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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#361

Post by oblio »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #306
nine_k wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#362

Post by charles_f »

Until someone stops installing gmail because it's too big (and it's coming back as a signal), I doubt anything will be done about it. In the absence of constraints, things just keep growing... without constraints. The costs of pruning/shaking embedded frameworks, refactoring, optimization, etc. cannot be justified if it's not signaled as a problem by customers.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#363

Post by WindyMiller »

syberant wrote: post #356
r14c wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To be fair it wouldn't really be doing its job if it didn't come with any asterisks

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#364

Post by kuekacang »

josefresco wrote: post #255

1.15 GB for me - dear god. There's a comment in the article with two helpful links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail The bloat? Mostly "localization".

Except the text is stored as image, I can't imagine localization would be that large.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#365

Post by fingerlocks »

throw10920 wrote: post #269
tarentel wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how that would help. SVGs aren't natively handled on iOS. They get rasterized during build time and that's what gets shipped with an app.

Huh, is there a requirement that they be rasterized at build time? If I had a choice, I'd rather ship the SVGs in the bundle alongside a renderer like ThorVG and render at runtime. The renders could even be cached if the rendering itself was expensive.

If you’re including these assets as UI elements, they would be rasterized anyway and copied to a GPU bound buffer for the frame blit. Doing so at compile time increases runtime performance.

You can of course override this behavior and redraw your vector every 8.3 ms if you want, but I promise you that this is not faster. For sparse pyramid-tiled vector images like Google/Apple maps, this is a two step process using the latter method followed by the former.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#366

Post by Daedren »

ksec wrote: post #345
zffr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is the default.

You could get localizations OTA, but that's engineering you need to do to make that happen.. or a product you purchase, as there's various localization managers offering these options in their software.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#367

Post by toyg »

kasabali wrote: post #358
toyg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

The verdict significantly hamstrung their internal developer processes. Yes, IE didn't go anywhere, but the path of tight integration of web and OS was effectively abandoned for several years, and they generally toned down integration features between their products.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#368

Post by thedeadgamer »

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.

Whoa, Encarta was such a great thing back in the day for me. Brought back memories.

I agree, that we crossed lunacy long ago, and that LLMs have not helped in the slightest.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#369

Post by [deleted] »

HPsquared wrote: post #64
miki123211 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[deleted]

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#370

Post by joseda-hg »

oblio wrote: post #361
CyberDildonics wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why?

Small screen, lots of system components that should get drawn dynamically, etc

A bit reductionist, but I get it, if it were a priority you could do lots with a hundredth the space

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