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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

akr.am

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#401
post #275

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.

Historically, raster graphics won out because they used less resources. Perhaps that's changed. If so, it would make sense for various OS's to start working on native support. Irix did it in the 90's. It can be done now.

Yeah but I would argue that they just used cheaper ressources since historically has been cheaper than compute.

It's not clear if compute can be cheaper than storage still today.

On one hand you can afford to use less storage but you have to use GPU power everytime to draw graphics, if the chip can support the compute requirement you can save on storage, but you pay with higher power draw at every interraction.

On the other hand you can just put more storage, chip assest that are rendered for the device they'll be used on and be ok.

Outside of crisis like now, storage should be cheaper in the long term I think. I doubt there is that much benefit in having assets being able to resize to any arbitrary resolution. The definition used in phones isn't that far away than what is used in laptops, monitors and now even TVs.

Something to think about is that icons/assets often need to change shape slightly as they become smaller or bigger for optical reasons. So even if you manage a fully vector scaled UI, you might still need to have difference depending on DPI to reading distance ratio. Rasterized assests might still be the real answer for a very long time.

Considering how bad is the iOS 26 release on performance, because of its dynamically computed interface, I'm not sure it's worth pursuing vector UIs, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a more powerfull chip just to draw prettier or more "pure" interfaces...

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#402

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…

It's pretty much the results of inter-platform competition. None of the actors want to use what the others are making for various reasons which I think are valid. For example, history has showned that being completly dependant on Apple tooling/frameworks/APIs isn't really a good idea because they are not a trustworthy player. The same thing could be said about the reverse I guess and about most companies in general.

Software really has a big dependency problem because the sellers always bundle it with a service or a hardware in order to make money. I doubt it can be solved, since one has to make money somehow.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#403
post #90

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…

Safari is just a wrapper around the system webview framework so it does make sense, although it makes the comparison very misleading.

Safari is not a WebKit wrapper. Out of the box, WebKit can only display web views inside rectangles, and nothing else. A web browser is a lot more than its rendering engine.
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