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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#211

Post by kstrauser »

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…

My back-of-my-head benchmark is still my old Amiga. Here's[0] a full-blown GUI email app that was perfectly nice to use. The entire package, complete with all its custom GUI classes and 3 sets of icons, took 1.4MB uncompressed.

I know the thousand legitimate reasons why modern apps are larger. It's not all bloat and inefficiency, either, except in the harshest sense that old apps tended to use byte-optimized data structures like linked lists instead of faster, but less space-efficient structures like hash maps. They have to deal with higher resolutions, although the command to draw an empty white 320x200 square on the screen should be approximately the same size as to draw a 2000x1500 one. And yet, wow, it doesn't seem like it should need to be that much bigger.

[0] https://aminet.net/package/comm/yam/YAM20

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#212

Post by paulddraper »

Aachen wrote: post #29
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

> a few dozen kilobytes

A "hello world" Android starts at ~5MB.

It is possible to make it smaller if choosing some non-default different tools.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#213

Post by paulddraper »

orthoxerox wrote: post #157
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 remember when Windows 95 was around 10-30 MB, ten whole diskettes or so.

Now I can't even install Ubuntu without 4 GiB+

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#214

Post by dieggsy »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #196
anal_reactor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gmail is a product, but the comment wasn't saying "Gmail the product deserves to be shamed... ", more like "the Gmail team/devs/company deserves to be shamed...", which is why the plural still made sense to me (given the omission of an explicit "team"). The singular makes sense to me too.

In any case, I wasn't really interested in correcting or proving anyone right or wrong, just pointing out an interesting linguistic detail and where the grammar may have come from.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#215

Post by toyg »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #196
anal_reactor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you "shame" a product, though? Obviously not. So you're shaming the people who built Gmail, the organization - hence the plural form is acceptable.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#216

Post by jeroenhd »

lynndotpy wrote: post #85
simonw wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

4kB is also the minimum file size on Linux, so I imagine a similar issue could exist on Android.

The Gmail app on Android is 150MiB in size.

Android traditionally puts resources into a compressed archive, though, so by simply using an archive for storage, Google may be avoiding the 4k size problem.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#217

Post by achairapart »

layer8 wrote: post #99
HPsquared wrote: post #2

The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"

As usual, the answer to a question in the title is “no”. ;)

Correct, as in Betteridge's law of headlines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#218

Post by ljm »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #187
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…

I call it Marketing Driven Development, having lived through it at a previous job. It really sucks. They give engineers no time to breathe and do maintenance code changes.

Growth hacking is a polyp on the arsehole of technology, to paraphrase

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#220

Post by jeroenhd »

kstrauser wrote: post #211
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…

My back-of-my-head benchmark is still my old Amiga. Here's[0] a full-blown GUI email app that was perfectly nice to use. The entire package, complete with all its custom GUI classes and 3 sets of icons, took 1.4MB uncompressed. I know the thousand legitimate reasons why modern apps are larger. It's not all bloat and inefficiency, either, except in the harshest sense that old apps tended to use byte-optimized data str…

Thunderbird for Android supports pretty much everything Gmail supports and probably more, but it's "only" 40MiB in size. Even on Android, that's a 3x size reduction.

I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps (that doesn't just seem to be a Google problem) but you certainly don't need the full size of the Gmail app.

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