321–330 of 403 posts
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If you use Electron, yes, any application starts from around 100MB. But there are alternatives that reuse the OS's libraries nowadays.
How does a web application reuse browser system-native libraries?
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If you use Electron, yes, any application starts from around 100MB. But there are alternatives that reuse the OS's libraries nowadays.
How does a web application reuse browser system-native libraries?
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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?)
Localization doesn’t just mean string translations. Apple platforms give you the freedom to redo the UI to fit the language. For example, parts of System Preferences (not sure about Settings) would look completely different in languages with long words because the original design for English simply didn’t fit. The translators rearranged buttons to make the text fit.
In the version I'm looking at there are 27,470 .strings files totaling 69 MiB, but they take up 155.9 MiB of disk space due to the 4 KiB filesystem block size.
The keys for the strings take up 39% of the space while the values take up 61%. About 12% of translations are duplicated (the word "Cancel" is translated like 53 times)
So 55% of the space used for strings localization is just pure waste due to having so many small files. The long keys are rather wasteful too and about 12% of the translations are duplicated (i.e. the word "Cancel" is translated 50+ times per language).
Some of this is arguably Apple's fault. Their whole .string file per table per language is incredibly space inefficient by default.
People need to reread this classic piece from 2001 every so often: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... As a regular user, you are probably using 10% of all features available.
Gmail barely has any features, which haven't changed since it's inception. Most of the code is in the cloud.
> 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.
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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.
Logitech and creative do the same with bloated user apps, filled with what I assume is duplicated high res images for each device.
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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.
> 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…
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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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There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app , which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself. Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).
Sounds like how Internet Explorer used to be integrated in Windows. That was quite contentious at the time!