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's not really clear to me why Uber'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++)