Can we get dark-mode for another 5MB possibly?
(700 MB more is also an acceptable increase for this feature)
On second thought, I love looking at on-duty page emails in the middle of the night with 7 million lumens blasting my retinas.
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
121–130 of 403 posts
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#122The Apple vs Google app size comparison is so disingenuous. It doesn't take into account all of the preinstalled iOS dependency libraries used by these Apple apps.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#123The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"
There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just ma…
Apps like that often contain (many?) short high resolution videos to show how to do an initial connection or something that can take up a ton of space.
Gmail has no such excuse.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#124Because most phones have enough memory to handle all the bloat, and when they don't, Google can sell those people cloud space. Not to mention that adding more memory is how phone manufacturers earn money - out of my ass example just to illustrate the concept: 100GB phone costs $400, same phone but with 200GB memory costs $500, 100GB memory chip costs $20, manufacturer pockets the difference. Having bloated apps and no SD card (iOS doesn't support SD Cards, Android makes them work like shit on purpose) justifies in the eye of the consumer the necessity of extra memory. Most people have fast internet connection so download time is always acceptably small, no matter how much bloat you put, not to mention that updates are in the background anyway.
The economic pressure to keep apps small is literally negative.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#125This may finally drive me to just use Apple Mail for my Google Workspace account. I know it's not a fair comparison, but an app I made that's in the App Store is only 8MB.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size b…
130 MB for localization? At 50 languages that would be 2.6 MB/language. If we assume an average 50 bytes per string and another 50 for an identifier, that's 27,000 strings . That doesn't seem right. Localization feels like it should add a few MB. Not over 100. (Plus shouldn't it be compressed, and locally uncompressed the first time a language gets used?)
Any rtl language will probably require a lot of different assets. If for no other reason than gradients. Plus anything asymmetric.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#127Well, something fishy is going on because there is literally no way that Safari, in its entirety, is 5.1 MB. The numbers for the others app seem similarly off. It would be really hard to believe that somehow Apple has found some magic formula to make their apps 100x smaller than Google and Microsoft. Much more likely is that the reporting by the OS is off somehow (probably most of the app functionality is tied up in…
Safari is just a wrapper around the system webview framework so it does make sense, although it makes the comparison very misleading.
So are the other browsers on iOS.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#128Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyo…
I just downloaded QGIS to take a look. On my Mac, it takes 2.1GB of disk space after installation, which has some notable space sinks:
* 562mb of Python 3.11 and libraries (of which 240mb goes to the qgis python library, 101mb goes to duckdb, and 50mb to PyQt5) * 130mb to i18n * 140mb to `libclntsh.dylib` which I think is the Oracle DB client library? * 80mb to libduckdb.dylib, separate from the Python version * 80mb to libQtWebKit
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#129Probably because it has three embedded versions of libcef
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#130The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"
The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked. And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.
Why? It’s obviously not a problem for them