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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#371

Post by miki123211 »

stefanfisk wrote: post #344
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).

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?

All of them (except the downloadable ones like Xcode on Mac).

With Safari it's a lot easier to see, as you can get the standalone version.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#372

Post by rerdavies »

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.

I'm wondering what the source for these apps were. Google Store downloads strip unnecessary localized assets at download time. This used to be a BIG deal back when icons were bitmaps; but compiled binaries do provide COMPLETE pre-rendered sets of bitmap icons if your downlevel minimum version (Android 5.0? Android 6.0?) extends that far. Which are then stripped whenever you download to modern phone. Assuming that you have SVG replacements for all legacy bitmap icons. Perhaps Gmail does not. So if there are multiple localizations, that would suggest that either the user is measuring the pre-installed app (which almost immediately upgraded and is therefore effectively replaced), or has obtained the APKs from a different source.

The publicly available email app in the Android sources is NOT gmail (and is therefore likely to be unloved and uncared for, and probaly will contain massive blobs of bitmap icons. So if it was that...

Any native code ALSO bloats compiled binary size dramatically (since binaries include code compiled for each processor you have selected when you performed the native build). Unnecessary binary blobs are stripped by the Play Store when you download. It is conceivable that gmail carries ancient crusty pieces of native code, I suppose, given its long heritage.

And also includes pre-compile maps to speed up startup. Very strange process. Apparently, the Google Play Store profiles the startup of the first 20-odd users who download your app, and then transmit the pre-compile map to all subsequent downloads. I'm not sure whether apps are pre-jitted at install time or whether the pre-jitted code is downloaded from the Play Store.(Play Store does tells you they are going to do it when you upload, and -- sure enough -- load time "magically" improves by a significant amount shortly after you push the binary to production. I don't honestly know whether pre-jitting has taken place before first load. (And whether that code shows up as cache space or app size).

Compat frameworks, on the other hand.... absolutely yes! I'm not sure that native Android framework code EVER gets executed on a modern app, to be honest. Almost all compat layers, and extensions, I think.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#373

Post by thebytefairy »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #301
Fiveplus wrote: post #92

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…

Thank you for your explanation. This is more like the what causes these apps to be so large, but when you ask why then you see that they simply do not care about the amount of space they take on users’ devices. There’s no obvious effort to reduce app size with modular design, it simply feels like they don’t care.

I think a simpler explanation the some of the others is.. why care? Phones these days, even cheaper ones, have oodles of GB available. They're not losing customers from the size. And I don't think making it smaller is going to draw in new gmail/workspace customers. So why spend time on it when there are tons of new features or active bugs that could be fixed instead?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#374

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

tarentel wrote: post #118
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An unoptimized version of the app I'm currently working on has a ~15mb binary, the core app not including all the "extras" people have asked for. It has about 75mb of assets, probably 10-15% are unused but I have no idea. The download size is about 400mb. What are the other 310?

Frameworks from other companies. A lot of it is analytics/tracking, some payment processing, etc. There are a few open source libraries we're using as well but those probably are Again, a lot of these companies have also been around so if my app has a ton of bloat from years of work, we're bringing in frameworks from other companies who have been around for years as well and probably have a similar amount of crap in…

> A lot of it is analytics/tracking

Woof. This is just so wild if one ever stops to think about it. ~300mb of tracking for a single app is bigger than the entire hard drive of a fully internet-capable desktop computer in the mid '90s.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#376

Post by etruong42 »

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 Google of 2026 is a very different Google of 2006. In 2006, everyone who left Google had only praises to sing about the employer they were leaving! It is very telling when the Google of 2026 has had years of highly reputable engineers voluntarily leaving (even before the layoffs) who are so bold as to openly criticize Google in the social environment that we're in. Openly criticizing Google requires great personal fortitude, since being a critic only burns bridges and reduces your career opportunities. That is to say nothing about the criticisms that never get published outside of Google.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#377

Post by amluto »

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.

I don’t think this fully explains it. In the nineties you could build a whole application using a toolkit like MFC, and you could ship the entire .dll, which bundled a whole bunch of (low-res, remarkably tasteless even for the time) bitmapped UI assets, and the resulting package didn’t hold a candle to modern bloat. Nor could it: you wanted that self-extracting installer (this predated MSI!) to be reasonable to download on a 56k modem, and even if you used a CD, you wanted room for something else on that CD.

Of course, there were multi-hundred-MB software packages in that era, but they were complex, multifunctional, and highly capable. And IIRC all of Microsoft Office (RIP!) except for some rarely used extras still managed to fit in one CD for a long time.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#378

Post by neop1x »

Software has gotten out of control. A simple Gmail client is now larger than an entire operating system was just a few years ago. And their “web apps” like Google Cloud Console, are so slow that they’re practically unusable in Firefox. Pinnacle of software engineering at Google :/

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#379

Post by kjkjadksj »

allthetime wrote: post #282
kjkjadksj wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a sub 5mb app is still the strongest quality signal there is for ios. A shame you can’t sort and filter results by size.

If your app is 5mb to download but then needs to download 100mb of content your app is 105mb.

I have a couple that are honest sub 5mb apps. Some of my favorite apps on my phone. Limited featureset that does what it says on the tin. Loads instantly. Hardly uses battery at all. I wish everything was like this.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#380

Post by dbacar »

rconti wrote: post #156
dbacar wrote: post #13

It is bloatware for a reason, to force you a cloud subscription, not for your money (which helps though) but your data.

Google writes bloatware for iOS to force me to buy a cloud subscription (?) from... Apple?

Gmail android size is also ~750MB.
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