I just use the gmail mobile website on my smartphone and put a link to it on my Home Screen. So many of these services you don’t necessarily need an app for, unless you just enjoy giving them your personal data or something ha ha
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
261–270 of 403 posts
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#262I’m just guessing but probably because it’s not just GMail, it’s likely chock full of all Google’s other walled garden nonsense. Hey, you installed GMail? Great, here’s a 2FA client for all federated Google logins everywhere too. hell i’m surprised it doesn’t contain the entire chrome browser as well.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#263Earlier 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…
Sounds like a ripe opportunity for someone to reverse engineer their USB protocol and create a free/open alternative.
Yes!! I was thinking of doing that myself but I don't have the chops to create an android app and no time to learn right now. But the protocol can't be that hard.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#264[dead]
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#265Earlier 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.
Idk what to tell you but my "hello world" + a few dozen lines of functionality are 9.6KB. Haven't done anything special to shave things off
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#266Incidentally, the last ssd i bought at the beginning of last year now costs double what i paid for it. Ram is what, 3-4x? It's a great time to ship more bloated apps, the suckers will enrich the hardware manufacturers, won't they?
Closer to 2.5x right now, likely to hit 3x this year.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#267A 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…
Very insightful, rather than unjustified speculation. Of course it doesn’t explain why many other apps are so big, e.g. Withings, Bunq (bank), and Albert Heijn (supermarket) together eat 1GB of my storage. All 3 are things I need to list data, but somehow are the size they are.
I don't know much about app development, but I was curious and downloaded the Albert Heijn apk for ARM64. Inside the apk, the three largest entities are:
- libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously)
- flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.)
- libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think)
There is a 640 KByte json file in the assets that stores an animation in base64 format. Now you know what the CPU and storage resources of your devices are used for nowadays...
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#268> 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
I recently made a tiny utlity app with a single screen, one dropdown and a few lines of text (it makes a single API call to populate the text).
According to my phone it's 25MB.
There's no assets, not even an app icon.
I have no idea what would be taking up more than a few hundred kb, let alone 25MB.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Huh, is there a requirement that they be rasterized at build time? If I had a choice, I'd rather ship the SVGs in the bundle alongside a renderer like ThorVG and render at runtime. The renders could even be cached if the rendering itself was expensive.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#270On my Android phone, just the calculator app is 13MB. How in hell is it 13MB just for a calculator? It beggars belief.