifies this for me.
Right before I sleep I also do 4-7-8 interval breathing in bed that slows down my heart rate and gets me calm and sleepy. I use a simple app called iBreathe for that. This breathing session also lets my Apple Watch give me an accurate reading for my heart rate variability (HRV) that gamifies this for me.
There's only so much maneuvering space, and so much time a single brushing session takes; perhaps the error of double integration is small enough they can get away with dead reckoning. Especially since you mouth is a small, confined space, so they could estimate its bounds and use that to further correct their position estimate.
(I imagine a system like this would need at least two accelerometers - one close to the tip, and another one in the grip area; the second one would be used to cancel out the movement of users' head and body, allowing the first one to effectively operate in a mouth-relative coordinate system.)
I think it would be quite accurate if you parse based on training data, think about how we brush our teeth and the relatively consistent and unique angles and accelerations.
Maybe not from brushing one tooth but brushing the whole mouth you'd get a pretty good picture I'd say. The app would justify itself if it did give you a rough map of how you brushed your teeth and suggest areas that you're missing/if it's being done incorrectly.
I recently bought an oral-b toothbrush with the AI app thing, and it’s worked really well. Something about making the little dots disappear mean I’m now cleaning my teeth properly for 2m30s. Wish I’d had it a lot earlier and maybe I wouldn’t have so many fillings. (I swear this isn’t an ad, I bought it on prime day thinking I’d probably return it).
Also I doubt it’s AI, just doing something fairly basic with the accelerometer data
Didn't read as I'm on a no-Twitter diet, so I'm not sure exactly which app they're referring to, but my Oral-B toothbrush has an app that tracks brushing habits over Bluetooth.
I decided when I bought it that I would never ever ever install that app or make use of these features (it's tooth-brushing, for crying out loud), and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
I'm sure the company just wants to collect data about my brushing habits in order to sell it to... someone, who knows.
Sure, but pretty much my only considerations were the quality of brushing, cost of new brushes, and general reliability. The one I thought was best and in-budget just happened to have these anti-features too, which fortunately I don't have to use.
It wasn't worth it to me to spend more time on it to see if I could find something without the connected crap.
(And I do wonder if the connected crap makes the device cheaper, since they're hoping to make money on selling user data.)
This is speculation, but maybe electric toothbrushes are going the way of TVs, in that most have “smart” features and you pay a premium for one without.
They need some reason to make you think that a $$$ toothbrush that is yet another device that takes up another electrical outlet and space on your bathroom countertop is better than a $2 brush you can keep out of sight in a drawer and that you will never forget to charge.
As someone that owns a $2 tooth brush, I've always wondered if it was better to put it in a drawer where mould etc might build up on the brush faster, but it was protected from the air in the rest of the bathroom (c.f. Mythbusters "There is poop on everything").
Perhaps the answer is to put the toothbrush in a different room!
An electric toothbrush is better than a regular toothbrush for the same reason that your dental hygienist doesn't use a regular toothbrush for your biyearly cleanings.
Okay, so it is better. How much better is it? I don't use an electric toothbrush, I haven't had a cavity since childhood. Why do I need a better toothbrush? Can the cost be justified?
IANAD, but if you're good at brushing, it probably won't cause you to have fewer cavities. But speaking from personal experience, it's better at actually cleaning your teeth surfaces (you can see this yourself when you visit the dentist: notice how much smoother they feel after polishing), and it's just plain easier to use since you don't have to move your arm/wrist around and don't have to worry about making sure you're using circular motions like your dentist recommends. The brush head on an electric brush moves much faster than you possibly could, so all you have to do is put it on your teeth and apply proper pressure. No, it's not as cheap as a $2 toothbrush, but for some at least, the convenience is worth the extra cost. Plus, most dentists I've had in the last decade have recommended using one.
Using the same brushing force and a highly abrasive toothpaste, manual toothbrushes are significantly less abrasive compared to power toothbrushes for an 8.5—year simulation.
This seems to be obvious, since you're specifying the same toothpaste and the same brushing force (and I assume the same amount of time brushing). Electric toothbrushes move much, much faster than your arm possibly could, so of course it's going to abrade more. It's like comparing hand-sanding with a piece of sandpaper and a wooden block, to sanding with a powered orbital sander (or any power sander). Of course the power tool is going to wear away a lot more wood (given the same sandpaper grit) than you can with your arm.
So when you're using an electric toothbrush, you don't need to brush as long, or as firmly. It doesn't help that many people tend to brush with way too much force anyway.
I would agree it's marginally better, particularly around the back teeth where it's hard to move a regular brush back and forth very much.
But in general if you spend 2-3 minutes brushing with a conventional toothbrush, that's going to be good enough if you're also seeing a dentist regularly to remove tartar and check for cavities.
The problem most people have with a regular toothbrush is they brush like a madman for 20-30 seconds and that's just not enough. That's another advantage of the electric brushes, they run on a timed cycle which is a lot longer than most people would brush on their own.
It's like many tools we use: sure, doing it the old-fashioned way will work well enough if you do it properly, but the new tool makes it easier and more foolproof (and maybe faster), in exchange for higher cost. This doesn't make the new tool bad.
since this is YC, maybe to understand oral-B's business model which is avante-garde, you could consider this great piece on their main competitor (SmartPipe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
More embarrassing than the size itself is that it is supposedly required to change the mode of the toothbrush. I truly do not think this should be allowed, but I’m not sure how to approach enforcing it.
Well, challenge number one is having a consumer protection agency that's legally empowered to pull products that are defective by design from the market. Second challenge is precisely defining what is and is not allowed, but given the sheer number of stupid things that a business could conceivably do to fuck with their customers, I'm willing to give such an agency a fair amount of latitude to evaluate things and make decisions, so long as the decisions are based on a good set of core principles. (E.g., "functionality that can be implemented without a companion app must not require a companion app".)
I guess it depends on which one you have and what mode you want to change, but I have the Oral-B Pro 5000, and have been able to change cleaning modes ("Daily Clean", "Sensitive", etc) and the color of the LED at the tip without the app. The display shows a timer for cleaning time which is all the tracking I need from a toothbrush.
There could be other modes that aren't accessible from the buttons, but none that I'm aware of.
On my IO, you can change the mode from the toothbrush, but the selection of modes to change from is on the app. However, I think it defaults to "all of them" so it's still usable without ever running the app.
This is the worst Twitter proxy I've ever seen. It's got one of those idiotic "wait x seconds to view this page" and then a "reload the page". It's like a spam interstitial you get when you're trying to view illegal streams.
I can't believe anyone not affiliated with it would post it. Awful tool.
My understanding is that Nitter instances like this one, now that guest accounts don't exist anymore, depend on a pool of manually-created Twitter accounts. If the use case is people infrequently viewing the occasional tweet or thread, it's relatively easy to keep the pool of accounts healthy. If the Nitter instance is abused by scrapers or bots, its accounts will quickly be banned by Twitter itself, and the instance dies. So it's important to have anti-botting protections.
I've found that this instance works perfectly once you're past the bot wall. I'm not affiliated with it, but I use it daily and post it instead of x.com every single time I share a tweet.
Every health company out there has an app that connects their devices, but make one for a toothbrush and people freak out like this is the first time we've ever let an app measure something health-related.
Y'all will back smart watches that know all your vitals, and pendants that listen to everything you say, but log how frequently and thoroughly you brush your teeth, and suddenly there's an outrage.
As for why they are 300MB? It sounds like it was just poorly packaged assets. That's stupid, but also not a big deal.
Possibly a controversial opinion here but… who cares? I don’t mean this in a snarky way. If you’re an app developer you’ve got limited development time like everyone else. Most phones have at least 128gb internal memory and the app is downloaded over WiFi. I just don’t see this as a constraint.
Sure you could have a CDN and lazy load but then the app doesn’t work without internet. Just dump it all on the device.
Limited storage space is a valid argument I guess, though with music / everything streaming these days I’ve always struggled to see how you’d fill up a 128gb phone. And I’ve obviously got no data to support this but i suspect the cross number of people downloading the Oral B toothbrush app on 4G internet out and about would be low. Feels like the number of people in developing countries buying an app-enabled toothbrush would be similar.
I bought an electric toothbrush from Walmart for $6.99 probably 5 years ago. It takes Oral-B brush heads and AA batteries. It's not capable of using an app. Who know being a tech guy would make me love as-simple-as-possible "retro" devices.
> I work in IT, which is the reason
our house has:
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/...
- no internet connected
thermostats
>> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
>> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
The Oral-B app was fun a few years ago when it was fairly lightweight, showed an up-to-date current world events news feed, while logging data into apple health and encouraging a brushing streak. Then they rewrote the entire app and it lost almost all of those features. I never opened the app once after the first run after the upgrade. Really makes me wish for an iOS app store that would allow installing older versions, like testflight does (up to 90 days only, unfortunately). Maybe it's time to break out a BLE sniffer... although I'm sure getting a HealthKit entitlement for a one-off unlicensed adhoc app is impossible :(
ADA recommends brushing your teeth for 4 minutes a day (2 mins morning/night).
2 minutes feels incredibly long for a lot of people. Doing something that feels productive or provides 2 minutes of entertainment while simultaneously operating as a timer seems like not so crazy of an idea.
I know this is probably going to land with a thud in this venue, but as a counterpoint to the predictable "why do toothbrushes need an app?!", it should at least be acknowledged that these apps might be the first and only place someone could learn of good oral hygiene.
Because developers who make toothbrush apps don't care. For these long tail apps, the standard tooling has to be idiot proof, and no you're not going to sell tooling to these developers — they don't care.
Personally, I’ve used both and they work pretty well at displaying where your toothbush is in relation to the rest of your mouth and tracking your habits, etc.
I can't comment specifically about either of these apps, and I actually may be hypothesizing in the wrong direction (especially if they're somehow hilariously connecting to an electric toothbrush, and developed these apps in-house) but...
1. an agency probably built these apps, an arena where I've worked or contributed to for 15 years that is defined by arbitrary quarterly client budgets and flavor of the month tech stacks evangelized by a rotating cast of characters (including random contractors), due mostly to high industry turnover, mis-allocation of project 'resources' (human beings), moving goalposts often dictated by client whim, etc etc, all in the pursuit of technology deliverables that are intentionally crippled by analytics libraries and conceived almost entirely by creative departments that "ladder up to the dynamic storytelling and next-gen digital transformations that Brand X will deliver holistically to its army of advocates and consumer clusters who crave end-to-end digital alchemy and mindblowing content journeys on socials".
(don't forget, we sell electric toothbrushes)
You can imagine how in that environment it's Thunderdome, anything goes! :-D
And of course I'm being actively silly in my description, but it's worth painting this picture to articulate that a lot of these projects are moving too fast and have too many things literally bolted onto to them to ever find themselves in a place where you could package and release a 10MB app again.
2. after throwing that industry under the bus, I opened Xcode to interrogate one of my own iOS apps, of which I'm the sole and only contributor, painstakingly birthed from scratch with love.
IT, TOO, IS 300MB, much to my surprise!
The app itself does a lot of things:
- beautiful onboarding screens that you likely only ever see once (graphics, video, etc)
- complex notification receipt and display
- full-featured audio player
- embedded HTML webviews and code for audio visualization
- custom iOS Sticker extension
- integrated image editor
- iOS widgets
- Apple Watch support
- tvOS support for a completely unique second-screen experience
- a bunch of frameworks and libraries, leveraged for different reasons (Messages, WidgetKit, SwiftUI, SPPermissions, Haneke, MarqueeLabel, NotificationBannerSwift, Reachability, SDWebImage, Shift, SnapKit, SwiftAudioEx, SwiftQueue, SwiftyJSON)
But realistically, the app actually only does two things: plays some tunes and lets you know when some new merch is for sale. The rest of the stuff is shiny toy territory. Then you compile and package it up, and voila, 300MB.
Turns out, I'm just as culpable for the bloat as any agency or poor soul making apps these days -- you're gonna reach for libraries and include giant assets and do all this stuff that's probably not sane, while in the pursuit of fun, beauty, innovation, or I guess even just collecting intrusive metrics on people's dental habits.
While I can't say anything about these apps, I do work close to a bunch of companies that make and distribute software, and there is a general rule I see.
The crappier the companies software security is, the larger their apps are.
One of the large companies I work with takes software security seriously and has internal employees that make most of the software, and internal security teams that audit it. Outside of having low defect rates, their software is also small and streamlined. They just don't have tons of external libraries they pull in unless it's for a legitimate reason.
Another large company in the same industry has almost everyone making their software as an external contractor. Employees turn over all the time and no one stays on a team long. I swear they make software by running 'npm install *'. Their software binaries/release are much much larger than the first company. Their defect rate is huge, which causes huge delays in releasing software because there are always a pile of showstopper security tasks before release that anything that's not showstopper gets ignored.
What drives me nuts is that gathering user data for data brokers is such a valuable operation. I am sorry, but I can't sit here and be excited about who numbers are going up at conglomerates as they continue to make apps to extract data rather than any sort of good product. I know I have officially passed middle age due to my good old day's rant, but fridges, dishwashers, and toothbrushes with apps... like when the dishwasher loads itself. I'll accept the hedonistic inflation adjustments.
If only the ad quality went up with the efficiency with which they syphon the data. I don’t have a driver’s license and I’m in a relationship yet a considerable amount of personalised ads on my devices are about dating sites and car dealerships.
246 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] thread> Connection failed: User 'u327838624_unroll' has exceeded the 'max_connections_per_hour' resource (current value: 500)
> Connection failed: User 'uxxxxxxx_unroll' has exceeded the 'max_connections_per_hour' resource (current value: 500)
(Is that a MySQL error?)
Seems like it, but why would a website have such a (low) limit for mysql connections.
Not what I was expecting. I was expecting it to be more like the Colgate app mentioned later in thread.
Takes a lot of models and instructions to burn hundreds of megs that way.
But they should still be pulled on demand.
For reference, my own photos downscaled to 3840x2560 AVIF for sharing purposes range from 500KB to 2MB depending on how "busy" the image is. The off-camera 6000x4000 JPEG is ~7MB in comparison.
I stand by my opinion that a few hundred KB per image is plenty at the required resolution for model photos in an app.
So only twice the size of your JPEG example. Looking at the area chart of the files, it looks like the majority of the assets are less than that 2-3MB.
https://xcancel.com/pic/orig/media%2FGWAYmxabsAApjwu.png
There's probably over 200 or so assets in that 233MB archive.
That's slightly less than half the height and width of your phone's screen respectively, so a decent representative of a model photo dimensions (which are usually widgets smaller than the screen).
Model images would compress much better as they are edited to be much cleaner with smoothed solid colors and either solid or transparent backgrounds, and for something like a toothbrush you'd have an incredibly narrow image geometry making the final image likely much smaller.
Even if you'd consider this image too small or too low resolution, bumping those would not push us past 150 or maybe maximum 200KB.
(That repo has plenty of examples of other configuration examples if one is curious.)
Otherwise they save all the traffic and put it on the appstores and users and when they use some service for analytics they don’t need to run any server themselves. Oral-B probably sells worldwide putting everything in the app instead of fetching it maybe saves them good money.
But why can’t they be vector images? The pictures in the tweet looks like they could easily be replaced by vectors and the difference would be nearly unnoticeable.
He's a professional chef now, the first in our family to finish college, so I think it turned out pretty good.
That’s the really valuable stuff. The app’s purported aim is simply to get it installed onto your mobile device.
Fortunately for me I put my toothbrush on its own VLAN
All of it with their "consent" (you installed the app and likely accepted their ToS/PIvacy Policy), under the pretense of providing them a service like counting the time/frequency of your interaction with the product or reminding you to use it (something you would already do anyways, maybe less accurately, if you are a functioning adult).
¹ I'm not suggesting these particular companies aren't selling customer data.
BTW, I stayed over at a friend's place one time, and he donated me a new electric tooth brush. How can people even use this? I found it extremely hurtful on my teeth. I would not use it if you paid me.
Fuck you. A "toothbrush app" which shouldn't exist in the first place CANNOT justify AI anything.
What an indictment of our entire industry, nobody stopped this at any point. Nobody said "no we can't justify doing this to our customers", nobody said "this is an insane waste of the resources of everyone", nobody said "this is atrocious". APPLE didn't say "No you can't do this to the people we supposedly lock the garden for".
The management of our entire industry needs to be re-educated.
Also, how is it POSSIBLE to ship duplicate files in such an ecosystem? Apple could trivially and invisibly duplicate files in the file system and app submissions.
I wasn't born with an innate ability to know how to brush my teeth or how to shave (my electric razor also has an app), I had to learn how. If the devices I use can tell that I'm using them wrong, and there's a better way to do things, it's nice to have it tell me.
To my knowledge it does not know where you are in your mouth when brushing (positioning via accelerometer/gyroscope), so a synchronized start would likely give similar results.
I don't care for an app-connected toothbrush personally. But suggesting that just because it can't keep track of your diet overall means it can't possibly give any insights in health is overly reductive. A workout tracker app can't keep track of your food intake, but that doesn't mean it can't help the user be healthier.
Apart from the I go to the dentist 2-3 times a year, they do a great job telling me what area of my mouth I need to focus on. A toothbrush wouldn't really be able to give me that info anyway.
Say I have an app with 1M downloads. Who do I sell 1M email addresses and the fact they've bought a toothbrush to?
Think about how many companies have pivoted to burning cash on adding "AI" to their products. How many of those cases are going to end up actually being a good business decision? Probably very few. It's likely the same with everyone just wanting "data" to "analyze"--even if they have no idea how it might be useful.
tl;dr IDK but they don't do it without a profit motive.
And yeah, the usual electric toothbrushes are terrible slow since the brush heads are in the size of one teeth, instead of 3-4.
Step 1: collect data
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
Hopefully you sell the company between Step 1 and 2.
Competitive brushing!
Hey, now oral b know where you are all the time, who you know etc
"We noticed that brushing takes you X seconds longer than usual. Do you want to buy new bristles for your tooth brush?"
"We noticed you haven't used our tooth brush in a while. Do you want to buy our new tooth brush?"
"We noticed that you started brushing your teeth earlier than usual. This probably means that you started a new job and can afford our new deluxe premium tooth brush."
"We noticed that you brush your teeth later than usual. That probably means that you met with someone who you can recommend our amazing tooth brush to."
"We noticed that your tooth brushing times are all over the place, so you probably had a child. Buy our new baby tooth brush."
And that is just from the time you brush your teeth. However, the app also collections "Health and fitness and Device or other IDs" according to the app description:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pg.oralb.o...
That means that Oral B can link that data with the data harvested from other apps or data brokers, so they probably know everything about you. Health data seems especially creepy to me. I wonder if it is possible to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement from the heart rate data. At least they can definitely tell if you brush longer after seeing their latest Oral B add on TV/YouTube/some website.
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38752691
* Collect data on brushing frequency and thoroughness, and sell that data to dental insurance companies. Perhaps not even anonymized, so they can raise your premiums if you don't brush as often or as well as they'd like.
* Nag you to buy brush replacements after a certain amount of time or certain number of uses.
* Use dark patterns to trick you into giving access to other, unrelated data on your phone, and sell this data to third parties.
* Market their other products to you, or even perhaps suggest other things (sold by marketing partners) to buy, like different kinds of toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, etc.
Shit's already fucking happening with car insurance. Install their app to reduce your premium! It's only a matter of time before it's the other way around.
They've pivoted away from that to general benefits management (basically every flavor of job-connected insurance that isn't major medical), FWIW...
You get permissions to whatever you ask for. The unsavvy user will click yes.
You get a push notification channel that can interrupt the user ANY time of day or night and get their immediate attention. Suggesting products and "deals".
Use your imagination. Think like an asshole.
But honestly I'd say that it's probably more about them being able to market their own products to you by displaying ads and sending you push notifications on new deals on brushes, rather than selling your data to third parties.
That's just an example guess, but the bloat is there for a purpose... I'm pretty sure the app gets updated on intervals too, just like so many others under the guise of "security or functional updates".
We're in an era where data is weaponized for profit maximization... The most simple and seemingly benign data sets when combined strategically can work against consumers deeply.
We need app audit boards now, maybe even on a government level, and specific detail of everything apps do to be displayed in app stores. There should be serious consequences if apps are found to do things that are not detailed in their release/update descriptions. This collected data can persist forever, and be used in some of the most destructive ways.
Device/OS makers also need to do better at preventing/partitioning non-essential apps from collecting data they don't need access to...
Likely reasons why this isn't already in place is because most don't know how it happens, and many others are invested in these companies, so they turn a blind eye on regulation of them.
https://nitter.poast.org/emergetools/status/1828490449881047...
https://xcancel.com/emergetools/status/1828490449881047401
https://nitter.lucabased.xyz/emergetools/status/182849044988...
1. I highly doubt that's done on device
2. how are they supposed to link you to your bank account? AFAIK cross app tracking is opt in, at least on iOS so unless the user explicitly opts in, you're not going to get a cross-app identifier.
I think you're overestimating the competence of the shops that develop those apps. I bet that 90% of the code is just company's standard set of frameworks and advertising SDKs they put in every app without even thinking about it.
I'd buy a toothbrush that did that, even if it had "AI" in it's name.
But no, I think it just logs the brush duration and for the more expensive models the "coverage", or something like that.
- Brushing pressure
- How long you brush
- When you brush
- Where you brush (tracking orientation and motion)
With that, you might see some trend of "you brush your left-back-bottom teeth a little harder than the rest, and you're not quite getting your front middle teeth very well".
Now, if that data is actually useful logged and analyzed is another question.
I've got a toothbrush that theoretically has bluetooth connectivity support. I've never used it. But I do like there's a colorful ring that lights up to show the brushing pressure and I do like the 30 second timer feature to help ensure I brush each area of my mouth about the same amount of time. Neither require bluetooth and an app though.
People want to log and track your health data.
[1] https://www.vox.com/23901293/dentist-delta-dental-insurance-...
But it's fine; we call it insurance anyway, and everyone knows what it means, so there's no problem.
“When you look at the dental insurance model, it doesn’t protect the patient from financial risk. It’s the opposite,” said Marko Vujicic, chief economist and vice president of the Health Policy Institute at the American Dental Association. “Once the benefit runs out, the $1,400 or whatever it is, all of that financial burden is on the patient. So it protects the insurer, they’re limited on their exposure.”
In other words, there is no real benefit to offering a "good brusher" discounts.
/rant
Personally I just used it once and ended up removing it, but I can see some people using it to ensure their brushing is efficient.
Anyway, it's completely optional, you can just use the brush ignoring the existence of the app.
I’m not tracking my meals. I did use MyFitnessPal for a bit but I didn’t find it useful.
What if you (for whatever reason, doesn't matter) only ate on the left side of your mouth for dinner? You'd spend plenty of time on the left side, but the app might tell you you've done a bad job on the right. Further, depending on what you ate, it might take longer than whatever their predetermined time is to clean the side that had a disproportionate amount of food on it.
What if you have had a tough time with a couple of "problem teeth" that need a bit more love? Is the app capable of tracking where those "problem teeth" are and ensuring that you're spending extra attention there?
I dunno... to me, it seems like it's a no brainer to me when my teeth are clean - I can feel it. Unless a toothbrush has some detailed sensors in the head, I'm gonna seriously doubt its ability to tell me when my teeth are actually clean.
Then I envy you, because the only thing I feel that's different before and after brushing is a generalized "my mouth is sticky on the inside" feeling. I definitely lose track of how much time I spent cleaning each side relatively, and I'm sure there are areas I rarely reach because I don't know the brush isn't touching them.
I'd love having a toothbrush that would monitor if I reach every spot as a baseline; I can handle my problem teeth or any eating side imbalance on my own, especially that there is no rule saying you need to brush exactly 2 minutes (or 2.5 or whatever) and not a second more - I could do my baseline and spend extra 30 seconds or so in the problem areas.
Right before I sleep I also do 4-7-8 interval breathing in bed that slows down my heart rate and gets me calm and sleepy. I use a simple app called iBreathe for that. This breathing session also lets my Apple Watch give me an accurate reading for my heart rate variability (HRV) that gamifies this for me.
(I imagine a system like this would need at least two accelerometers - one close to the tip, and another one in the grip area; the second one would be used to cancel out the movement of users' head and body, allowing the first one to effectively operate in a mouth-relative coordinate system.)
Maybe not from brushing one tooth but brushing the whole mouth you'd get a pretty good picture I'd say. The app would justify itself if it did give you a rough map of how you brushed your teeth and suggest areas that you're missing/if it's being done incorrectly.
How does it even have a census of your teeth?
Some people have wisdom teeth, while other people don't.
Some people have been on the losing end of a bar fight with carneys, and some people haven't.
Also I doubt it’s AI, just doing something fairly basic with the accelerometer data
I decided when I bought it that I would never ever ever install that app or make use of these features (it's tooth-brushing, for crying out loud), and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
I'm sure the company just wants to collect data about my brushing habits in order to sell it to... someone, who knows.
(Something is up with the world when you're thinking about toothbrushes that respect your privacy. It's like something out of a Douglas Adams book.)
It wasn't worth it to me to spend more time on it to see if I could find something without the connected crap.
(And I do wonder if the connected crap makes the device cheaper, since they're hoping to make money on selling user data.)
Perhaps the answer is to put the toothbrush in a different room!
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Conclusion
Using the same brushing force and a highly abrasive toothpaste, manual toothbrushes are significantly less abrasive compared to power toothbrushes for an 8.5—year simulation.
So when you're using an electric toothbrush, you don't need to brush as long, or as firmly. It doesn't help that many people tend to brush with way too much force anyway.
But in general if you spend 2-3 minutes brushing with a conventional toothbrush, that's going to be good enough if you're also seeing a dentist regularly to remove tartar and check for cavities.
The problem most people have with a regular toothbrush is they brush like a madman for 20-30 seconds and that's just not enough. That's another advantage of the electric brushes, they run on a timed cycle which is a lot longer than most people would brush on their own.
It's like many tools we use: sure, doing it the old-fashioned way will work well enough if you do it properly, but the new tool makes it easier and more foolproof (and maybe faster), in exchange for higher cost. This doesn't make the new tool bad.
What happens with the data that is collected is NOYB (none of your business).
There could be other modes that aren't accessible from the buttons, but none that I'm aware of.
I can't believe anyone not affiliated with it would post it. Awful tool.
the interstitial only seemed to appear on first load, and didn't take very many seconds..
the interface is clean and allows me to see the entire thread without being logged in, unlike x..
I had to log out of X to test this, but I can see the utility, and am not understanding the hate.
I've found that this instance works perfectly once you're past the bot wall. I'm not affiliated with it, but I use it daily and post it instead of x.com every single time I share a tweet.
Y'all will back smart watches that know all your vitals, and pendants that listen to everything you say, but log how frequently and thoroughly you brush your teeth, and suddenly there's an outrage.
As for why they are 300MB? It sounds like it was just poorly packaged assets. That's stupid, but also not a big deal.
Some people have limited storage space remaining on their device. Some people have slow Internet, or capped Internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeCYiD0hnE
- mechanical locks
- mechanical windows
- routers using OpenWRT
- no smart home crap
- no Alexa/Google Assistant/...
- no internet connected thermostats
>> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
>> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
- https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/how_the_sausage_gets_made
"I'm holding it wrong."
So, I don't use them.
I mean, if it has vibration or sound, you might be able make it talk or play music.
Say what now? Oral-B? World events news feed?
2 minutes feels incredibly long for a lot of people. Doing something that feels productive or provides 2 minutes of entertainment while simultaneously operating as a timer seems like not so crazy of an idea.
The tiktok generation. What happens to good old sand timer technology?
(i'm wish i was kidding: Phillips seems to publish firmware updates for the sonicare a few times a year)
Don’t dis it until you try it.
1. an agency probably built these apps, an arena where I've worked or contributed to for 15 years that is defined by arbitrary quarterly client budgets and flavor of the month tech stacks evangelized by a rotating cast of characters (including random contractors), due mostly to high industry turnover, mis-allocation of project 'resources' (human beings), moving goalposts often dictated by client whim, etc etc, all in the pursuit of technology deliverables that are intentionally crippled by analytics libraries and conceived almost entirely by creative departments that "ladder up to the dynamic storytelling and next-gen digital transformations that Brand X will deliver holistically to its army of advocates and consumer clusters who crave end-to-end digital alchemy and mindblowing content journeys on socials".
(don't forget, we sell electric toothbrushes)
You can imagine how in that environment it's Thunderdome, anything goes! :-D
And of course I'm being actively silly in my description, but it's worth painting this picture to articulate that a lot of these projects are moving too fast and have too many things literally bolted onto to them to ever find themselves in a place where you could package and release a 10MB app again.
2. after throwing that industry under the bus, I opened Xcode to interrogate one of my own iOS apps, of which I'm the sole and only contributor, painstakingly birthed from scratch with love.
IT, TOO, IS 300MB, much to my surprise!
The app itself does a lot of things:
- beautiful onboarding screens that you likely only ever see once (graphics, video, etc)
- complex notification receipt and display
- full-featured audio player
- embedded HTML webviews and code for audio visualization
- custom iOS Sticker extension
- integrated image editor
- iOS widgets
- Apple Watch support
- tvOS support for a completely unique second-screen experience
- a bunch of frameworks and libraries, leveraged for different reasons (Messages, WidgetKit, SwiftUI, SPPermissions, Haneke, MarqueeLabel, NotificationBannerSwift, Reachability, SDWebImage, Shift, SnapKit, SwiftAudioEx, SwiftQueue, SwiftyJSON)
But realistically, the app actually only does two things: plays some tunes and lets you know when some new merch is for sale. The rest of the stuff is shiny toy territory. Then you compile and package it up, and voila, 300MB.
Turns out, I'm just as culpable for the bloat as any agency or poor soul making apps these days -- you're gonna reach for libraries and include giant assets and do all this stuff that's probably not sane, while in the pursuit of fun, beauty, innovation, or I guess even just collecting intrusive metrics on people's dental habits.
The crappier the companies software security is, the larger their apps are.
One of the large companies I work with takes software security seriously and has internal employees that make most of the software, and internal security teams that audit it. Outside of having low defect rates, their software is also small and streamlined. They just don't have tons of external libraries they pull in unless it's for a legitimate reason.
Another large company in the same industry has almost everyone making their software as an external contractor. Employees turn over all the time and no one stays on a team long. I swear they make software by running 'npm install *'. Their software binaries/release are much much larger than the first company. Their defect rate is huge, which causes huge delays in releasing software because there are always a pile of showstopper security tasks before release that anything that's not showstopper gets ignored.