Emerge's Bits & Bytes: September 2024

Emerge released its own app this month 🎉!!! Introducing Hacker News: a 100% free, open-source Hacker News client for Android. We felt there was no better way to test and build our own suite of products than with our own app that we can iterate and maintain.

With HN, we can show off and demo all Emerge Tools products.. Here’s an example of Reaper data from the project where we can see all of the classes that have never been hit across all sessions for an app version.

📢 Speaking of Reaper, Duolingo just wrote about how they used Reaper to delete 1% of their codebase 👀

What we're building

We recently released a History tab on Reaper to show how the number of unused classes changes as user sessions increase daily. Aside from helping out our visual right-brained friends, this can help you understand code usage over time and determine when code is safe to delete.

You can now share your latest Emerge data for any app! This was a common request from SDKs looking to prove minimal impact, but also works if you want to show off your latest optimizations!

Snapshots is now available for macOS! macOS Snapshots work the same way as iOS, using Xcode previews to generate screenshots of your app and notify you of any regressions before they make it to production.

What we're writing

A great post by our friends at Duolingo about how they’ve successfully used Reaper

Everything you need to know about our new Hacker News app, and why we built it

Our latest guest post on the blog chronicles the mystery behind a seemingly minor UI bug that turned out to be a significant memory leak

A big thanks to all open source contributors and the team behind the Open Source Pledge

What we're reading

• Google's New Compiler Explorer
• Gaining access to anyone's browser without them even visiting a website
• Rendering the Java heap as a treemap

App finds of the month

This month, we analyzed the size of a few regional versions of the Santander banking app 💰 for iOS and found that 35% of the UK app doesn’t do anything for its users. Check out the full thread on Twitter or Unroll Now.

September was an eventful month! Many of you might’ve seen that Marques Brownlee @MKBHD released an app earlier this week 😬 so we looked at what was happening behind the scenes (📢 hint: ads have been a big topic of discussion). Take a look at the full thread to see what we found on Twitter or Unroll Now.

This month, we also attended Droidcon NY and got to catch up with many friends IRL. Thanks for stopping by the booth, and we hope to see you again soon! 🤗

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️