Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by romwell | Hacker News Reader

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What I wish for a is a simple thing:

- Apps declaring how much space they need

- The OS enforcing that size as the quota.

That's it. There's no need for the OS to figure out how much space to give to apps.

This way, if I install an app that is purportedly a 2GB app, I'll know exactly how much space I'll lose.

If an app needs more space after an update, that update would require a manual approval from the user.

Something tells me that if app developers were required to be honest about their disk usage, and knew that he users would have to agree to a "This app wants 5GB more space after an update, are you OK with that?" prompt, we would not be where we are today.

On top of everything else, I wish Android versions were held to the same standard, and that phones were advertised with the amount of free space available to the user.

I feel like app developers would try to do things right the first time, and after fighting the issue of users not accepting an extra 500 MB after an update, for the future they would learn to just request a good measure of their expected size x10, just to avoid that issue.

Good luck with that later strategy - they would limit their user base to people with enough space for that.

Imagine getting a notification that you don't have enough space to install Uber, but Lyft works fine.

Or realizing that you don't have space for apps after installing WhatsApp, but not Telegram.

Would be fun to see how the pressure on the devs works in this case.

As a user I don’t care and don’t want more nag popups. I use my phone heavily and after a year I’m at about 40gb of 128 used and the majority of that is cached pictures and songs I can easily clear out. Rather than being nagged constantly I’d rather just check the storage page and remove apps that are too large.

What would you use that information for? Would you refuse to use an online service, smart device or video game based on how much storage space the app asks for? Even though the actual space they will end up using might be only half of that or even less?

For an app you haven't used in awhile, you'd probably uninstall it.

For an app you're actively using, you'd probably accept the update, but there would likely be pressure on the devs from the percent of people who would uninstall it instead. I think the hope is that this would cause them to think twice about bloating for no reason.

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