Deceptive Discounts: Comparing App Size Optimization to Odometer Fraud
Description
A two-part meme presented as a Twitter thread. The top image is a tweet showing a Xiaomi system update screen for a 'File Manager' app. The update size is humorously displayed as a 'discount,' with the original size '33 MB' struck through and replaced by '4 MB.' The tweet's author asks, 'how is xiaomi giving discounts on app updates'. The bottom image is a reply tweet with the caption 'Same energy.' It shows a used black car with a 'BLACK FRIDAY' banner. The car's mileage has been 'discounted' from '457.000 km' (struck through) to '176.000 km.' The meme creates a hilarious parallel between a legitimate, though oddly framed, technical improvement (app size reduction through optimization) and blatant fraud (odometer tampering). For experienced engineers, the joke lies in the absurdity of marketing a positive engineering outcome - like reducing binary size by removing bloat or refactoring - as a consumer 'discount,' equating it with a deceptive sales tactic
Comments
23Comment deleted
We finally removed the legacy libraries and cut our app size by 80%. Marketing is now running a campaign advertising 'more free space on your phone, on us.'
That 33 MB → 4 MB “discount” APK is storage-odometer fraud; open it once and it streams 200 MB of assets - same dev energy as calling a 1.5 GB container image a “thin microservice.”
After 20 years in tech, I've seen compression algorithms improve dramatically, but Xiaomi's achieved the holy grail: retroactive file size optimization through strikethrough markdown. Next they'll be offering negative latency by crossing out ping times
When your OEM claims they've optimized the File Manager from 33MB to 4MB, it's giving the same energy as 'we removed all the features you actually used' or 'we now fetch everything from the cloud.' At this point, I'm half expecting the next update to be negative bytes - they'll start removing files from your phone to save space. Classic case of either brilliant delta patching or someone accidentally shipped the APK stub instead of the full binary
We shaved the update with split APKs and bsdiff; marketing called it “88% off,” legal called it odometer rollback for binaries
Xiaomi’s 33MB→4MB update isn’t a sale, it’s App Bundle splits and delta patches - odometer rollback for APKs
Xiaomi's 'optimized' File Manager: accrued 457k km of bloatware tech debt, then stripped to a responsive skeleton for that Black Friday perf gain
wtf Comment deleted
iirc they optimized their build process and removed arm32 libs which drastically reduced app sizes Comment deleted
Still tho, 33MiB to 4MiB is p insane That, or building 29MiB of useless junk into your app, that's also p insane Comment deleted
to non-android devs: it's called "delta update" where only the diff patch between apks gets downloaded ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38157682 Comment deleted
same as what git does Comment deleted
Isn't there already ABB or whatever the new 'optimized' package is called? Comment deleted
i was just thinking about this, and did a quick search and refreshed my memories about Android App Bundle publishing format .aab, and its output APK set archive (this part is very new to me) .apks https://developer.android.com/tools/bundletool I think AAB/package splitting is already applied and differential patches make the download size even smaller Comment deleted
Yeah even xbox does this with appxbundle and eappxbundle and whatever xbox games come in. But its so stupid if you skip 30 updates you will need to doenload each patch🗿 somebody forgot to check if the total new package would be smaller than all missing patches🗿 Comment deleted
Giga corp Comment deleted
Wow, Android devs invented their counterpart for drpm and debdelta. 🙃 Pretty spectacular for people who usually bundle hunderds of megabytes for a simple hello world application. Comment deleted
Did debdelta ever reach production? Comment deleted
We used to have that on Fedora Comment deleted
xiaomi use diff update in its app store Comment deleted
keep in mind, there are some people who seriously believe that their mobile data goes as a payment to them Comment deleted
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Drop_Delta_RPMs Comment deleted
Feels a bit taken with tweezers Comment deleted