alt Hacker News> For most of that period, the size of the Gmail app hovered around 12 MB, with a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017... The Gmail app, on the App Store, is currently 760.7 MB in size.
With charts:
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-tak...
I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.
Something like Gmail doesn't have massive hi-resolution bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.
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> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.
This is Android, but: 13+ years ago I had an HTC Desire. I was really struggling with internal storage space, regularly uninstalling and replacing apps just to be able to update others. Eventually I moved to custom ROMs just because they allowed some apps to be moved to the SD card.
I remember the biggest problem was WhatsApp, which was somehow over 7MB while the average was closer to 1MB.
On my current phone WhatsApp is 231MB. It's still pretty high up in the rankings, but doesn't stand out, and barely any apps are below that then-huge 7MB.
My back-of-my-head benchmark is still my old Amiga. Here's[0] a full-blown GUI email app that was perfectly nice to use. The entire package, complete with all its custom GUI classes and 3 sets of icons, took 1.4MB uncompressed.
I know the thousand legitimate reasons why modern apps are larger. It's not all bloat and inefficiency, either, except in the harshest sense that old apps tended to use byte-optimized data structures like linked lists instead of faster, but less space-efficient structures like hash maps. They have to deal with higher resolutions, although the command to draw an empty white 320x200 square on the screen should be approximately the same size as to draw a 2000x1500 one. And yet, wow, it doesn't seem like it should need to be that much bigger.
It’s probably frameworks + localized assets.
With dynamically linked frameworks you bear the cost of the entire framework (and its dependencies) even if you just use a few functions.
iOS apps also need to include all localized assets in each app bundle.
> a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017
Google Meet was launched in March 2017.
For a while there were app size limits for downloading over mobile data. That meant that if your app was too big you'd have terrible growth metrics.
I remember when Windows 95 was around 10-30 MB, ten whole diskettes or so.
We once ran Windows 95 with Encarta in about the same amount of disk space.
We crossed lunacy long ago.
Part of it is resolution. The icons and such in apps are much larger now than they were in 2013. Besides that I mentioned this in another thread but rarely will a team clean up after itself. There's probably tons of dead code and what not in a lot of these larger apps. I know all the ones I've worked in had a lot of bloat just from years of work. Some feature gets added 5 years ago by a team that no longer exists, it was turned off and no longer used but who is going to remove it?
Besides that, there's just a lot of garbage that gets added by various people with different interests. An unoptimized version of the app I'm currently working on has a ~15mb binary, the core app not including all the "extras" people have asked for. It has about 75mb of assets, probably 10-15% are unused but I have no idea. The download size is about 400mb.
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.
This is one of the reasons why these apps grow: because the user doesn't notice!
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB
Phones used to have 4GB of flash memory... Some had 2GB.
Having a sub 5mb app is still the strongest quality signal there is for ios. A shame you can’t sort and filter results by size.
There are full-featured operating systems that fit on like one or a few floppy disks. Standard Linux distros would fit on a standard 600-700 MB CD, with some made for mini CDs being much smaller.
Guys, do you think AI is like newage bloatware? Like, it's gigabytes of just things you're never going to need, and now ram prices are skyrocketing because they have no idea how to make it efficient.
In fact, they state the oppposite: To really make it go, they need petawatts of energy and compute. It's like Windows incarnate.
>"I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB"
I wrote native Windows desktop application 10 years ago that still brings me some money. It has boatload of functionality and the size is 12MB. Competitors have similar app written in .NET. The install is about 1GB.
When I doing mobile app development a decade ago, I found that many interviewers and clients were evaluating my experience more like an artist's portfolio, alongside a couple of arbitrary metrics to determine app scope
One of those arbitrary metrics was bundle size, how many megabytes on the app store was the app. The bigger the better and more serious it was.
At the time I was knee deep in optimizations, using SVGs, doing compression, even bitshifting, to make apps smaller for the companies I worked for. Reducing how many people would be bounced from downloading or installing the app.
And yet, that impressive 12MB app from a venture backed company with hundreds of thousands of users was getting me penalized for taking up so little space
I literally started putting dummy files in the app bundles and it worked for my professional goals. All kinds of premium marketing has similar fictions in them to convey value
so I can emphasize how its the difference between $50/hr upwork gigs inconsistently, and $500,000/yr at Google
Hmm, mine is currently 673MB on iOS 26.
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB.
More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like
Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes