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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#351

Post by pacifika »

simfree wrote: post #339
andrekandre wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> improve someone else's code, that could make them look bad, and that would have negative consequences for you i would never have thought google of all companies would be this political...

All large organizations are political. Some employees choose to ignore the office politics, but that choice might find their management not ensuring they survive the next round of layoffs.

This is a result of doing “rounds of layoffs” as a solution to bad organisational decision making, so not quite a root cause.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#353

Post by vrighter »

lxgr wrote: post #50
Aperocky wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked. And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.

I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think. Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps. Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.

Tree shaking is insane to me too. Just use a language that can actually do proper DCE, if you're not building a website.

(I do realize though that most "apps" are just websites without the browser toolbar, unfortunately)

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#354

Post by Tox46 »

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.

There are ways to analyze the content of your app so you know exactly what's taking all the space.

Tools can vary depending on what language you used. For example i wrote a small app using flutter and i used the flutter's app size tool.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#355

Post by lxgr »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #174
lxgr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think. Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps. Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.

On Android, Gmail reports as being under 200 MB. So I agree, they probably include way to much for portability.

On Android, sharing code is much more feasible than on iOS as far as I understand it, especially if you're Google and can demand that everybody using your apps has Play Services installed.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#356

Post by syberant »

r14c wrote: post #260
paulddraper wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I can't even install Ubuntu without 4 GiB+

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.

Unsure if this is useful to you but have you heard about GNU Unifont? It’s not as nice and comes with some asterisks but damn it’s very compact.

I first read about it via this blog post: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/04/banish-the-%ef%bf%bd-with-u...

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#357

Post by pjmlp »

paulddraper wrote: post #212
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

> a few dozen kilobytes A "hello world" Android starts at ~5MB. It is possible to make it smaller if choosing some non-default different tools.

I am quite sure that isn't using the plain Android APIs, and has a bunch of needless libraries.

Use plain Java, regular Android views, handle yourself the ifdefs for Android versions, and the 5 MB won't be there.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#358

Post by kasabali »

toyg wrote: post #226
HPsquared wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like how Internet Explorer used to be integrated in Windows. That was quite contentious at the time!

'90s Microsoft was like early christians: harshly persecuted, only for everyone else to eventually adopt their ways. In this metaphor, emperor Constantine is probably Steve Jobs.

Harshly persecuted how, exactly? They got a slap on the wrist, still continued to ship IE as the default browser and stayed dominant browser vendor until another monopoly started to abuse its position.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#359

Post by pjmlp »

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.

Which is why on iDevices static libraries should be used instead, as the linker can throw away the extra stuff.

Likewise on Android, on the NDK, and R8/D8 take care of removing all the extra stuff as well.

Sandboxed applications don't make sense to have dynamic linking beyond what is required by some OS workflows, e.g. loading native code into ART.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#360

Post by 3form »

andrekandre wrote: post #338
etruong42 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Google engineer, I believe it is largely accurate to say that we "don't care", or at least "not caring" is the emergent behavior at Google. There are many things we don't care about at Google that I think would shock many engineers who have a healthy amount of pride in craftsmanship. It's hard for me to precisely describe why we "don't care", but I will try anyways. As the parent commenter has pointed out, pulli…

> improve someone else's code, that could make them look bad, and that would have negative consequences for you i would never have thought google of all companies would be this political...

The process to retain and advance your career at Google is incredibly political, and these are the results.
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