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Comment by aswinmohanme | Hacker News Reader

I love everything about flutter except the size, and I would have stayed on flutter if it wasn't for the competition's app weighing around 1.6 MB.

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Does the size of an app affects something besides the initial download?

Maybe it also lengthens the app loading but everybody here doesn't talk about it because it's well known of android developers, which I'm not?

Yes, bigger apps take up more space in storage.

I feel like most phones nowadays don't really care about a 5mb difference considering they have multiple GB's of space. At least on my phone, the space taken by the actual app binaries is negligible compared to media.

Most people have no concept of how much space things take. When their phone fills up because of too many videos of toddlers bumbling around they assume it's the apps.

One app being 5MB larger is negligible. 50 apps being 5MB larger isn't a huge problem but it is significant. Modern phones have gigabytes of storage but not many gigabytes.

I also didn't see that the difference is just 5MB. Most apps are in the double or even triple digits.

In addition, caring about anything being 3 times larger than necessary stikes me as the right mindset. Individual items may insignificant but they add up. It's certainly better than the electron-ic opposite.

When people fill up their phone, they look at apps, sort by size, and bigger is more likely to get removed.

For users who haven't enabled automatic updates, they're going to delay updates more often for bigger apps too.

There may be runtime impacts too, but that's outside my area of knowledge. I would guess there are better things to look at to improve responsiveness of an app than simply executable size, but it probably doesn't hurt.

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