Fitting the Lapse experience into 15 MegaBytes

How we optimised the world's most complex app clip

Today we’re going to explore how we optimised the Lapse app clip to fit into 15MB. Once we got past the low-hanging fruit, there were trickier size optimisations to work through. To get over the finish line, we had to apply some more hacky tricks.

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At Lapse (the series A social media startup I work for), we’re constantly evaluating new iOS technologies to make our social media app more fun, more engaging, and more viral.

The app clip we built for our Rolls feature contains the core experience of our social photo-sharing app, and is almost certainly the most feature-rich app clip ever created.

The challenge?

The app clip was limited to just 15MB.

We achieved this via a 5-stage optimisation process:

• An architectural overhaul to fix our dependency graph.

• Nice, easy optimisations to pick low-hanging bundle-size fruit.

• Painful, difficult optimisations to grind our app clip towards the size limit.

• Awful, hacky optimisations to narrowly inch our app clip size over the line.

• Setting up automation to catch size regressions before they block a release.

Today we’re going to look in detail at how we applied these optimisations to bring our app clip down to 15MB.

These techniques aren’t limited to app clips—you can apply the same approach to achieve size efficiency to your own apps, and potentially win a dramatic increase in the conversion rate from app store listing to download.

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