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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?

#91

Post by CGMthrowaway »

taeric wrote: post #58
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 so…

Starting with machine code expands lines of code 2-10x.

It's also taking helper functions and pre-evaluating them putting results inline, and unrolls loops (could be 5-50x increase where they exist?)

And it precalculates lookup tables (takes up space) for virtual methods.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#92

Post by Fiveplus »

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 and spaces, plus the heavy protocol buffer definitions and gRPC libraries that underpin them.

Even if you don't use the "meet" tab, the binary could be including the video codecs, the real-time transmission logic plus the AR filter assets, because the app is compiled as a "Super App" container rather than a modular mail client. I feel it's an organizational artifact as much as a technical one.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#93

Post by paxys »

csoups14 wrote: post #89

The easy answer: Google simply does not care. Some mix of: they don't measure it, they don't look at it, they don't goal around reducing it, nobody's performance review is going to be better because they reduced it, no director is asking product teams why they're increasing the app size. It's not surprising why these companies don't care, because it's a tragedy of the commons. The better question is why is Apple allo…

> why is Apple allowing these companies to ship apps that unnecessarily take up a meaningful amount of storage space

The answer to this one is obvious - to incentivize you to buy iPhones with more storage and/or higher tier iCloud plans.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#94

Post by kccqzy »

tarentel wrote: post #87
kccqzy wrote: post #65

The table at the end is seriously misguided. You can’t compare the sizes of an iOS preinstalled app against a non-preinstalled app. It’s just a thin UI shell where the code for all the functionality is inside system frameworks. The Photos app is quoted at 4.2MB. Guess what, if you delete that, you still have system components to render photos, UI for a photo picker, perform analysis on photos such as face recognition…

You can though because a lot of those things you're talking about are available for any app. Sure Apple does have some private frameworks and what not that aren't available to everyone but I imagine if you wanted to recreate what the photo app is doing you'd be able to in 4.2mb or less.

The iCloud Photo Library doesn’t have any public APIs that I know of. You simply can’t recreate the Photos app completely, regardless of app sizes. Apple values deep integration into the system more than it values giving third party developers a fair chance at cloning their app.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#95

Post by CGMthrowaway »

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahead-of-time_compilation

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#96

Post by tonyplee »

simonw wrote: post #44
jshchnz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Wonder if it is better to create separate localized app download such as gmail-japanese, etc.

Re: Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

#97

Post by crazygringo »

simonw wrote: post #44
jshchnz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

130 MB for localization? At 50 languages that would be 2.6 MB/language. If we assume an average 50 bytes per string and another 50 for an identifier, that's 27,000 strings.

That doesn't seem right. Localization feels like it should add a few MB. Not over 100. (Plus shouldn't it be compressed, and locally uncompressed the first time a language gets used?)

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