Emerge's Bits & Bytes: February 2025

What we're building

Hacker News for iOS is officially available in the App Store! It's still a work in progress, but try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Our compile unit attribution API now supports app clips.

We've made multiple improvements to the Android Gradle plugin to reduce conflicts + you can now get it sooner than ever with up to commit -SNAPSHOT releases.

What we're writing

An introduction to the Emerge CLI, a command-line tool that helps mobile developers analyze and optimize their app's size, performance, and build processes.

A step-by-step guide on using Emerge Android Snapshots with GitHub Actions to automate UI change detection in Android apps.

A step-by-step guide on using Emerge iOS Snapshots with GitHub Actions to automate UI change detection in iOS apps.

Check out our newest case study with Lightricks/FaceTune with strategies to reduce an iOS app's download size, covering techniques like stripping symbols, optimizing assets, and leveraging bitcode.

What we're reading

• Debugging An Undebuggable App
• Code injection on macOS
• How Apple's Close-Source Approach Is Losing Out to AI App Builders
• The Tragedy of Build Classpath

App find of the month

You know we love to analyze bloated banking apps 🫶 This month, we were tagged on Threads to break down the 700 MB Binance app. Check out the full thread on Twitter or Thread Reader to see what we found 👀

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️