Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

If the AppStores would consider app size in ranking we might see an improvement.

My prediction is that this will continue to occur indefinitely.

The conversation is always the same, only there is another zero on the end.

We'll have terabyte apps in not too long.

(100% serious)

Why is the Gmail app not open source

Same goes for other other bloated apps mentioned in the blog post

On my Android phone, just the calculator app is 13MB. How in hell is it 13MB just for a calculator? It beggars belief.

Not sure how many ppl know this: you can use another email provider, e.g. [email protected], to register to YouTube.

Bloated libraries and support for multiple versions of iOS/phones?

I was just wondering why the Adobe Acrobat installer is nearly a gigabyte in size.

Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyond 1,3 gig now. And it's FOSS, not commercial bloatware you might think. I have no idea what they stuff it with.

Just yesterday, I wanted to generate a GeoTiff on a macbook. To do it in a simple way, you need libGDAL, a geo-spatial abstraction library that exists since maybe the '90 and supports all thinkable formats. Under Linux, you just install it together with QGIS as a dependency. Mac is still unix, so you may think, a 3-decades old library, with few patches to support modern formats, should be just a couple of megs, right? Brew suggested downloading ~2 GB of ~100 packages!!!! Half of them were aws-* (yes, AWS tools), and 1 GB of LLVM!!! (is it their whole GIT repo with 10M SLOC?)

For geotiff, I ended just using standard Tiff library, inserting my 4 geospatial tags with a few lines of code.

The question why is almost all modern apps pushing around 1G.

It is dependencies, if you ever compiled almost any GUI application via prots/pkgsrc on a BSD, you will be shocked by the dependencies that application needs, it is obscene.

HN commentators usually attempt to defend this sort of bloat. Whether such "justifications" are legit is a question left for the reader

In any event, the storage space, RAM, file descriptors, sockets and bandwidth all belong to the computer owner, not the app developer

Are the 700 MBs worth more when used for Google's "app" or when they are used for something else, e.g., the computer owners' files, other apps, etc.

That decision should be up to the computer owner

But unless there is a "Gmail app" alternative, e.g., a 12MB version, this does not leave the computer owner much choice. As usual, the Silicon Valley/Google strategy is to remove meaningful user choice

I use the command line to retrieve Gmail messages. No Javascript. Generally, I try not to send email using Gmail. I use it like a "receive only" temporary email website

Probably because it has three embedded versions of libcef

Perhaps someone can decompile the app and find out.

2nd order Jevons paradox I guess

It is bloatware for a reason, to force you a cloud subscription, not for your money (which helps though) but your data.

Sometimes I allow App Store to use mobile data because how much an app can weight, 50MB? Then suddenly 1GB of mobile data is gone.

Why is my banking app 1.5GB?

The Facebook and Instagram iOS apps were/are enormous codebases. Absurd, sprawling monsters with tons of dead code, duplication, and old stuff.. like being written in mostly Objective-C.

I imagine the Gmail app also suffers from having zillions of engineers touch it without being incentivized to make it better or smaller, only to add features and impact for the all-important performance review.

Add zillions of instrumentation and third-party frameworks, each with piles of dependencies, and apps will grow without bounds like molecules of gas to fill the container.

I’ve noticed most popular apps are pushing 500+MB. Most likely they are shipping debug builds, with loads of third party deps, so they can send crash reports from production with meaningful stack traces.

Until Apple penalizes app developers for app size, nothing will happen. Most consumers are not aware of the impact , until they go to clean up their phone.

There isn’t much usable free space on the device after the OS, and now having 50+gb of used space from apps, means your own content (photos, music, videos) doesn’t fit.

There isn’t much incentive regardless, since Apple merchandise’s iCloud storage. Bloated apps actually drive iCloud sales. A lose-lose for the consumer.

Love how it ends with "Why you ask, your guess is as good as mine" lol.

Not only is the YouTube iOS app huge, it uses an atrocious amount of additional storage. It was using over 2GB on my iPad for...something...and the only way to clean that up was to delete the app and reinstall.

I’m surprised so few comments have pointed out how this doesn’t matter at all to anybody. The “apps are too bloated” debate is a dessicated horse.

1. You don’t even have to use the Gmail app to use Gmail. Pick whatever flavor of client you want, they all support Gmail. Apple Mail, Outlook, or something else entirely.

2. If you buy the shittiest available new iPhone it has 128GB of storage. Used iPhone 15 on Swappa with 512GB is <$500. How many of you need hundreds of apps installed on your phone?

3. Nobody’s forcing you to use Gmail. Email is an open federated standard. Use something else.

Size should be a product metric so that it is tracked and optimized. Same goes for memory consumption. It's easy for product to come up with features and run the enxt cool experiment but your users don't care about any of that.

Can we get dark-mode for another 5MB possibly?

(700 MB more is also an acceptable increase for this feature)

On second thought, I love looking at on-duty page emails in the middle of the night with 7 million lumens blasting my retinas.

I just use the gmail mobile website on my smartphone and put a link to it on my Home Screen. So many of these services you don’t necessarily need an app for, unless you just enjoy giving them your personal data or something ha ha

Of course it's self-hosted intelligence gathering or metadata auditing. This is Google we're talking about. They're "pushing compute to the edge," taking advantage of more powerful mobile processors to reduce their own infrastructure cost while still providing that sweet sweet Big Data, as they used to call it.

I didn't use the Gmail app for the longest time, always used third party, not sure why I started..

I just looked at Gmail on my Android phone and it is only 164 MB. That is a big difference.

Also, one thing that annoyed me when I used iPhones is that you can't remove an app's cache without reinstalling it and losing all your data. And most modern applications think cache is free so they use a lot of it. Many times it will exceed even your installed apps or data size.

Framework mania. This has been the problem for years. Webapps bloat like crazy, and now with AI the sloplevel has gone berzerk.

Maybe because it’s an Electron app?

Sure, Electron does not come natively for iOS. But with tools like Capacitor, you can take a web app (even an Electron one) and package it for iOS/Android, adding native features and running in a native WebView, allowing it to be an “Electron for Mobile”.

I'm sorry, but that "table" at the end of the article is infuriatingly confusing.

even though I have more data than I ever use on my plan, after 15yr's exclusivly on mobile data, I reflexivly look at the size of anything before I download something, 700mb is bonkers for email, and I have started to reject many other apps, based on there improbable sizes. useing android my phone has gmail iremovably installed on my phone, but was disabled before I even put a sim in it, but in spite of this, having just checked, it has user data, something in cache, and has used some internet data. how creepy is that.

Because most phones have enough memory to handle all the bloat, and when they don't, Google can sell those people cloud space. Not to mention that adding more memory is how phone manufacturers earn money - out of my ass example just to illustrate the concept: 100GB phone costs $400, same phone but with 200GB memory costs $500, 100GB memory chip costs $20, manufacturer pockets the difference. Having bloated apps and no SD card (iOS doesn't support SD Cards, Android makes them work like shit on purpose) justifies in the eye of the consumer the necessity of extra memory. Most people have fast internet connection so download time is always acceptably small, no matter how much bloat you put, not to mention that updates are in the background anyway.

The economic pressure to keep apps small is literally negative.

The Apple vs Google app size comparison is so disingenuous. It doesn't take into account all of the preinstalled iOS dependency libraries used by these Apple apps.

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>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each.

One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety".

More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.

Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)