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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#241

Post by vbezhenar »

tarentel wrote: post #76
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…

Part of it is resolution. The icons and such in apps are much larger now than they were in 2013. Besides that I mentioned this in another thread but rarely will a team clean up after itself. There's probably tons of dead code and what not in a lot of these larger apps. I know all the ones I've worked in had a lot of bloat just from years of work. Some feature gets added 5 years ago by a team that no longer exists, it…

Icons should use vector format.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#242

Post by mckn1ght »

nickff wrote: post #180
mckn1ght wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could decouple the video download from the app download. Then they could even update the video independently if needed. Not everyone that downloads the app needs the videos, and even the ones that do I’m sure would be happier to reclaim the disk space after viewing them. It’s lazy.

I often use the DJI MIMO app while out of WiFi, and would rather not download a large video separately. For the record, I do not like the DJI MIMO app (because it is the only app for their 'Pocket' products, and MIMO doesn't support tablets well), but I think this decision is a reasonable one.

I did consider this, but I'm curious: what are you doing that you need to watch a video out of internet range, that you couldn't have done while testing things out while in range? Isn't it risky trying something for the first time in the field without having already practiced it? I do understand that not all things can be anticipated.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#243

Post by trinix912 »

kccqzy wrote: post #94
tarentel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can though because a lot of those things you're talking about are available for any app. Sure Apple does have some private frameworks and what not that aren't available to everyone but I imagine if you wanted to recreate what the photo app is doing you'd be able to in 4.2mb or less.

The iCloud Photo Library doesn’t have any public APIs that I know of. You simply can’t recreate the Photos app completely, regardless of app sizes. Apple values deep integration into the system more than it values giving third party developers a fair chance at cloning their app.

I'd bet my money that you can roll your own iCloud-esque Photo Library and it still won't be near the 100MB territory if you just use native libraries for the UI. Everything you'd have to do from scratch: cloud auth, encryption, syncing, compression, transcoding, etc. is all at most a few MBs combined, not to mention that all of these except cloud auth are already in the built-in libraries on iOS that any app can freely use.

What the apps here are doing is shipping whole (UI) frameworks and tons of old code and assets that aren't really used anymore but nobody dares to remove.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#245

Post by j45 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #92

A significant portion of larger sizes is likely due to how Google handles shared code across its iOS suite. They rely heavily on a shared C++ backend (using tools like J2ObjC or similar internal transpilers) to keep logic consistent between Android, iOS and of course the web. When you pull in the gmail dependency from the internal monorepo, you are most likely pulling in the entire visual stack for Google meet, chat…

I guess so much has already been built they wouldn't have just recreated it in Flutter or something.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#246

Post by zffr »

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…

It’s probably frameworks + localized assets.

With dynamically linked frameworks you bear the cost of the entire framework (and its dependencies) even if you just use a few functions.

iOS apps also need to include all localized assets in each app bundle.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#247

Post by HumblyTossed »

The article compares the native (iOS) mail app which is (from the article) 8.7MB. What I believe is happening is that the gmail app is not a native app, it is some cross-platform monstrosity, so Google has to bring all the widgets and doo-dads that they wrote so that it looks just like it does on all the other platforms. The native iOS mail app is so tiny because part of iOS that the article mentions taking up 25GB contains all the native widgets and doo-dads that the native mail app can use.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#248

Post by binaryturtle »

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.

Outch… and I though an ~8KB "Hello, World!" here on my rusty Mac is HUGE already.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#249

Post by hn8726 »

jorams wrote: post #168
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. But are now hundreds of MB. This is Android, but: 13+ years ago I had an HTC Desire. I was really struggling with internal storage space, regularly uninstalling and replacing apps just to be able to update others. Eventually I moved to custom ROMs just because they allowed some apps to be moved to the SD card. I remember the biggest problem was WhatsApp, which was…

On Android most apps started bundling androidx/jetpack compat libraries that help deal with various API versions, and generally make the development much, _much_ easier. These days apps will also bundle the entire new Android UI framework (Compose) while in the past all the UI code was using framework classes.

Other than that, some popular and useful libraries will bundle native libs (for example for sql), and some ad/analytics/corporate SDKs will use native libs to share code between platforms and for obfuscation. These corporate SDKs (like Zendesk) will also notoriously break Android minification tools, because why bother

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#250

Post by mattacular »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #247

The article compares the native (iOS) mail app which is (from the article) 8.7MB. What I believe is happening is that the gmail app is not a native app, it is some cross-platform monstrosity, so Google has to bring all the widgets and doo-dads that they wrote so that it looks just like it does on all the other platforms. The native iOS mail app is so tiny because part of iOS that the article mentions taking up 25GB c…

I think that's true and it's also a convenient way to "smuggle" in Google's most important doodads: their tracking apparatus which includes all of the single sign on and MFA stuff on top of the usual analytics
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