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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#341

Post by saidinesh5 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #307
koyote wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it could be all the compat /support libraries that try to give you the same API across different Android versions.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#342

Post by transcriptase »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #24

I was just wondering why the Adobe Acrobat installer is nearly a gigabyte in size.

Personally I always wonder why a pdf tool puts 3-6 background processes on startup that are constantly doing something with my CPU and internet connection when my PC is otherwise idle.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#343

Post by transcriptase »

culebron21 wrote: post #160
maximilianburke wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just downloaded QGIS to take a look. On my Mac, it takes 2.1GB of disk space after installation, which has some notable space sinks: * 562mb of Python 3.11 and libraries (of which 240mb goes to the qgis python library, 101mb goes to duckdb, and 50mb to PyQt5) * 130mb to i18n * 140mb to `libclntsh.dylib` which I think is the Oracle DB client library? * 80mb to libduckdb.dylib, separate from the Python version * 80mb…

Oh, nice. Yeah, Python got gazillion new versions, incompatible, in million folders in sys.path, and sys.path different in different places, and recently they started to menace you to shutdown old versions (I get such warning, that 3.9 will stop working in October 2026). So, since you can't rely on system Python anymore, they made essentially a docker container. Sigh.

The most fun part about trying to run any modern AI tool is the 14 different python installations that tag along.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#344

Post by stefanfisk »

miki123211 wrote: post #57
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…

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).

I don't think that Safari should be used for comparison here since web views have a special place in the OS. Which of the other stock apps have a similar architecture?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#345

Post by ksec »

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.

>iOS apps also need to include all localized assets in each app bundle.

Is this a hard requirement? I use two languages or at best three. The other 100 language don't matter to me. Why do I have to waste space on my smartphone. This adds up if I have hundreds of apps.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#346

Post by az09mugen »

tralarpa wrote: post #267
port11 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know much about app development, but I was curious and downloaded the Albert Heijn apk for ARM64. Inside the apk, the three largest entities are: - libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously) - flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.) - libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think) There is a 640 KByte json file in…

So it seems flutter by itself takes 200-ish MBytes. Flutter alpha is 2017 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutter_(software)

Mystery solved it seems

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#347

Post by mskogly »

I haven’t made iPhone apps but my guess it that the size comes from bundling libraries and dependencies needed, sort of like how venv includes as snapshot of python and all dependencies into your project folder. Apple core apps probably uses iOS libraries (25GB) already on the device

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#348

Post by vrighter »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #332
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…

We once ran Windows 95 with Encarta in about the same amount of disk space. We crossed lunacy long ago.

My first PC (my parents splurged on a high-end machine (for the time, of course) only had 8MiB of memory and a 1 GiB HDD. It ran windows 95 and encarta just fine.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#350

Post by xigoi »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20

AOT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast) Frameworks 150MB Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB AI models 25MB

> OT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast)

Yet there is a positive correlation between size and startup time…

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