We bought a successful app, loaded it with extras and watched it fail
vox.com
vox.com
Looking at their breakdown of the Olympic app, I can see using some of that space for media since you don't want to pull all the images over-the-air every time, but 16 MB just for fonts? How do fonts take up more space than the embedded video?
The only apps I've downloaded that broke 30 MB or so have all been games that use local textures and geometry (and likely came from Unity). If I see an app which isn't a game taking over maybe 30 MB, it's an instant cancellation for me. I think mobile developers can afford to spend a little more effort on optimization instead of pretending it's another platform with limitless resources.
<strawman alert> If there is a moral principle that client software developers should respect the scarcity of their users' computing resources, then that's news to me. My experience as a user is that developers have always treated my hardware's memory, storage, bandwidth, and compute cycles as externalities that are free for the taking.
Why do you say that it's out of touch?
I mean, it's not that unethical; that's a big word to be throwing around. It's just kind of a dick move.
You're pretty much describing the foundation of science: breakig stuff that's working just to see what happens.
That said, I don't think I'd call this particular experiment unethical, because it was a free mortgage calculator app and I can't imagine people depending that much on it. Calling it a dick move seems more apt. Then again, who knows...
Why does a site like reddit want to push their app so badly? What can be done with an app that can't be done on a webpage now and what is so important to something that just delivers text?
Companies push their own apps for control. They are very limited on the types of metrics and tracking that can be done through the browser. By pushing their own apps they become limited only by the operating system itself.