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Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

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Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#71

Post by scblock »

culebron21 wrote: post #48

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 beyo…

I am not sure QGIS is a good comparison to this. The projection information dataset is nearly 800 MB on its own. But it's not really PROJ's fault that there are so many projections to manage.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#72

Post by lostmsu »

paxys wrote: post #45

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?

Could be similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 (code duplication for locality for a tiny perf gain).

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#73

Post by HPsquared »

dieggsy wrote: post #59
NuclearPM wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conv…

I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#74

Post by SaltyBackendGuy »

suprfsat wrote: post #41
hadlock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#75

Post by dylan604 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #67
HPsquared wrote: post #2

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

There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just ma…

Doesn't the Mimo app work for many devices not just your mic? While your mic might not need a lot of the code, someone using one of their other devices might not need your mic's code either. I can totally see why DJI would want a single app to control any of the DJI branded devices rather than dealing with multiple app store approvals. It would also be confusing for the end user as in "Which device am I using so which app do I need to use" would be a nightmare for all involved.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#76

Post by tarentel »

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…

Part of it is resolution. The icons and such in apps are much larger now than they were in 2013. Besides that I mentioned this in another thread but rarely will a team clean up after itself. There's probably tons of dead code and what not in a lot of these larger apps. I know all the ones I've worked in had a lot of bloat just from years of work. Some feature gets added 5 years ago by a team that no longer exists, it was turned off and no longer used but who is going to remove it?

Besides that, there's just a lot of garbage that gets added by various people with different interests. 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.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#78

Post by wrs »

Not only is the YouTube iOS app huge, it uses an atrocious amount of additional storage. It was using over 2GB on my iPad for...something...and the only way to clean that up was to delete the app and reinstall.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#79

Post by Etheryte »

paxys wrote: post #47
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.

They're both on my phone anyway, so I don't really see the difference? Whether it's in one app or spilt across two apps makes no difference if there's no extra layers between. Having it all in Passwords is better in that regard, since it requires you to use Face ID to open the app.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#80

Post by MYEUHD »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #43
Kwpolska wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

No need to.

Android does that already and allows apps to use it (the webview)

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