Of course it's self-hosted intelligence gathering or metadata auditing. This is Google we're talking about. They're "pushing compute to the edge," taking advantage of more powerful mobile processors to reduce their own infrastructure cost while still providing that sweet sweet Big Data, as they used to call it.
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
251–260 of 403 posts
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#252Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyo…
The brew LLVM situation is crazy and even more noticeable when you're on older macOS for which they no longer ship precompiled stuff.
I know they don't want stuff breaking because users have a GCC version that's 6 months behind and the homebrew folks can't be sure that package XYZ doesn't use any newer features. But when installing anything built with C++ I really don't expect to wait half a day for the whole LLVM+CMake toolchain to compile from scratch.
You can pin LLVM but it's useless as there's no bypass to the version check. They've also closed all relevant issues as "won't fix" as it's not "their way of doing things".
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#253> 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 one of the reasons why these apps grow: because the user doesn't notice!
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not sure how that would help. SVGs aren't natively handled on iOS. They get rasterized during build time and that's what gets shipped with an app.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#2551.15 GB for me - dear god.
There's a comment in the article with two helpful links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail
The bloat? Mostly "localization".
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#256> 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…
Having a sub 5mb app is still the strongest quality signal there is for ios. A shame you can’t sort and filter results by size.
As long as you don't need a lot of hi-res graphics. One of the no-frills icon themes installed on my Linux laptop (from which I'm typing) is 170M, just because it has a pack of icons rendered for each of the 8, 16, 18, 24, 32, 48, and 64 pixel sizes.
(And no, vector icons are not equally useful in this whole range of resolutions; you need to lower the level of detail for small resolutions to avoid pixel sludge, and increase the level of detail for high resolutions to avoid the barren look. Still, say, 3 versions in SVG format could be sufficient.)
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#257Earlier 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…
Doesn't the Mimo app work for many devices not just your mic? While your mic might not need a lot of the code, someone using one of their other devices might not need your mic's code either. I can totally see why DJI would want a single app to control any of the DJI branded devices rather than dealing with multiple app store approvals. It would also be confusing for the end user as in "Which device am I using so whic…
Yes, I have used Mimo for a separate DJI product. They also have at least two drone control apps each used by multiple models of their drones.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#258Earlier 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.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#259Earlier 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…
Corsair iCUE. 1.1GB to control your RAM lights...
Beautiful example of bloat. Bravo!
The software crisis never ended. Instead, we also gained a hardware crisis.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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+
Proper unicode font support is like 1.2GiB (noto, but I haven't found any complete unicode font collections that are significantly smaller). There's bloat for sure, but supporting universal text is one that I think is not a waste of space.