For perspective, the entire iPhone OS 1.0.x ipsw image was around 100MB in 2007 (and there was a 4GB iPhone SKU for a brief period.)
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
281–290 of 403 posts
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#282> 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.
If your app is 5mb to download but then needs to download 100mb of content your app is 105mb.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#283One of the reasons the Facebook app was large was that they were using Thrift or something and generating a tremendous amount of code for their API interop. Protobuf+GRPC is similarly heavyweight, so I wouldn't be surprised if some megabytes were dedicated to the generated code. But hundreds of megabytes is wild. It has to be one-package compatibility as opposed to specialized app packages for different form factors etc.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#284The 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
Instead of Gboard, get Anysoft keyboard from https://f-droid.org, enable Gestures in the settings. You'll thank me later.
Also, F-Droid has different keyboard layouts for Ansyoft such as better ones for SSH and OFC language related layouts.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#285Earlier 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.
Maybe not proper support, but when I tried NetBSD recently my entire installation was around 1.5 GB on disk and seemed to handle Unicode well enough for me (for languages I care about). Not doubting some more packages would be needed to support every language, but happy everything wasn't installed by default.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#286> 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"
I wrote native Windows desktop application 10 years ago that still brings me some money. It has boatload of functionality and the size is 12MB. Competitors have similar app written in .NET. The install is about 1GB.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#287> 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…
One of the struggles on my first android phone was fitting updates for the multiple google docs apps since they were all getting bigger and didn't share their redundant data. That phone had about 150MB for apps.
It's sad the laziness that happens when there's no pushback. The devs gain barely anything from leaving things this bloated, but barely anything isn't zero so now a million people have to deal with big files and wasted RAM.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#288A 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.
bunq 30.0.2 on Android is 380 MB by itself.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#289Earlier 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.
Is it plausible that the libraries are so big? I mean, for example, NodeJS is in the order of 100mb and contains the whole v8 engine. The Gmail app size has to be assets, right?
You'd be surprised what ends up dragged into where when you have a build system that makes it easy. Just look at the npm.js mess (and what kind of things ended up depending on what kind of other thing) if you want an example.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB
Instead of Gboard, get Anysoft keyboard from https://f-droid.org , enable Gestures in the settings. You'll thank me later. Also, F-Droid has different keyboard layouts for Ansyoft such as better ones for SSH and OFC language related layouts.
Futo Keyboard.