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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#291

Post by throwaway81523 »

Aachen wrote: post #29
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. 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 remember hearing that even a trivial React Native app is around 100MB on Android.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#294

Post by pmontra »

jeroenhd wrote: post #220
kstrauser wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My back-of-my-head benchmark is still my old Amiga. Here's[0] a full-blown GUI email app that was perfectly nice to use. The entire package, complete with all its custom GUI classes and 3 sets of icons, took 1.4MB uncompressed. I know the thousand legitimate reasons why modern apps are larger. It's not all bloat and inefficiency, either, except in the harshest sense that old apps tended to use byte-optimized data str…

Thunderbird for Android supports pretty much everything Gmail supports and probably more, but it's "only" 40MiB in size. Even on Android, that's a 3x size reduction. I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps (that doesn't just seem to be a Google problem) but you certainly don't need the full size of the Gmail app.

More than 3x: GMail is 194 MB on my Android phone and the old K9 (which Thunderbird built upon) is 10.60 MB.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#295

Post by derkades »

Kwpolska wrote: post #35
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #5

> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app? Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device. Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms. I’m just speculatin…

The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.

K-9 mail (aka Thunderbird) is a nice 12MB, 70MB installed.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#296

Post by dangus »

paxys wrote: post #47
Etheryte wrote: post #42

For me, the most important takeaway from the article was that the Passwords app supports 2FA codes! I was not aware of this, that's nice and getting rid of Authenticator is one less Google thing to worry about.

Having both your password and 2nd factor in the same place isn't the best idea however.

I don’t think it matters much. In 1Password you still need your secret code to login in addition to your password. It essentially acts like a second factor.

I could give you my 1Password username and password right now and you wouldn’t be able to access it.

Being logged in to my 1Password essentially verifies that you have a physical device of mine.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#297

Post by Aloisius »

crazygringo wrote: post #97
simonw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size b…

130 MB for localization? At 50 languages that would be 2.6 MB/language. If we assume an average 50 bytes per string and another 50 for an identifier, that's 27,000 strings . That doesn't seem right. Localization feels like it should add a few MB. Not over 100. (Plus shouldn't it be compressed, and locally uncompressed the first time a language gets used?)

The version I'm looking at has 27,470 strings files, mostly of them less than 4 KB each.

Since the iOS filesystem uses 4 KB blocks, it looks like about half the space is just wasted.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#298

Post by pmontra »

My guess: phone get more storage so we can build fatter apps. With RAM and storage getting more expensive maybe developers will face some pressure to deliver slimmer apps but I don't have many hopes for that. It's going to take at least a couple of device replacement cycles with lower and lower RAM and storage for that to happen.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#299

Post by dangus »

I’m surprised so few comments have pointed out how this doesn’t matter at all to anybody. The “apps are too bloated” debate is a dessicated horse.

1. You don’t even have to use the Gmail app to use Gmail. Pick whatever flavor of client you want, they all support Gmail. Apple Mail, Outlook, or something else entirely.

2. If you buy the shittiest available new iPhone it has 128GB of storage. Used iPhone 15 on Swappa with 512GB is 3. Nobody’s forcing you to use Gmail. Email is an open federated standard. Use something else.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#300

Post by itopaloglu83 »

zffr wrote: post #246
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.

That’s a lot, a lot, of compiled code and text, especially when you consider some of it is likely compressed.

Also, afaik, it is possible to ship an iOS app in a way certain modules can be downloaded as needed.

It would be nice if Google paid some respect to user devices, or at least go back to “don’t be evil”

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