The use of Go will definitely do that, as it prefers to statically link everything. https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile If we had an entire POSIX OS built with Go, then we would be back to statically-linked UNIX prior to BSD. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dyna...
can you build a Swift UI in go?
There is a single mention of Swift on the developer page that I posted.
"Note that you can also invoke GoHelloGreetings from Swift by importing Hello."
@import Hello
// ...
let msg = Hello.GoHelloGreetings("gopher")
Android seems to be a bit better in that regard: not in the sense that applications are smaller (though I think they are, slightly), but rather that you can easily unpack or decompile most of them and see what's inside.
There it tends to be mostly due to dependencies, including some native libraries in multiple copies for 2-3 CPU architecture.
> 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…
I remember when Windows 95 was around 10-30 MB, ten whole diskettes or so.
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?)
> 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…
Having a sub 5mb app is still the strongest quality signal there is for ios. A shame you can’t sort and filter results by size.
Not 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…
Oh, nice. Yeah, Python got gazillion new versions, incompatible, in million folders in sys.path, and sys.path different in different places, and recently they started to menace you to shutdown old versions (I get such warning, that 3.9 will stop working in October 2026). So, since you can't rely on system Python anymore, they made essentially a docker container. Sigh.