1. an agency probably built these apps, an arena where I've worked or contributed to for 15 years that is defined by arbitrary quarterly client budgets and flavor of the month tech stacks evangelized by a rotating cast of characters (including random contractors), due mostly to high industry turnover, mis-allocation of project 'resources' (human beings), moving goalposts often dictated by client whim, etc etc, all in the pursuit of technology deliverables that are intentionally crippled by analytics libraries and conceived almost entirely by creative departments that "ladder up to the dynamic storytelling and next-gen digital transformations that Brand X will deliver holistically to its army of advocates and consumer clusters who crave end-to-end digital alchemy and mindblowing content journeys on socials".
(don't forget, we sell electric toothbrushes)
You can imagine how in that environment it's Thunderdome, anything goes! :-D
And of course I'm being actively silly in my description, but it's worth painting this picture to articulate that a lot of these projects are moving too fast and have too many things literally bolted onto to them to ever find themselves in a place where you could package and release a 10MB app again.
2. after throwing that industry under the bus, I opened Xcode to interrogate one of my own iOS apps, of which I'm the sole and only contributor, painstakingly birthed from scratch with love.
IT, TOO, IS 300MB, much to my surprise!
The app itself does a lot of things:
- beautiful onboarding screens that you likely only ever see once (graphics, video, etc)
- complex notification receipt and display
- full-featured audio player
- embedded HTML webviews and code for audio visualization
- custom iOS Sticker extension
- integrated image editor
- iOS widgets
- Apple Watch support
- tvOS support for a completely unique second-screen experience
- a bunch of frameworks and libraries, leveraged for different reasons (Messages, WidgetKit, SwiftUI, SPPermissions, Haneke, MarqueeLabel, NotificationBannerSwift, Reachability, SDWebImage, Shift, SnapKit, SwiftAudioEx, SwiftQueue, SwiftyJSON)
But realistically, the app actually only does two things: plays some tunes and lets you know when some new merch is for sale. The rest of the stuff is shiny toy territory. Then you compile and package it up, and voila, 300MB.
Turns out, I'm just as culpable for the bloat as any agency or poor soul making apps these days -- you're gonna reach for libraries and include giant assets and do all this stuff that's probably not sane, while in the pursuit of fun, beauty, innovation, or I guess even just collecting intrusive metrics on people's dental habits.