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 bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.
More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like
Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes
According to my phone it's 25MB.
There's no assets, not even an app icon.
I have no idea what would be taking up more than a few hundred kb, let alone 25MB.
A "hello world" Android starts at ~5MB.
It is possible to make it smaller if choosing some non-default different tools.
This is Android, but: 13+ years ago I had an HTC Desire. I was really struggling with internal storage space, regularly uninstalling and replacing apps just to be able to update others. Eventually I moved to custom ROMs just because they allowed some apps to be moved to the SD card.
I remember the biggest problem was WhatsApp, which was somehow over 7MB while the average was closer to 1MB.
On my current phone WhatsApp is 231MB. It's still pretty high up in the rankings, but doesn't stand out, and barely any apps are below that then-huge 7MB.
Other than that, some popular and useful libraries will bundle native libs (for example for sql), and some ad/analytics/corporate SDKs will use native libs to share code between platforms and for obfuscation. These corporate SDKs (like Zendesk) will also notoriously break Android minification tools, because why bother
It's sad the laziness that happens when there's no pushback. The devs gain barely anything from leaving things this bloated, but barely anything isn't zero so now a million people have to deal with big files and wasted RAM.
I know the thousand legitimate reasons why modern apps are larger. It's not all bloat and inefficiency, either, except in the harshest sense that old apps tended to use byte-optimized data structures like linked lists instead of faster, but less space-efficient structures like hash maps. They have to deal with higher resolutions, although the command to draw an empty white 320x200 square on the screen should be approximately the same size as to draw a 2000x1500 one. And yet, wow, it doesn't seem like it should need to be that much bigger.
I don't know why iOS apps in general are so much larger than Android apps (that doesn't just seem to be a Google problem) but you certainly don't need the full size of the Gmail app.
With dynamically linked frameworks you bear the cost of the entire framework (and its dependencies) even if you just use a few functions.
iOS apps also need to include all localized assets in each app bundle.
Of course, there were multi-hundred-MB software packages in that era, but they were complex, multifunctional, and highly capable. And IIRC all of Microsoft Office (RIP!) except for some rarely used extras still managed to fit in one CD for a long time.
Also, afaik, it is possible to ship an iOS app in a way certain modules can be downloaded as needed.
It would be nice if Google paid some respect to user devices, or at least go back to “don’t be evil”
The publicly available email app in the Android sources is NOT gmail (and is therefore likely to be unloved and uncared for, and probaly will contain massive blobs of bitmap icons. So if it was that...
Any native code ALSO bloats compiled binary size dramatically (since binaries include code compiled for each processor you have selected when you performed the native build). Unnecessary binary blobs are stripped by the Play Store when you download. It is conceivable that gmail carries ancient crusty pieces of native code, I suppose, given its long heritage.
And also includes pre-compile maps to speed up startup. Very strange process. Apparently, the Google Play Store profiles the startup of the first 20-odd users who download your app, and then transmit the pre-compile map to all subsequent downloads. I'm not sure whether apps are pre-jitted at install time or whether the pre-jitted code is downloaded from the Play Store.(Play Store does tells you they are going to do it when you upload, and -- sure enough -- load time "magically" improves by a significant amount shortly after you push the binary to production. I don't honestly know whether pre-jitting has taken place before first load. (And whether that code shows up as cache space or app size).
Compat frameworks, on the other hand.... absolutely yes! I'm not sure that native Android framework code EVER gets executed on a modern app, to be honest. Almost all compat layers, and extensions, I think.
Likewise on Android, on the NDK, and R8/D8 take care of removing all the extra stuff as well.
Sandboxed applications don't make sense to have dynamic linking beyond what is required by some OS workflows, e.g. loading native code into ART.
Is this a hard requirement? I use two languages or at best three. The other 100 language don't matter to me. Why do I have to waste space on my smartphone. This adds up if I have hundreds of apps.
Google Meet was launched in March 2017.
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
I keep seeing tools that should be a for loop inside a script that instead are a sprawling project with all sorts of different files and class hierarchies and abstractions...
(And no, vector icons are not equally useful in this whole range of resolutions; you need to lower the level of detail for small resolutions to avoid pixel sludge, and increase the level of detail for high resolutions to avoid the barren look. Still, say, 3 versions in SVG format could be sufficient.)
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.
What are the other 310?
We crossed lunacy long ago.
I agree, that we crossed lunacy long ago, and that LLMs have not helped in the slightest.
This is one of the reasons why these apps grow: because the user doesn't notice!
In fact, they state the oppposite: To really make it go, they need petawatts of energy and compute. It's like Windows incarnate.
I wrote native Windows desktop application 10 years ago that still brings me some money. It has boatload of functionality and the size is 12MB. Competitors have similar app written in .NET. The install is about 1GB.
Phones used to have 4GB of flash memory... Some had 2GB.
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.
(And yes I know it’s a tiny fraction of the size, let me have my fun).
This is more like the what causes these apps to be so large, but when you ask why then you see that they simply do not care about the amount of space they take on users’ devices. There’s no obvious effort to reduce app size with modular design, it simply feels like they don’t care.
As the parent commenter has pointed out, pulling in client code can be very large. If the backend team owns the client code, they may not be properly incentivized to improve the product of the clients, sadly. And calling it the backend "team" might be overly simplistic. There may be additional layers to the the client code owned by other teams, such as different protocol implementation and definitions of those protocols, etc. Pushing for change can be viewed negatively, since it could leave a poor impression. E.g. if you improve someone else's code, that could make them look bad, and that would have negative consequences for you as you have violated (a variation of) Greene's first law of power: never outshine the master.
Since the code and the organization are so convoluted and complicated, it's a lose-lose proposition. If you mess up your optimization, you will get blamed. Even if you succeed, you may have reduced someone's reputation of someone you can't even identify in the bureaucracy, and thus have made an enemy of someone you can't even identify.
Right, I wouldn't be surprised of the app includes its own cryptography instead of relying on platform libraries, and/or contains what amounts to a userspace network stack in the form of QUIC (Cronet).
- libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously)
- flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.)
- libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think)
There is a 640 KByte json file in the assets that stores an animation in base64 format. Now you know what the CPU and storage resources of your devices are used for nowadays...
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.
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 speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason.
You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.
Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).
It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest.
Ps pardon my french but I'm really annoyed about this and in this case it's warranted in my opinion. 800MB is ridiculous.
lol remember the Karma?
Gmail has no such excuse.
The past year or so I've stopped buying stuff with an app before checking out how big the app is (if I plan to use it).
If enough people actually did that, the companies would start caring.
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.
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.
I mean, it's certainly not anything to boast about from a technical perspective. I just don't know whether it's really enough to warrant any shame for the product though.
Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?
WHAT THE FUCK!
There are 4k videos there...
Just unbelievable.
Gboard 247MB
Google 415MB
Google Play Services 1330MB
Google Play Store 165MB
Messages 321MB
Gmail 233MB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
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.
One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-real...
AFAIK iOS does not offer anything similar.
Frameworks 150MB
Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB
Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB
AI models 25MB
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.
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.
Yet there is a positive correlation between size and startup time…
Another reason, is rusty code (not Rust. It's a play on the saying "Code doesn't rust", which I used to hear, last century).
It does, indeed, rust. Actually, "rots" is probably more apropos.
I'll bet that's the reason that Xcode is such a pig (makes GMail look like an anorexic).
Code is created that people no longer understand, so they are loath to make large changes. They just do enough to fix a bug, and pray that they don't need to dig any deeper. One of my first software jobs, was exactly like that.
When that happens, the code never shrinks. It just accretes.
The answer to this one is obvious - to incentivize you to buy iPhones with more storage and/or higher tier iCloud plans.
Could the main issue be Google is shipping apps within apps?
For Android, you can check [1] Download the apk, rename it as a zip and look inside to see the files.
A quick file analysis of the 67MB shows around 58MB of java code and some 32MB of ARM libs, 31MB of this is the libvideochat.
[1] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11...
Until Apple penalizes app developers for app size, nothing will happen. Most consumers are not aware of the impact , until they go to clean up their phone.
There isn’t much usable free space on the device after the OS, and now having 50+gb of used space from apps, means your own content (photos, music, videos) doesn’t fit.
There isn’t much incentive regardless, since Apple merchandise’s iCloud storage. Bloated apps actually drive iCloud sales. A lose-lose for the consumer.
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.
I imagine the Gmail app also suffers from having zillions of engineers touch it without being incentivized to make it better or smaller, only to add features and impact for the all-important performance review.
Add zillions of instrumentation and third-party frameworks, each with piles of dependencies, and apps will grow without bounds like molecules of gas to fill the container.
As a regular user, you are probably using 10% of all features available.
Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have to do this. They can integrate at lower levels and even with all else being equal can develop updates with perfect insight on the ecosystem and foresight on things to come.
Somewhat supporting this possible explanation is that, similar to Apple on iOS, Google's apps on android are significantly smaller.
On the middle side of that range, extra features adds up fast.
1. You don’t even have to use the Gmail app to use Gmail. Pick whatever flavor of client you want, they all support Gmail. Apple Mail, Outlook, or something else entirely.
2. If you buy the shittiest available new iPhone it has 128GB of storage. Used iPhone 15 on Swappa with 512GB is <$500. How many of you need hundreds of apps installed on your phone?
3. Nobody’s forcing you to use Gmail. Email is an open federated standard. Use something else.
Ram is what, 3-4x?
It's a great time to ship more bloated apps, the suckers will enrich the hardware manufacturers, won't they?
As others have pointed out, the main executable is huge (~300MB) and there are a lot of localization files, but not too much traditional asset duplication.
You can click into different slices of the app and see what it's made of if interested: https://dotipa.app/?app=Gmail#examples
That one's on the author. Duo Mobile is 2MB and shows the same 6-digit codes just fine.
There's a comment in the article with two helpful links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail
The bloat? Mostly "localization".
Also, one thing that annoyed me when I used iPhones is that you can't remove an app's cache without reinstalling it and losing all your data. And most modern applications think cache is free so they use a lot of it. Many times it will exceed even your installed apps or data size.
There it tends to be mostly due to dependencies, including some native libraries in multiple copies for 2-3 CPU architecture.
Sure, Electron does not come natively for iOS. But with tools like Capacitor, you can take a web app (even an Electron one) and package it for iOS/Android, adding native features and running in a native WebView, allowing it to be an “Electron for Mobile”.
For example here’s the Facebook app for iOS:
543.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2w ago)
542.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3w ago)
541.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
541.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
540.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
539.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
539.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
538.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago)
538.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
537.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
536.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
535.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
534.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
534.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago)
533.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
532.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
531.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
530.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago)
529.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
529.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
528.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
527.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
526.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
525.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago)
524.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (5mo ago)Meanwhile, well-written browsers - which are essentially whole operating systems - are in the dozens, so this is 100% bloat.
There simply is little incentive to optimize apps for size, because someone else pays the price and there is little consequence for making it big. Slapping another data collection or ad SDK into the app is easy and free.
If the EU was serious about it, it would consider it part of the ecodesign rules since it forces people to buy new phones for more storage much earlier than needed.
If the app stores were serious about it, they'd either re-introduce the hard cap and stick to it, or at least show the size prominently. Or start charging fees for bloaty apps. At least on the mobile version of the Play store, I don't think you can even see the app size without starting an install - let alone search or filter by it. It's as if they want to encourage bloat.
The economic pressure to keep apps small is literally negative.
The conversation is always the same, only there is another zero on the end.
We'll have terabyte apps in not too long.
(100% serious)
Same goes for other other bloated apps mentioned in the blog post
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.
I know they don't want stuff breaking because users have a GCC version that's 6 months behind and the homebrew folks can't be sure that package XYZ doesn't use any newer features. But when installing anything built with C++ I really don't expect to wait half a day for the whole LLVM+CMake toolchain to compile from scratch.
You can pin LLVM but it's useless as there's no bypass to the version check. They've also closed all relevant issues as "won't fix" as it's not "their way of doing things".
* 562mb of Python 3.11 and libraries (of which 240mb goes to the qgis python library, 101mb goes to duckdb, and 50mb to PyQt5) * 130mb to i18n * 140mb to `libclntsh.dylib` which I think is the Oracle DB client library? * 80mb to libduckdb.dylib, separate from the Python version * 80mb to libQtWebKit
(700 MB more is also an acceptable increase for this feature)
On second thought, I love looking at on-duty page emails in the middle of the night with 7 million lumens blasting my retinas.
One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety".
More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.