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Comment by jamieomatthews | Hacker News Reader

I work on Amazon Prime Photos iOS app. It's currently 60mb in size, and a good chunk of that is the Swift runtime.

Even the main Amazon shopping app is less than 100mb.

I'll bite. In what ways can you use up 100MByte with a fancy reimplementation of an online shop? That should be enough for a text to speech engine, or a 3d engine with quite a few assets.

I am being deliberately ignorant, having no idea what functionality one might add, but I'm actually genuinely curious. All that I see is a small databse and a lot of assets that are being downloaded on the fly.

I believe it does have a text to speech engine......the Android app has one.

I don't know the division of work between the app and server but don't forget that the app includes some level of voice recognition, and has not just a bar-code scanner but enough of a computer vision system that I can pretty reliably look up products simply by taking a picture of them.

>Even the main Amazon shopping app is less than 100mb.

109 on my device, not sure why it needs over 100 for a menu/search and checkout function that relies entirely on external data.

Also another commenter said Alexa was 78 when it's 124 for me and does even less than the shopping app.

Those apps are standouts but generally Amazon iOS apps are appalling. Alexa is 78MB of pure UX hell.

Wait. Do you have to include the runtime with the app? That seems backwards.

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