Emerge's Bits & Bytes: June 2024

June started in a whirlwind, with the Emerge team at Droidcon San Francisco, the One More Thing Conference, and hosting a WWDC happy hour with Runway.

Action shot of Emerge's WWDC Happy Hour

No events planned for July, but we do have some exciting news coming, starting with...

What we're building

Reaper for Android is working E2E 🙌. For those unfamiliar, the Reaper SDK finds unused code based on production runtime analysis. Previously only available on iOS, we will be opening up a beta for Android soon 🎉

Alternative app icons are never shown to a user above a 180x180 px resolution but must be submitted in 1024x1024 resolution. This new Size Analysis insight will downscale any alternate icons to 180x180 and then upscale it to 1024x1024, saving size from the bundled image. With the new iOS 18 icon features, something tells us that teams will start playing around with icons even more. This new insight will help prevent app size bloat.

Emerge's Android Snapshots now show what parameters Compose Previews have set in our UI, like font scale or locale 🌐. This helps make it even easier to know what you're reviewing and where exactly a diff is coming from.

What we're writing

How does the speed of Realm compare to SwiftData? What about memory usage? Size? Does the answer change if the data object is complex or simple? Wonder no more 🤓

What we're reading

• WWDC Notes 2024 (the real MVPs)
• H.264 is Magic (oldie but goodie)
• AXNav: Replaying Accessibility Tests from Natural Language (full paper in link)

App find of the month

A user on Twitter asked how the DJI Mimo app was 1 GB. Turns out the app has one of the largest app sizes from CoreML models we've seen. You can read about it on Twitter or Thread Reader.

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️