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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#51

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

When I doing mobile app development a decade ago, I found that many interviewers and clients were evaluating my experience more like an artist's portfolio, alongside a couple of arbitrary metrics to determine app scope

One of those arbitrary metrics was bundle size, how many megabytes on the app store was the app. The bigger the better and more serious it was.

At the time I was knee deep in optimizations, using SVGs, doing compression, even bitshifting, to make apps smaller for the companies I worked for. Reducing how many people would be bounced from downloading or installing the app.

And yet, that impressive 12MB app from a venture backed company with hundreds of thousands of users was getting me penalized for taking up so little space

I literally started putting dummy files in the app bundles and it worked for my professional goals. All kinds of premium marketing has similar fictions in them to convey value

so I can emphasize how its the difference between $50/hr upwork gigs inconsistently, and $500,000/yr at Google

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#53

Post by londons_explore »

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…

For a while there were app size limits for downloading over mobile data. That meant that if your app was too big you'd have terrible growth metrics.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#54

Post by tarentel »

jmclnx wrote: post #9

The question why is almost all modern apps pushing around 1G. It is dependencies, if you ever compiled almost any GUI application via prots/pkgsrc on a BSD, you will be shocked by the dependencies that application needs, it is obscene.

It is dependencies but not from the GUI. As someone who has worked on several very large apps I can tell you 99% of the bloat is garbage. Someone somewhere wants this SDK from their friend's company in the app. Some manager wants to track X using this very specific framework. Some designer decided to add in animations in one screen that requires another framework to run and also 10mb in assets. etc, etc, etc. If your app is 10+ years old this all adds up and no one ever cleans any of it up. There's probably like 100mb of crap you can delete that doesn't even work anymore but who has time to remove that?

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#55

Post by tshaddox »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #18
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.

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

That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#56

Post by jacobp100 »

HendrikHensen wrote: post #49

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 probably is that size because WebKit is a system framework, so it’s just the size of the UI code

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#57

Post by miki123211 »

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…

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).

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#58

Post by taeric »

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

I find "ensuring app loads fast" to be absolutely hilarious, here. What has to be done to help a mail app load fast?

And, snarkily, can they do this for the web page? On my decent connection right now, loading a new tab to gmail takes about 3 seconds to visibly load. Another few seconds to get so that I can interact with it. Is kind of hilarious to see how long it takes to load the compose window if I press "c" as soon as I see any of the app has loaded.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#59

Post by dieggsy »

NuclearPM wrote: post #16
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.

Deserves.

It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs.

This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#60

Post by adastra22 »

tshaddox wrote: post #55
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.

The background images alone would be more than that.
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