Helo!
Is there a difference in size between similar Fuse-App and Native-App? (Deployment)
Hi.
Depend of what you mean “similar”. Have same assets? Have same functionality? And so on.
Here my own experience. 2 “similar” Android apps:
App1 - native
App2 - with fuse
Apk size: App1 - 6.2 MB, App2 - 12.4 MB
For me its ok because with fuse i am really create 2 apps in one shot (Android and IOS). Plus excellent fuse app design… Its not be the point to you…
@jsmi: In general Fuse-made and “traditional native” should be pretty much equivalent.
The one major difference for Android apps is that Fuse will bundle V8 which can take up around 8MB installed size. However, the download / apk difference will be a lot less as it compresses well.
With time we will also start testing how well the already-bundled versions of V8 on Android work as well (so we can stop bundling our own), but last time we did that they weren’t quite possible to rely on.
On iOS we simply use the version of JavaScriptCore installed on the device, so there the Fuse apps should align well with regular native apps.
@Jack The Bear: I’m surprised that the difference between those two apps is that big. Could it be that the newer one made in Fuse uses more / larger graphical assets for instance? 
Helo!
Thanks for the answers!
Fuse:
OpenGL should be on both platforms by default, isn’t it?
So if you compare a simple “Helo World”-App on iOS (native controls), what would be the difference and what are the tech. reasons for an overhead? (UnoCore, …?)
@jsmi: I exchanged Bent’s reply with my own (after checking with him) as it was a bit more complete.
In general: with the huge number of different devices and OS versions in Android space we discovered that we couldn’t quite rely on the versions of V8 that were shipped with the device. (At least not yet, as I mentioned).
There’s of course also the possibility to bundle another VM which takes less space than V8, such as Duktape (although that one currently has some other issues on its own).
Other than the JS VM on Android the size differences should be fairly small but of course not non-existant. There’ll be a little bit of overhead here and there depending on the features you use (such as including a GL UI component at all instead of using a native component), but we don’t expect any of this to be a showstopper.
If you run into any case (for a real app) where the size difference is such that using Fuse would be an absolute no-go then we really want to hear about it so that we can try to fix it.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Remi Pedersen wrote:
@Jack The Bear: I’m surprised that the difference between those two apps is that big. Could it be that the newer one made in Fuse uses more / larger graphical assets for instance?
@Remi Pedersen Graphical assets ABSOLUTELY equal.
On device (Samsung Edge 7)
Fuse app: 29.00 MB of Internal storage used.
Native: 8.99 MB of External storage used.
Thanks! We’ll do some tests here to see what we find out then.