alt Hacker News> 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.
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One of the struggles on my first android phone was fitting updates for the multiple google docs apps since they were all getting bigger and didn't share their redundant data. That phone had about 150MB for apps.
It's sad the laziness that happens when there's no pushback. The devs gain barely anything from leaving things this bloated, but barely anything isn't zero so now a million people have to deal with big files and wasted RAM.
On Android most apps started bundling androidx/jetpack compat libraries that help deal with various API versions, and generally make the development much, _much_ easier. These days apps will also bundle the entire new Android UI framework (Compose) while in the past all the UI code was using framework classes.
Other than that, some popular and useful libraries will bundle native libs (for example for sql), and some ad/analytics/corporate SDKs will use native libs to share code between platforms and for obfuscation. These corporate SDKs (like Zendesk) will also notoriously break Android minification tools, because why bother