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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#21

Post by Aachen »

begueradj wrote: post #14

>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety". More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.

Pardon? I can't tell if you're serious. How would adding more lines of code in a program (or assets or whatever make up this size) add security?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#22

Post by crazygringo »

> 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 bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#25

Post by compiler-guy »

jshchnz wrote: post #10
simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?

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

Non X version:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#26

Post by ineedasername »

I know that in some cases, apparent bloat like this is related to needing to support so many potential devices and versions of the underlying OS. Google has to support, on iOS, roughly 6 years of devices and their variations + OS variations on them. Each of these may require their own libraries compiled against it, for optimal performance or because it simply is less practical to engineer non-breaking updates against new SDK and HW versions in the same codebase without introducing complexity.

Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have to do this. They can integrate at lower levels and even with all else being equal can develop updates with perfect insight on the ecosystem and foresight on things to come.

Somewhat supporting this possible explanation is that, similar to Apple on iOS, Google's apps on android are significantly smaller.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#27

Post by hadlock »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #18
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.

It is also a conferencing app. That might explain some of the size.

I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#28

Post by stronglikedan »

Aachen wrote: post #15
mbesto wrote: post #8

Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)

Do you mean the RAM used by the tab? The article is talking about disk space

There's an app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetool...

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#29

Post by Aachen »

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…

> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB.

More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like

Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#30

Post by dewey »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #23
calin2k wrote: post #12

maybe because we need to be pushed to buy minimum the 256GB versions of phones. it is a wintel deja vu

Why would Google try to maximize Apple's revenue?

Google is also selling phones? Not a great point as it's probably not really a revenue driver for them though.
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