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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

akr.am

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#111

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

tarentel wrote: post #76
crazygringo wrote: post #22

> 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 bit…

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…

> 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.

What are the other 310?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#112

Post by tarentel »

kccqzy wrote: post #94
tarentel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can though because a lot of those things you're talking about are available for any app. Sure Apple does have some private frameworks and what not that aren't available to everyone but I imagine if you wanted to recreate what the photo app is doing you'd be able to in 4.2mb or less.

The iCloud Photo Library doesn’t have any public APIs that I know of. You simply can’t recreate the Photos app completely, regardless of app sizes. Apple values deep integration into the system more than it values giving third party developers a fair chance at cloning their app.

You can access iCloud from an iOS app, it has its own public framework called CloudKit, so you could create your own version of it. If you don't like that example Chrome and Edge are both forced to use WebKit on iOS but are still much larger so.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#113

Post by morshu9001 »

miki123211 wrote: post #57
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #5

> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app? Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device. Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms. I’m just speculatin…

There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app , which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself. Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).

Reminds me of when people were clamoring for the ability to delete 1P apps to save space

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#114

Post by renrutal »

crazygringo wrote: post #22

> 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 bit…

> a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017

Google Meet was launched in March 2017.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#116

Post by wackget »

kccqzy wrote: post #98

People need to reread this classic piece from 2001 every so often: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... As a regular user, you are probably using 10% of all features available.

Don't blame the users. Unless Google have hidden a copy of Crysis inside the Gmail app there's no hidden functionality which should come even close to requiring hundreds of megabytes.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#117

Post by anal_reactor »

dieggsy wrote: post #59
NuclearPM wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deserves.

It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs. This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial conv…

There's something funny about someone trying to be smart and pointing out a typo or some other minor irrelevant error only to be proven completely wrong.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#118

Post by tarentel »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #111
tarentel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What are the other 310?

Frameworks from other companies. A lot of it is analytics/tracking, some payment processing, etc. There are a few open source libraries we're using as well but those probably are Again, a lot of these companies have also been around so if my app has a ton of bloat from years of work, we're bringing in frameworks from other companies who have been around for years as well and probably have a similar amount of crap in their code. Plus they probably want to track everything we're doing so they're bringing in their own third party libraries. It's kind of ridiculous but that's where we're at.

Bigger companies won't have as many third party libraries as they can afford to do it in house but they're still bringing in similar sized libraries to do the same things.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#120

Post by titzer »

My prediction is that this will continue to occur indefinitely.

The conversation is always the same, only there is another zero on the end.

We'll have terabyte apps in not too long.

(100% serious)

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