alt Hacker News> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app?
Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device.
Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms.
I’m just speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason.
You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.
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The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.
Windows 98 and Office 97 in their entirety are less than 700MB combined. How have things gotten so out of hand that a single email client needs more than an entire OS and office suite used to?
I’m sorry but ~700MB of compiled code, text, and vector graphics is a lot of assets, almost a truck load. It doesn’t look like they care about how much space they take in users’ devices at all.
There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app, which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself.
Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).