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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#301

Post by itopaloglu83 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #92

A 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…

Thank you for your explanation.

This is more like the what causes these apps to be so large, but when you ask why then you see that they simply do not care about the amount of space they take on users’ devices. There’s no obvious effort to reduce app size with modular design, it simply feels like they don’t care.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#302

Post by marcosdumay »

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

Phones used to have 4GB of flash memory... Some had 2GB.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#303

Post by Neywiny »

port11 wrote: post #209
Fiveplus wrote: post #92

A 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.

But this is still unjustified speculation

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#304

Post by marcosdumay »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #291
Aachen wrote: post #29

Earlier 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

I remember hearing that even a trivial React Native app is around 100MB on Android.

If you use Electron, yes, any application starts from around 100MB.

But there are alternatives that reuse the OS's libraries nowadays.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#305

Post by elpakal »

I maintain an app size inspection tool that runs locally on your macOS and added the file inspector (Sunburst chart) for Gmail if anyone is interested in exploring its contents.

As others have pointed out, the main executable is huge (~300MB) and there are a lot of localization files, but not too much traditional asset duplication.

You can click into different slices of the app and see what it's made of if interested: https://dotipa.app/?app=Gmail#examples

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#306

Post by CyberDildonics »

nine_k wrote: post #256
kjkjadksj wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as you don't need a lot of hi-res graphics. One of the no-frills icon themes installed on my Linux laptop (from which I'm typing) is 170M, just because it has a pack of icons rendered for each of the 8, 16, 18, 24, 32, 48, and 64 pixel sizes. (And no, vector icons are not equally useful in this whole range of resolutions; you need to lower the level of detail for small resolutions to avoid pixel sludge, and i…

You don't need "hi-res graphics" in an app.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#307

Post by marcosdumay »

koyote wrote: post #268
Aachen wrote: post #29

Earlier 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

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.

Maybe your compiler isn't pruning dead code?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#308

Post by itopaloglu83 »

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…

I’m sorry but ~700MB of compiled code, text, and vector graphics is a lot of assets, almost a truck load. It doesn’t look like they care about how much space they take in users’ devices at all.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#309

Post by cyanydeez »

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…

Guys, do you think AI is like newage bloatware? Like, it's gigabytes of just things you're never going to need, and now ram prices are skyrocketing because they have no idea how to make it efficient.

In fact, they state the oppposite: To really make it go, they need petawatts of energy and compute. It's like Windows incarnate.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#310

Post by tentacleuno »

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.

> I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps [...]

Rough guess: It probably wouldn't be this dramatic of an increase, but could it be something to do with iOS disallowing Just-in-Time compilation, and forcing Ahead-of-Time? I've always wondered.

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