311–320 of 403 posts
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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.
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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.
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The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.
To add to the comparisons. Protonmail is showing as 180 MB on GrapheneOS. Add in user data and cache and it's 495 MB. I don't consider myself a big email user so I am a bit appalled.
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…
The past year or so I've stopped buying stuff with an app before checking out how big the app is (if I plan to use it).
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Doesn't the Mimo app work for many devices not just your mic? While your mic might not need a lot of the code, someone using one of their other devices might not need your mic's code either. I can totally see why DJI would want a single app to control any of the DJI branded devices rather than dealing with multiple app store approvals. It would also be confusing for the end user as in "Which device am I using so whic…
Just for the comparison, Damn Small Linux is still around 700 MB, and contains Linux kernel, desktop environment, web browser, office suite, and other software. Mimo app will never support as many devices as Linux kernel does.
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Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB
Holy... What kinda heavy lifting is Google Play Services doing with those 1330 megs?
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The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.
Probably bundles its own copy of Chrome just in case :)
For apps like Gmail and a handful of others, they are big enough that they need multiple layers of fallback. e.g. they can't just use a networking layer, they need a fallback separate implementation in case that breaks, so that they can recover. They might have 2 or even 3 options for some of the critical parts, all so that if stuff goes wrong they can as close to guarantee recovery as they can get.
Mobile is quite specific in this regard, because you don't have hardware access, network is heavily restricted, battery reduces the amount you can do, etc.
Source: I work on mobile SRE things at Google.
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…
(And yes I know it’s a tiny fraction of the size, let me have my fun).