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> it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app

It's the "people have powerful computers now so we can be as lazy as we want" culture. We have amazing computers but they feel less powerful than an 80s arcade machine.

Today my Windows 10 PC told me that the "Snipping Tool" had been deprecated and would I like to try the new W10 version? So I did. And when I took a screenshot, it said something like "please wait while we make your screenshot" for about 20 seconds! What could POSSIBLY take so long‽

> What could POSSIBLY take so long‽

This is something I find myself asking more and more almost every time I use a computer or mobile device. I have multiple cores here. Why is anything stuttering? Why are these processes taking so much memory up? Why is this web page pulling down 100MB of traffic? Why do I remember text console DOS apps being so much more responsive than today's click-then-wait UI apps? Before spinning hard drives dropped out of fashion, you could hear that thing grinding away, doing who knows what, while the computer was sitting there supposedly idle! What gives software developers the idea that they can just have their software just wake up and do things without the user commanding it?

Just a particularly egregious example: If there's one thing that nothing on the entire system should preempt, it's the mouse cursor. If I move the mouse, the cursor should move instantly. There is nothing more important that the computer should be doing. I thought this was like a basic, very well understood rule and a solved problem. Hell, I recall a long time ago things like mouse cursor drawing were driven off a hardware interrupt. On today's "modern" computers, if I have a lot of applications running in the background, the mouse cursor will stutter and lag, and text input will be buffered and show up N seconds after I type. Totally unacceptable, yet software continues to ship like this.

EDIT: Sorry, the rant kind of drifted off of the "nobody cares about bloat" problem and into the general "nobody cares about performance" problem.

Goes to show how we, the end users, don't matter much. There's just so many other profitable metrics to optimize for.

Boot FreeDOS from a USB stick on a modern computer, or even a 15-20 years old computer. Gives you some perspective on how fast the hardware really is, even when using only a single core.

Surely not image compression.

Sounds like your screenshots are being conveniently uploaded to MS servers so you could share them (Yay!).

Getting such enormous delays when performing otherwise simple operations usually means that network requests are being made, and servers aren't normally snappy when it comes to free storage.

Here is my example of enormous loading times: it takes a few minutes to clear browsing history on the android version of Chrome browser. Quite outrageous.

Would be fun to reverse that app and find out!

I’ve never seen that, perhaps it was preloading the actual tool that makes the screenshot (since they seem to like lazy-loading features nowadays). Is this different from the Windows key+shift+S tool?

Worse is Calculator. Why does that app that simple take a noticeable (small, but not instant) delay to open on a pretty decent machine?

(also why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of a simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating?)

> why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of a simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating

Some oxygen waster's salary and career is tied to these metrics.

I bet the calculatory functionality is small enough to load instantly.

I suspect that it's he heavyweight GUI library that takes a lot of time to initialize.

Filling rectangles is hard in windows 10. They shall use BGI, it's faster.

Analytics? Maybe under the guise of "search your screenshots later for people, apps, or words on the screen!"

FWIW, I've switched to Greenshot and I couldn't be happier. So many useful features. I donated to the developers due to the annotation features alone.

I use the new Snip&Sketch tool all the time on multiple computers and it never takes more than a fraction of a second. Maybe it was just slow the very first time you used it?

Doesn't fix Windows "Upgrades" ruining workflows, but Sharex[1] is a very useful utility that you might be interested in. System-wide hotkeys for screenshots, can do short encoded video, optional auto-uploading, etc.

[1] https://getsharex.com/

Windows seems to be super stupid about cloud syncing, especially when one drive. For some reason, it seems like sync is a blocking action that will freeze the UI.

I would expect to just write it to disk and sync whenever. Instead it seems to take seconds any time it hits “the cloud” and makes me wait. So I bet your screencap tried to transfer your file.

I see this when trying to open files from OneDrive even though I have it local. Word will take seconds to “browse” through online OneDrive directories even though I have them local. So it might take 10 seconds just to pick a folder to save a file.

And of course, afterwards my cpu will peg for minutes doing something.

On my barebones Windows 10, clicking the WiFi menu makes it hang for up to 5 seconds until the little popup appears where you can turn WiFi on/off or choose the network.

Windows 2000 on the Pentium 3 with 300 MHz felt way snappier.

The Linux desktop isn't perfect, but basic stuff like that works way better there on the same machine.

Windows 10 is in fact doing something when you click the Wi-Fi icon in the taskbar. That's the moment it chooses to actually poll for networks. This ties up your Wi-Fi card and dramatically increases ping for about two seconds, in short pulses.

The UI should instantly display the previously known APN list while loading the new one in the background. Microsoft has multiple teams researching asynchronous programming, but their work doesn’t seem to make it to the desktop.

probably telemetry of every running process, which ones have gui features, and which running process has a gui currently visible on your screen and sending all that data to MS.

obviously, that's just a guess.

It must ask the mighty Gates for permission (they care about your privacy) and must request database access in the new FBI server. And then maybe execute some crappy JS because they are not able to program in C anymore.

Why does bringing up the menu to eject a USB disk take so long? Maybe 5s on my PC.

It's been like that since Win7.

QA should be done on a cheapest phone available to buy at the telcos 2 years ago.

For Microsoft sure, but people who buy the cheapest phone aren’t the target customer for most products.

Like, you know, calling, navigation, discount codes or news.

Not latest iPhone = poor, right?

Depends.... Social networks, bank apps, chat apps, casual games, productivity apps, music/video players,... basically everything except new games still should work, even on shitty phones.

If it involves spending money and your business model isn’t to make pennies at massive scale, it makes no sense to optimize for those who actively reduce costs. I don’t remember the exact percentages, but there’s a quip that Apple has something like 90% of the profit with under 30% market share.

Apple had over 100 percent of the profit in the phone market for a quarter a few years ago. Every android handset maker lost money.

So, throw away literally billions of users worldwide? Outside of USA, apple has a very, very small market share, and cheap (weak) android phones are the norm.

For example, Facebook ("lite") and google ("go") already optimize their apps to those markets. Why not eg McDonalds?

Some businesses optimize for profit and not userbase or mindshare.

Not every business earns its revenue by casting the widest net possible. Focus on users who are known to have the discretionary funds to buy new iPhones and then you’ve also focused on users who aren’t as likely to penny-pinch when deciding whether to pay for your products.

Tons of Apple users are still on old phones like iPhone 8 or even 6S. Those are still counted in the 30% market share but they have slow phones.

I’ve seen some very rich people use some shockingly old hardware. It’s not about penny pinching, many don’t think about upgrading regularly largely because upgrading tends to be an annoying process.

Or rather the "developer time is cheaper than machine time" culture.

Oy. I meant "developer time is more expensive than machine time." It's been a long day.

This is more true than ever when the machine is my cellphone.

I'm really surprised sometimes at the size of what should seemingly be tiny apps. An app with a single screen that does literally one thing can clock in at anywhere from 20-70MB it's ridiculous. Yet at the same time there's apps that manage to do a lot, but don't gobble up the space.

Looking at something like the Infinity reddit client vs the official one. Infinity clocks in around 38MB the official client is around 100MB. They provide essentially the same functionality, the layout and UI is even very similar, yet one manages to be almost 2/3rds smaller in size.

Analytics libraries

You made me curious enough to look and I discovered that the default keyboard on my xiaomi phone "emoji keyboard" is 1.1GB.

So, thats worrying for a number of reasons.

Does the "emoji keyboard" support searching for animated stickers or something? My guess is that it's littering your phone with thousands of tiny clips.

I'm not sure but the main side effect of clearing the cache and the data was to throw up a contract with a big i agree button.

not clicking that.

I personally disable my stock keyboard immediately upon getting a new phone and use AnySoftKeyboard myself.

I always thought this was an Android problem, so I nuked every default Google app. For some reason, Google search/voice app I probably used 6 times a year had ~500mb space. 300 of that was just "data" for god knows what. Gmail was reaching a gig. Youtube also half a gig even though I never save anything and maps was just wild. All these apps are over 200mb solo dolo. Why? One would think the best paid devs in the world, in one of the wealthiest companies in the world would ship the best apps.

They don't. Not even close. It's actually sad.

The official Reddit client may contain tons of traffic measurements which eat up the memory.

When apps target users in developing countries, there is pressure to keep apps small. Those users tend to have phones with less storage and tend to sort by size when deleting apps to install something else.

Some users will build up a cycle of delete A and B to install C, then delete it to put back A and B. The smaller your app is, the more likely it is to stay installed because it's not as helpful to delete it.

The biggest obstacles are small storage phone users are well represented in non-Play store installs, which often means a fat apk that has binary libraries for all platforms and raster images for all dpis. The other big issue is translated strings; Android standard string translations can't be compressed (apk is a zip, but not everything in a zip is compressed), even though they would be very compressible. There's a lot of languages out there, and not using the standard translation tool is hard to sell (and you still need it for somethings anyway).

Doesn't help for US based banks though. Mostly their customers are going to have enough space that a bank app isn't going to get deleted to make space for whatever else.

When talking about raw local performance ("why my 4 cores today work similar or worse than 1 core yesterday?") I think part of the answer is: because yesterday we had comparatively less software, but it was written in closer to the metal languages (i.e. C/C++ and similar) while now there are x1000 more devs out there, most of them looking into writing their desktop applet with JavaScript / other languages similarly far from the metal, and wanting to know as little as possible about the hardware, thus relying on dozens of abstraction layers just to make their lives much easier (and their softwate much crappier).

Typical counterpoint is VSCode, wtitten in Electron. But you know, VSCode has had some serious engineering and optimisation effort ($$$) so not really a typical example at all.

VSCode is least crappy Electron application, but that doesn't mean its not crappy. It does less than half things that Intellij IDEs do at base install, and stillmanages to be slow and regularly lock up. And that is a comparison for feature rich use. If one compares VSCode the editor vs Kate/Emacs/Kdevelop there is no performance match.

I agree, but I have a counterpoint. Kate has been my editor of choice for all text editing things, I think since times of KDE 3 (so you see it's a long lasting preference by now).

However, I have always used JEdit to copy-paste huge text, like anything beyond 100k log lines from some software. JEdit seems to handle everything fine, while Kate has always hung up on me during some 10s of seconds (any kind of parsing or colorization are disabled in Kate, and the minimap is too... after that wait, everything works fine though).

Turns out, VSCode handles this kind of pasting nicely too, so I've replaces JEdit with it. Which drives me to think there is some low hanging fruit performance wise in Kate.

I've had similar waiting experience with Sublime for large text bodies. VSCode, IME (been couple years since I tried) absolutely choked and eventually had to terminate.

These days, I stick to Emacs and Vim (terminal) for large files. Perks of being in a Linux shop, I guess.

> It was impossible to use my phone with “only” 64GB without constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed at the time.

I too have 64GB. I just checked and my phone says apps take 11GB, and I have about 33GB free. At 250MB each (and many on my phone take less) that would be over 250 apps on a 64GB phone...

Do you actually use that many apps. Am I just a Luddite?

Apps were 35GB for me. My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of storage (OneDrive will eat up space).

10GB was OS, there rest was music, photos, videos.

> My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of storage

Ah, that'll change the equation. I just use Teams and Outlook apps for work on my phone (besides calls and texts).

I don't think you're a luddite, though people do use their phones for different things, some of which are just naturally going to take up more space over time. Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space, especially when you don't have them sync to the cloud. Some apps like reddit clients, comic readers, or music apps can take a lot of space up with cached images, music, and other files. Games also take up a ton of space.

> Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space

Right, but this was a discussion on app sizes. Photos and videos aren't due to the size of the apps, and can easily go on an SD card.

> cached images, music, and other files

Good point about caches. Should be some global policy for that IMHO. One thing is things like map apps downloading regions on demand for offline use, but just plain old caching...

> Games also take up a ton of space.

True, that's an issue even on my desktop computer with a 1TB SSD. Though I don't consider those regular apps. Still, point taken.

For me, iOS’s automatic offloading of apps seems to save me from having to do this, with the caveat that sometimes I try to access an app I haven’t touched in a while and have to wait to re-download in order to use.

I tried this, but the apps were big so it would churn. And the first time I arrived in a new country and didn’t have network and Apple had decided to offload Dropbox with my locally saved itinerary it really sucked.

I think that might with tons of apps that are rarely used. But it sucks if I have 10-20 apps that I frequently used.

> Do you actually use that many apps. Am I just a Luddite?

I bet you don’t have kids.

What does that mean? I have kids. My phone has around 2.5GB of apps.

I was referring to having 33 GB free. People with kids tend to always be running at the razor’s edge of their storage taking pics of their little one’s latest adventures.

In retrospect quoting that last piece, rather than the whole comment, made a lot more sense when I first wrote it than it does now.

> running at the razor’s edge of their storage taking pics

Well, I have SD cards for that... Regardless, the context was apps taking space. If I had used 80-90% of my storage for pics, then size of apps isn't the issue.

Yea, the capitalist "free market" that we have allows me to go buy the latest flagship phone with and root able bootloader that I can resign, replaceable batteries, expandable storage and dual Sim. Well you can in China but not the US.

This is why I think China has won. They are able to leverage free market dynamics without the ip/legal bloat here and then they just pull out the gun for national interest.

300MB? Wow, I thought my Capital One app was big at 128MB.

iPhone:

  BoA - 457MB
  AMEX - 130MB
  USAA - 109 MB

I only have BoA because I haven't canceled my CC with them yet (kept because AMEX is not accepted everywhere). It seems I deleted my other bank apps (after I'd closed the accounts, makes sense, right?) but IIRC they were somewhere in the 150MB-200MB range. Some people just really like bloat I guess.

USAA offers a CC.

They do, and I signed up for it. I literally just haven't bothered canceling the BoA CC yet. It's not been used since I got the USAA card (which is only used when the AMEX isn't accepted).

The app my credit union uses for online banking and card control functions is only 81MB.

My CU's is only 16mb.

I'm curious why people trust apps published by banks/credit unions instead of using the substantially similar web pages with a trusted browser and password manager. I've seen a mix of anything from awful to OK from mobile banking apps.

My only use case for apps is mobile check deposits, presumably because asking for camera control on mobile devices was beyond the ability of their web developers.

It used to be that everyone wrote all of their own code and applications were tiny. Now it’s easy to pull in dozens of libraries and their hundreds or thousands of transitive dependencies. The resulting app bloat becomes a ticket on the pile, to be solved some day going on never.

Parent comment is evergreen. It could have been written in 1996.

I feel the same way. But as we curmudgeons stand athwart history, the whole of software development is moving toward the largest sizes the technology will allow.

the office apps are each 500MB and different apps are needed: Excel, Word, Office, OneDrive, PowerPoint. Why is Edge 200MB?

It’s common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase as my credit card and their app is 300MB.

For what it’s worth, 200 to 300MB per app seems entirely reasonable to me. I’m not sure why it would be smaller or different.

I was expecting you to point out a 5GB app. That’d be overboard. But 200MB? Sure, why not?

Not to say you’re wrong. It’s likely me, not you. It just… seems fine.

Until recently I was using a Oneplus X with 16GB storage just fine. I was never tempted to download apps except the ones I completely needed (because I really didn't have room for it.)

Now, with a Pixel 4a the System/OS singlehandedly uses 18GB of storage. Today, I do not see myself ever filling up another 100GB of apps but who knows what app sizes will look like in 5 more years.

My pixel fill up to 30gb system storage. I free up 15gb of system storage by clearing app caches.

Doesn't it depends on what you're doing?

I can't remember with Galaxy S2 16GB, Galaxy S3 32GB, Galaxy S4 64GB, Lumia 1520 64GB? iPhone 7 Plus 128GB, OnePlus6 256GB

Deleting apps or anything else to get more free space on my phone's.

I don't have a main browser, I always used Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Samsung browser or Internet.

All the Facebook apps with Instagram. Always trying to get the biggest app and load my maps from Google drive for Offline navigation too.

Double or triple photos

And still didn't run out of storage.

why cant we set a system wide cache limit on apps? i don't need to keep 5 billion page cache on browser or reddit or youtube or whatever. for people who have fast internet, or even those who don't, cache does not work because these apps "assume" you are always connected so they break the flow if it detects no internet so cache is worthless then. other than that, i have been requesting app devs on github, foss apps at that to have a cache limit inside so if i set to 100mb or even 0, that works

On Android, Microsoft has an app called "Office" that combines Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other feature. It's just 133MB.

> it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app and it’s not reasonable that the Gmail app requires 300MB or PayPal needs 250.

s/devs/product managers

Product managers want a faster, smaller install. It means less cancelled/failed installs. It's a metric they'd love to optimize for.

Why are you bashing PM's?

At the end of the day, if delivering a new feature on time adds another 5 MB, it is what it is. Pretty useless to try to assign blame to either devs or PM's, or portray them as somehow opposing teams. They both want success for the business.

I'm not "bashing" anyone, and I wouldn't say the person who I replied to was "bashing" developers, either.

I agree that both developers and product managers want success for the business.

I probably should have said product owner here rather than product manager. I only meant to call attention to the fact that it's often others in an organization beyond the developers making decisions around whether to optimize for this sort of thing.

On average, more technically-minded folks are more likely to want to optimize for technical things like app install size where the business impact can be a bit more abstract and difficult to measure, particularly when compared to folks like product managers who are likely to have their individual performance evaluated by even less technical stakeholders on their ability to quantify the impact of whatever ends up getting shipped.

Again, I'm generalizing here - of course there are highly thoughtful and competent folks capable of balancing competing priorities across domains in any type of role.

It still boggles my mind to this day that in the early 2010's, I was debating getting a 8gb or 16gb iPod Touch. Now I can't even imagine anything less than 128gb if I'm including videos and pictures on my phone. That's even with only essential or primarily used apps. If I had everything I'd want on it, 128gb still feels like not enough. Not to mention Android taking up an absurd amount of space.