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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#191

Post by benhurmarcel »

wolvoleo wrote: post #67
HPsquared wrote: post #2

The 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…

Roborock is 900 MB just to control a robot vacuum

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#192

Post by convolvatron »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #188
wolvoleo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

DJI lost the plot years ago unfortunately. They reeeeally wanted their app to be this whole bespoke platform experience thing and it’s been downhill ever since. lol remember the Karma?

I did a DFU firmware update app for Jawbone once. after a bit of screwing around trying to figure out some of the reset paths we were good. and then the marketing people got involved. this was a customer touch point, and opportunity to reenforce the brand that just couldn't be ignored.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#193

Post by fx1994 »

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.

This might be true but most of time its just bloat no one uses.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#194

Post by Pxtl »

jonny_eh wrote: post #173
jshchnz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617

Looks like it's mostly strings, probably due to localization. They should consider compressing each localization/language, and decompressing the needed bundle on first startup (or language change). Even better: Download the language bundle when needed.

Well, that's a question for OS level. If the OS doesn't require the user to download the language and so language-switching to a new language is doable as an offline operation, I could see it being frustrating that switching to a new language must be done online.

So compression/deduplication is probably the better option. Rather than storing as 1 zip per language, though, you'd probably want a compression format that also eliminates duplication that may occur between languages if you're storing all languages compressed on the system. That means you'd need compression to handle the entire language complex being in one massive compressed blob and you'd just extract out the languages you needed. I assume there are some forms of zipping that do this better than others.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#195

Post by landr0id »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #185

On Android vs iOS, it's worth noting Android apps are smaller than iOS apps. The details are complicated but this report says after installation Android apps take up about half the space as iOS. https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-rese... One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-a…

Android also allows developers to split up their APK so features can be delivered on-demand: https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-deliver...

AFAIK iOS does not offer anything similar.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#196

Post by WillPostForFood »

anal_reactor wrote: post #117
dieggsy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He isn't wasn't wrong, and the parent post wasn't even correcting him. Gmail is not a corporation, it is a product - singular.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#197

Post by burnt-resistor »

The Facebook and Instagram iOS apps were/are enormous codebases. Absurd, sprawling monsters with tons of dead code, duplication, and old stuff.. like being written in mostly Objective-C.

I imagine the Gmail app also suffers from having zillions of engineers touch it without being incentivized to make it better or smaller, only to add features and impact for the all-important performance review.

Add zillions of instrumentation and third-party frameworks, each with piles of dependencies, and apps will grow without bounds like molecules of gas to fill the container.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#198

Post by themafia »

lxgr wrote: post #50
Aperocky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think. Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps. Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.

> Tree shaking

Modern development is insane to me. "Let's do it badly, and hope a tool can fix it for us."

"Is anyone keeping an eye on the tools? No? Perfect!"

Particularly for developers inside the company that owns the platform. At some point they have to recognize they've completely screwed all this up.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#199

Post by nottorp »

Incidentally, the last ssd i bought at the beginning of last year now costs double what i paid for it.

Ram is what, 3-4x?

It's a great time to ship more bloated apps, the suckers will enrich the hardware manufacturers, won't they?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#200

Post by agsnu »

akho wrote: post #127
afavour wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just the WebKit bit, basically the entire app implementation is actually shipped as a "Private Framework" which lives outside the .app bundle. e.g. on macOS % otool -L /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Safari (compatibility version 528.0.0, current version 623.1.14) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1356.0.0)

There's a bunch of other private frameworks (SafariCore.framework, SafariFoundation.framework, SafariPlatformSupport.framework, SafariShared.framework, SafariSharedUI.framework, SafariSwift.framework) as well. I haven't checked but I assume it's similar on iOS.

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