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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

It's one of the shittiest apps anyway. 111MB size? I mean honestly. What exactly does THAT mobile app need 111 Megabytes for?

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For the millions of classes it needs due to the developers adding classes for every feature rather than adding it to pre-existing classes: http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th...

In other words, it's typical "enterprise Java" style. I worked with code like that for a short time, and it's not just wasteful of machine resources; debugging and maintaining such code is a horrible experience.

Looking at my phone, a few make me wonder how we got here today.

Skype 149MB, Chrome 134MB, Sheets 122MB, Slides 115MB, Docs 101MB, Outlook 101MB, HSBC 73.97MB, Uber 60.98, Fitbit 79.77 ...

Skpye, HSBC, Uber & Fitbit all seem way larger than they should be

I've never knowingly used the Slides app.

I'd hazard a guess that part of the reason is about storing multiple copies of textures at different resolutions. At least, I think it works that way on the Apple store.

That is no longer the case since iOS 9 I think. Unless they didn't update / use the new App Thinning function.

But even if they get 30% reduction promised by App Thinning, they are still HUGE!.

This also applies on Android, supporting most modern devices requires 4 different sets of assets, which have all got larger as screen density has increased.

I had a look at app sizes on my phone and noticed a "cluster" around 60MB. I wonder if there's some common, huge, framework?

I've noticed this too, curious now - I'll ask some of my mobile developer contacts.

Maybe crosswalk[1], it takes about 50mb.

[1] https://crosswalk-project.org/

Binary serialization definition classes can take a large amount of binary size. Create 100 model types for protobuf with a lot of variables and you can have 3.5MB of C++ binary!

Since All Browser on IOS uses the same rendering and JS engine, I fail to comprehend why it is larger then even an Desktop App which includes its own engines.

HSBC is nothing more then a web view. 80MB? Seriously?

There is something seriously wrong with the iOS App Ecosystem bloat.

The above is Android - I should have said that - but I think the same applies to both ecosystems.

Usually, executable code is tiny. The bloat comes from data resources. 1 MB of code at 32-bit average instruction length ~~ 2.5M instructions. I'd guess FB's actual code size is somewhere around there (excluding third party libs, etc)

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