alt Hacker NewsIt still boggles my mind than such limits are a problem. Sure, a game with graphics and sound could easily burn past that.
But for a “boring” ride hailing app, it’s still beyond my imagination.
Microsoft Word was something like 8-10MB in the Windows 3.1 days. WordPerfect was about the same and even had a grammar checker.
The entire damn PC with DOS, Windows, and Word was 30MB.
We’ve fallen so far, we mistake the darkness for outer space.
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I don't want to justify the space too much, but things like the Uber app are kind of amazing.
While the base functionality is fairly simple in terms of find location > send car + all the courier and different varieties of what they do. It manages do that while working in 70+ countries over 15,000 cities with multiple different languages and payment vendors and it is all done via a single application.
That is pretty neat.
Yes, it is still very bloated but it does a lot more than what it initially looks like.
But yes, I am endless impressed when you come across a binary that is tiny. Like a text editor that is 14KB, sure it is simply but it doesn't need to be anything more for most people.
With more RAM, Storage and Compute everyone just got super lazy.
We're at the point now that everything is written in some sort of javascript, with a JIT compiler and JS engine...
There isn’t all that much actual first-party code in these apps, but if they made a “Hello World” but kept the same third party library deps, they’d be starting at 300MB, and once they add all the visual assets that’s another 200MB… I have a ton of apps on my phone that are absurdly large. Like Gmail is 706MB. The Gmail app for iPhone could not fit on a CD-ROM. A plain mail client. Compared to that, Facebook at 461MB is looking quite slim.
Overcast is 37MB.