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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

akr.am

271–280 of 403 posts

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#271

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…

> I should have returned the damn thing to be honest.

If enough people actually did that, the companies would start caring.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#272

> 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…

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#273
Android is slightly less horrendous but still bad - probably because at least in some markets enough people have low end phones that size does somewhat matter. I suspect Uber made optimizing app size a priority once they realized that their 1 GB behemoth was hovering on the top of the "things you can delete instead of your wedding photos if you want to be able to continue to use your phone" list, and they were losing customers over it. But there are still apps that are hundreds of MB with no valid reason to be that fat.

Meanwhile, well-written browsers - which are essentially whole operating systems - are in the dozens, so this is 100% bloat.

There simply is little incentive to optimize apps for size, because someone else pays the price and there is little consequence for making it big. Slapping another data collection or ad SDK into the app is easy and free.

If the EU was serious about it, it would consider it part of the ecodesign rules since it forces people to buy new phones for more storage much earlier than needed.

If the app stores were serious about it, they'd either re-introduce the hard cap and stick to it, or at least show the size prominently. Or start charging fees for bloaty apps. At least on the mobile version of the Play store, I don't think you can even see the app size without starting an install - let alone search or filter by it. It's as if they want to encourage bloat.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#274
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For English capitalization is a trivial problem. I think for Hungarian or something similar the rule set is like 6mb.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#275

Earlier 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.

Historically, raster graphics won out because they used less resources. Perhaps that's changed. If so, it would make sense for various OS's to start working on native support. Irix did it in the 90's. It can be done now.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have those apps handy and could share the sizes it would be very useful. I don’t have a way to check this. (Or do I? All I have is an iPhone )

Safari on MacOS is 66M, Safari Technology Preview is 226M

Yikes thanks. I remember when a full browser fit in a 1.44MB floppy disk.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#277
It might have to do with the fact that (at least on iOS), you can participate in a Google Meet call with just the Gmail app, as well as authenticate sign-ins, and who know what more.

Could the main issue be Google is shipping apps within apps?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#279
post #180

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.

You'd rather just keep every tutorial video in your phone's limited storage, forever?

The more likely outcome: because the app is huge, you'll uninstall it to save space. Then when there's no signal, you have no app at all.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#280
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the RAM used by the tab? The article is talking about disk space

There's an app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetool...

That's some third party app. And if you look at the Github it's basically an advertising vector for that companies set of mobile development tools.
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