I believe it is because it includes a suite of enterprise management features in addition to Gmail-related features. (Search for "google basic mobile device management" for more info.)
Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
31–40 of 403 posts
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#32>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety". More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.
Pardon? I can't tell if you're serious. How would adding more lines of code in a program (or assets or whatever make up this size) add security?
You must be a developer only :)
https://www.securecodewarrior.com/press-releases/secure-code...
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#33Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)
Do you mean the RAM used by the tab? The article is talking about disk space
ah I misunderstood...because hilariously my chrome tab is also ~700MB!
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#34Earlier 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...
- They mention Google Chrome tabs
- They speak of HN as a single thing, so presumably not a third-party implementation but the official one
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#35> 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.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#36>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety". More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.
According to looking at a 1,000 line code file on my machine right now, a million lines is about 48mb. You think > 10 million lines of code are required for security in an app?
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#37>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety". More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.
Pardon? I can't tell if you're serious. How would adding more lines of code in a program (or assets or whatever make up this size) add security?
(Anna Delvey voice) ... LOC is always better.
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#38AOT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast) Frameworks 150MB Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB AI models 25MB
AOT = Ahead Of Time? Attack On Titan? Something else?
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?
Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617
So is the extra space not accounted for from then to now AI related pieces?
Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
#40AOT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast) Frameworks 150MB Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB AI models 25MB
AOT = Ahead Of Time? Attack On Titan? Something else?
it's ahead of time and AOT compilation is done at OS startup, not sure if that is being measured here.