Emerge's Bits & Bytes: March 2025

What we're building

If there's code in your app that hasn't been used in the previous 10 versions, then it's probably safe to delete. That's exactly what our newest Reaper feature shows you. We've added a new insight feature in Reaper to compare older versions of your app against each other to let you know how long code has been unused.

Web tracker uses our Snapshots infra to screenshot web pages (mobile or desktop version) and monitor UI changes over time. This allows you to keep track of your own web pages (or maybe even your competitor's).

We released Emerge Gradle Plugin 4.3.1 with some small build performance improvements, disabling of third party preview snapshots as well as the ability to set the comparison precision using the new @EmergeSnapshotConfig annotation.

We've updated the UI for ignoring specific snapshot diffs to provide more control over what you want to see. There's now a checkbox option to "show ignored snapshots last" so they don't disrupt your workflow, and ignored snapshots are collapsed by default.

What we're writing

Tinder's iOS team reduced their localization file size by 95% using Emerge's SmallStrings to identify and remove unused strings from their app.

What we're reading

• How we reduced manual regression tests by 70% using AI tools
• On Apple Exclaves
• Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones

App find of the month

This month, we analyzed how the T-Mobile T-Life iOS app grew 10x in size since the beginning of last year. Check out the full thread on Twitter or Thread Reader to find out more 👀

Hope everyone enjoyed these Bits and Bytes ❤️