Emerge's Bits & Bytes: May 2024

In May, we followed up Deep Dish Swift with a team retreat filled with great food, beautiful museums, and a lackluster Cubs game (cool stadium though). That lackluster Cubs game was the first baseball game for two of our team (🇺🇾🇬🇧), but at least the weather was really nice. We also did some work at the retreat.

S/o public libraries 📚

For June, we'll be headed to San Francisco for Droidcon SF,One More Thing, and a WWDC happy hour with our friends from Runway.

P.S. If you've been wondering about Reaper for Android, we'd recommend stopping by our booth at Droidcon 🤓

What we're building

This month, Emerge announced our Open Source and Indie tiers. Open Source gives free access to Size Analysis for non-commercial Open Source projects. Indie provides developers with the most advanced Size and Snapshotting solutions for mobile. Here's some of what you can do:

• Track and manage app size in pre-prod, like how many of the largest mobile apps in the world do
• Snapshot testing without writing any test code or managing image generation/storage/diffing
• Actionable insights on how to reduce your app's size
• Compare your app's size directly against competitor apps
• Make your build pages public to show off for the world to see

You can apply for Open Source access and see Indie and Open Source details here.

With the release of our Snapshots 1.0, snapshot testing has never been easier. All you need to do is:

1. Add the Emerge Gradle Plugin
2. Add Emerge's Snapshot SDK
3. Upload a build to Emerge

That's it. With this you can snapshot every Compose Preview in the main source set. Emerge handles everything for you, from snapshot generation, storage, diffing, and a fully hosted UI.

To demonstrate, here's a PR to Now In Android that adds Emerge's Snapshots into CI. With this simple addition, you get status checks on the PR, showing any snapshot additions, removals, or diffs + a web UI to view specific diffs and all snapshots.

All your previews are now tests, just like that.

There's been several improvements to the performance and stability of ReaperAI, notably:

• Smarter module grouping, meaning better attribution of classes to the module they belong to
• Ability to delete individual protocols. Many apps can have hundreds or even thousands of unusued protocols in their codebase. With ReaperAI, you can see all of your unusued protocols and easily delete them 👇

Interested in trying ReaperAI out? You can sign up to join the beta here!

What we're writing

Remember when the Rabbit R1 APK leaked? Here we explore the APK of the Rabbit R1 launcher app.

rabbit_r1_lost_mode.gif

What we're reading

• Down Another Rabbit Hole
• LLM Visualization
• How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
• Cutting some Slack, for leaks and giggles

App find of the month

For those not on the platform formerly known as Twitter or Threads, we found a 14.6 MB `man.jpg` in the Toyota iOS app. This should not be 14.6 MB. Here's the full Toyota analysis page.

This picture is an accurate representation of my face when trying to shoehorn `man.jpg` in our newsletter in a way that makes sense. Here's to Toyota Man & "App find of the month" 🍻

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️