Pretty soon these will start to hit Apple's limit on downloads over cellular (something I still can't believe exists in 2017).
App sizes are out of control
31–40 of 455 posts
Re: App sizes are out of control
#32I have a cheap phone, and due to this I can only have like 6 apps installed at a time. I'm constantly removing Facebook/Messenger for situations like when I had to download Ticketmaster app for a concert ticket. And with all these apps disallowing you from moving them to SD card, I can't even really use my 32GB SD card for them.
protip: switch to browser-based FB. it's perfectly reasonable.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#33Normal apps are around 10 to 20mb, which is still big. But the reason for this is support for different screen resolutions. Images of different sizes are bundled with the app, even though the phone only needs on of them. Vector graphics will solve this, but is not mainstream yet. The facebook android app is 88MB (zipped), i did check the APK of why its so big: 90mb of code 30mb of assetes (javascript, metadata, librt…
Yep, agree with the image bundling issues. We have tried to keep our footprint as small as possible in our own product (3D modeling application https://3dc.io) and are clocking in at 8mb on iOS. Out of that about 3MB are icons/splash images and other media. Regarding vector graphics, we couldn't use them, as they cause bugs and flickering with css animations in iOS Safari. But we do generate everything we can procedurally (primitives, colorpicker etc.) which saves a ton of space.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#34Folks: there's a built-in technology on your phone that allows you to load and run an app on-demand over the internet without dedicating any internal storage at all! It allows clean integration with many of the "native" features you expect like camera and notification and timers and stuff. And it's based on completely open standards with multiple, competing open source implementations.
No, seriously: uninstall that junk and just run stuff in the browser. It works much better than you think, the biggest annoyance being all the nag screens sites throw at you to get you to install their apps.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#35Short a major customer outcry, Apple is largely incentivized to not fix this— (1) They substantial profits from memory upsells on their product lines (2) Larger apps take more horsepower to run— so older models become less effective sooner!
But it also adds to their bandwidth and storage bills
Re: App sizes are out of control
#36I never understand where this increasing size comes from. For videos or hi-res photographs, I understand. There is however no reason that code, either compiled to a binary format or in a textual format, uses so much data. Heck, the memoirs of Casanova spans 3000 pages, and is 6,5 MB. People don't understand how incredibly large a megabyte is for simple code. Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what comp…
A huge chunk of that probably goes to, well, videos or hi-res photographs to be used in building the UI. Hi-res splash screens plus a bunch of hero images plus 2+ prerendered sizes of each display element for different pixel densities plus a dozen 30 second tutorial videos can easily add up to a couple hundred megs of assets alone.
I think a large factor is the ever increasing need to have different display sizes for different pixel densities, developers essentially have to create and package a couple versions of the same application into one package and that is alot of waste.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#37I never understand where this increasing size comes from. For videos or hi-res photographs, I understand. There is however no reason that code, either compiled to a binary format or in a textual format, uses so much data. Heck, the memoirs of Casanova spans 3000 pages, and is 6,5 MB. People don't understand how incredibly large a megabyte is for simple code. Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what comp…
Could it be that whenever coders today need some fairly trivial functionality, they tend to go out and find a library that contains it. So you end up with lots and lots of libraries where only a tiny bits of them are used. Just a hypothesis though.
There are many reasons why apps are so big, but I think you are right about a major part of the problem. Development environments these days make it very easy to add in third party libraries for very little effort.
At a previous job we had a monolithic java server that ended up at over 350Mb of compiled code simply because each development team had imported whatever libraries they thought they needed. In some cases, 2 or 3 versions of the same library were included.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#38Awesomely, this blog post of less than 200 words and one screenshot loads over 1.41 MB for me.
Software expands to fill all available resources.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#39Pretty soon these will start to hit Apple's limit on downloads over cellular (something I still can't believe exists in 2017).
You're typing from a first world country where there are not huge cellular costs or speed limitations. If you go to other countries, even say, Botswana, the option to download over a gig in apps every (other) week isn't cheap. Bandwidth costs.
Re: App sizes are out of control
#40I never understand where this increasing size comes from. For videos or hi-res photographs, I understand. There is however no reason that code, either compiled to a binary format or in a textual format, uses so much data. Heck, the memoirs of Casanova spans 3000 pages, and is 6,5 MB. People don't understand how incredibly large a megabyte is for simple code. Surely the 275 MB isn't all useful data (I wonder what comp…
Could it be that whenever coders today need some fairly trivial functionality, they tend to go out and find a library that contains it. So you end up with lots and lots of libraries where only a tiny bits of them are used. Just a hypothesis though.
I think this is likely the biggest culprit. Another user pointed out an analysis of the Facebook app:
Most of it is actual code - not assets. For some types of apps (see: games) assets do take up a significant portion of total size, but for most everyday apps bloat by code over-inclusion is likely a bigger problem than asset-bloat.
I wonder if it's possible to get major open-source libs to move towards more fine-grained build targets and internal dependency management, so that devs don't pull in a gigantic binary when they're only using a small slice of the functionality.