It does do a lot of auth / security stuff for the entire Google Account... not 700 MB worth, but still thinking of the Gmail app as "just an email app" doesn't do it justice either.
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
221–230 of 403 posts
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#222Earlier 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.
First software ate the world. Then software sales ate software. Now its time for AI to eat software sales.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#223Earlier 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
Author here. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they released an updated version of this analysis last year [1]. It matches what I saw when analyzing the IPA. I tried to do a deeper analysis on the code itself using several tools, including Google's own bloaty [2] which was not very useful without symbols, classdumpios [3] which revealed something like 50k interfaces starting with "ComGoogle", and Ghidra [4], which I left running for a day to analyze the binary, but kept hanging and freezing so I gave up on it. Perhaps comparing the Android and iOS code could lead to something more fruitful.
[1] https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250
[2] https://github.com/google/bloaty
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
So are the other browsers on iOS.
Not in the EU...
While alternative browsers are legally usable on iOS, nobody has really published one yet.
Maintaining a browser is expensive and with the way Apple implemented their obligations, it's not worth it for existing browser companies to ship their own engines (and have twice or more the maintenance).
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
OS startup? AOT compilation happens in the build pipeline, before the app is distributed.
Wouldn't compilation during the build process be ROT? As in, "Right On Time" compilation? Build is where the compilation step is usually performed.
I don't think iOS does any on-device or in-app-store compilation since Apple deprecated Bitcode.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app , which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself. Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).
Sounds like how Internet Explorer used to be integrated in Windows. That was quite contentious at the time!
'90s Microsoft was like early christians: harshly persecuted, only for everyone else to eventually adopt their ways. In this metaphor, emperor Constantine is probably Steve Jobs.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's ahead of time and AOT compilation is done at OS startup, not sure if that is being measured here.
OS startup? AOT compilation happens in the build pipeline, before the app is distributed.
AOT is unique because you want to compile it with all the capabilities your device has, so there still has to be some complication done, especially when you have processors that have brand new instructions to make operations significantly more efficient.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#228> Also, can someone explain why Microsoft Authenticator is 150 MB to show 6-digit codes?
That one's on the author. Duo Mobile is 2MB and shows the same 6-digit codes just fine.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#229Earlier 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?)
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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#230Earlier 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…
Roborock is 900 MB just to control a robot vacuum
Logi Options+ is 500 MB to configure a few extra buttons on a keyboard or mouse. Back in the days things like these were a few kilobytes(!) control panel extension.