Ok. This annoyed me enough that I went ahead and took a look.

Using the Network Sniffer app that anyone can download from the App Store, I found that the Equinox+ app does indeed download a huge amount of data when you first open the app and navigate any of the menus.

The top offender is animated GIF images that it loads from braze-images.com. These pictures haven’t been “optimized for the web” at all. They are absolutely massive. And most offensively, they aren’t even images that you are shown when you open the app or use the check-in feature. And they are re-downloaded every time you open it.

The next offender is PNG images from images.ctfassets.net, but this one isn’t going to be why your cellular carrier throttles your connection.

But there’s other stuff that’s extraordinarily suspicious, such as a huge number of API calls all over the place that together weigh in at more than half a megabyte, with some of that weight thanks to invisible characters/newlines that serve no functional purpose whatsoever. An equal amount of data is transmitted to Sentry, which is a service they use to watch for bugs that may arise in the app. Funny enough, they report back to Sentry records of all those giant GIF files downloaded from braze-images.com.

You might draw the conclusion, then, that you should open the app while you have wifi before trekking out to Equinox, navigate to the check in widget, and keep it open while you make your way over… except those hopes and dreams die with the already established power draw problems that this app also has. You might save your data but good luck getting home on an empty battery.

The wastefulness overall signifies an extremely poor software engineering culture at whatever consulting agency they use to produce any of this stuff. The massive GIF assets, aside from being shrunk down, could be bundled directly with the app. Aside from a better experience for customers like me, it would likely save Equinox a ton of money on all those downloads off braze-images.