Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#41

Post by suprfsat » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

hadlock wrote: post #27

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also a conferencing app. That might explain some of the size.

I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.

Meet was discontinued; its functionality was merged into Duo and the resulting app renamed to Meet.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#42

Post by Etheryte » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

For me, the most important takeaway from the article was that the Passwords app supports 2FA codes! I was not aware of this, that's nice and getting rid of Authenticator is one less Google thing to worry about.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#43

Post by loloquwowndueo » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

Kwpolska wrote: post #35

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…

The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.

Probably bundles its own copy of Chrome just in case :)

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#44

Post by simonw » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

jshchnz wrote: post #10

simonw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?

Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617

Thanks, that thread is great!

They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail

130MB is localization data.

This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706

> There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#45

Post by paxys » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

I genuinely struggle to understand how apps can get that large. Games with hi-res graphics, sure. But Gmail barely has any assets. And they aren't shipping with custom runtimes or anything of that sort (like an Electron app) because Apple doesn't allow it. So how much code can you possibly write that compiles to 700 MB?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#46

Post by wiseowise » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

einpoklum wrote: post #38

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

AOT = Ahead Of Time? Attack On Titan? Something else?

Mobile applications need to be AOT (Ahead of Time) compiled for the target device to have optimal performance.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#47

Post by paxys » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

Etheryte wrote: post #42

For me, the most important takeaway from the article was that the Passwords app supports 2FA codes! I was not aware of this, that's nice and getting rid of Authenticator is one less Google thing to worry about.

Having both your password and 2nd factor in the same place isn't the best idea however.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#48

Post by culebron21 » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyond 1,3 gig now. And it's FOSS, not commercial bloatware you might think. I have no idea what they stuff it with.

Just yesterday, I wanted to generate a GeoTiff on a macbook. To do it in a simple way, you need libGDAL, a geo-spatial abstraction library that exists since maybe the '90 and supports all thinkable formats. Under Linux, you just install it together with QGIS as a dependency. Mac is still unix, so you may think, a 3-decades old library, with few patches to support modern formats, should be just a couple of megs, right? Brew suggested downloading ~2 GB of ~100 packages!!!! Half of them were aws-* (yes, AWS tools), and 1 GB of LLVM!!! (is it their whole GIT repo with 10M SLOC?)

For geotiff, I ended just using standard Tiff library, inserting my 4 geospatial tags with a few lines of code.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#49

Post by HendrikHensen » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

Well, something fishy is going on because there is literally no way that Safari, in its entirety, is 5.1 MB. The numbers for the others app seem similarly off.

It would be really hard to believe that somehow Apple has found some magic formula to make their apps 100x smaller than Google and Microsoft.

Much more likely is that the reporting by the OS is off somehow (probably most of the app functionality is tied up in shared resources counted towards system files, and not counted towards the app's size).

With respect, I would expect more from articles posted on Hacker News. More thorough research, and in fact an answer to the question.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#50

Post by lxgr » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #11

HPsquared wrote: post #2

The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"

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.