A former Uber engineer's disaster story
This may be an egregious question, but what does the Uber app actually <i>do</i> that makes it so big? It displays a map with some moving dots on them, allows you to pick a location, and asks the server for a route and price. Plus a bit of workflow for signup, credit card, reviews; not a huge number of screens.<p>I appreciate the difficulties of getting an app to fit in a fixed space having worked on a point of sale system that had to run on a MIPS device with 32MB of Flash, of which half was occupied by Windows CE. It&#x27;s not really clear to me why Uber&#x27;s app needs to be so large and complicated other than the availability of a large amount of money, high-powered engineers, and shiny new unproven technologies.<p>(The compact app fit in about eight megs in the end, plus another meg or so for the file which defined all the screens; it was written in the least trendy, unsexiest framework known to man, Windows MFC in C++)