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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#231

Post by mrweasel »

lenerdenator wrote: post #181
lxgr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For what it's worth, Outlook for iOS on my iPhone has an executable that weighs in at 368.8 MB. Google needs to trim some stuff down.

Apple Mail on macOS is 16-30MB, so something is still clearly of.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#232

Post by HPsquared »

lxgr wrote: post #150
tormeh wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of code, though. I can't imagine common libraries so big. The Linux kernel is less than 100mb.

The neat thing about code is that there's no upper limit on how inefficient one can get.

It's literally "work expands to fill the available time" (s/time/cycles and memory/)

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#233

Post by leftbehinds »

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…

that is fucking rediculous! companies should be banned for such neglegence.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#234

Post by khana »

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…

[dead]

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#235

Post by rjh29 »

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…

Corsair iCUE. 1.1GB to control your RAM lights...

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#236

Post by trinix912 »

kccqzy wrote: post #105
crazygringo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Localization doesn’t just mean string translations. Apple platforms give you the freedom to redo the UI to fit the language. For example, parts of System Preferences (not sure about Settings) would look completely different in languages with long words because the original design for English simply didn’t fit. The translators rearranged buttons to make the text fit.

Sure, but that's a few KBs for each locale at most. Still a long way to 100 MB.

They probably just have lots of leftover localized assets that nobody dares to touch as they aren't sure if it's used anywhere.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#237

Post by RachelF »

Mine is not 200MB on Android - the base apk is 67MB + 32MB for the ARM v8a specific libs. This is the code, the local caching and other data might make up the rest.

For Android, you can check [1] Download the apk, rename it as a zip and look inside to see the files.

A quick file analysis of the 67MB shows around 58MB of java code and some 32MB of ARM libs, 31MB of this is the libvideochat.

[1] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11...

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#238

Post by trinix912 »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #204
HPsquared wrote: post #2

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

Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB

Holy... What kinda heavy lifting is Google Play Services doing with those 1330 megs?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#239

Post by hn8726 »

tonyplee wrote: post #96
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…

Wonder if it is better to create separate localized app download such as gmail-japanese, etc.

Google Play offers such functionality already, it's called App Bundles. Instead of uploading an entire APK, the developers can upload the app assets that get bundled into device-specific APKs containing only the resources necessary for the end device. So you'd only get native libs for your phone CPU architecture, translations for the device language and image assets matching the device resolution for example. In fact, I think it's mandatory now to use the app bundles format (but you're still free to configure it to some extent)

I now see the article is about iOS app, but it looks like the Android app is anywhere between 50mb and 100mb (depending on the apk download side I look at) which is much more reasonable

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#240

Post by vbezhenar »

paulddraper wrote: post #212
Aachen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hello world Android app includes a lot of dependencies like compat libs, constraint layout, kotlin runtime. These are not essential and can be removed.
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