Adding offline access would indeed be nice, but that wouldn't even add 2mb of code. I have entire native mobile games with multiplayer under 3mb.
EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh
EDIT: just realized the app is a web view. Sigh
So now I just add a 150 megabyte dummy file at everyone else’s expense
I’m sure there is a lot of that going on given how long some job roles were open, I have to imagine that every mobile developer on the market may have passed through and made the same conclusion!
But for most employers they just need presence, almost nobody was breaking even on apps they just needed the presence on the app stores. Big waste of money for most, and for most projects I was pitched
Not to mention the billions of devices in the world which are running old OS versions with scant memory capacity.
are not the rich or loose-walleted people that app sellers and advertisers care about.
This judges the prospective employer more than it judges the candidate, doesn't it?
This is actually nothing new. Back when I was at uni some students claimed to do the same, adding code that served no purpose to inflate the resulting program executable size.
And if my memory serves me well, at this time when windows was still young and software was swapped around on floppies, software sizes started to skyrocket and I've heard then that the secret reason for this lack of care was that size was the easiest way to impress users and the tech press (all while making piracy more inconvenient).
Easy to say, rhetorically suggesting that its revealing a toxic mangement environment, but no, not really. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive with great teammates and great managers, and a hiring decision maker that was otherwise completely hands off of what I was doing for the rest of the project. A hiring decision maker that probably left within 3 - 6 months of me joining, or who was randomly called to do an interview last minute and had arbitrary evaluation metrics. Maybe that is what you mean, but it had nothing to do with the day to day experience, once on board I found every place to be very similar with the mobile team pretty much on autopilot, which is the desired experience. Even quicker paths to leadership roles and higher compensation.
They all have interesting-enough projects at the time, or fulfilled some other interest of mine, or money without being a bad environment. Interview gaffs really don't carry as much weight as people think, it requires a special kind of privilege to think it matters that not all of us have or had.
In a rather successful business I had, I had a product of a few 100kb which installed easily on servers; just ./install.sh. Someone told me that this was really not smart. The script downloaded it’s dependencies (just rpm install; nothing proprietary) and then it copied the binary to /use/local/bin. I figured I could fix 2 issues at once; people running other distros complained that it did (obviously) not work; in our target audience, well over 90% ran rpm based distros, mostly centos. This was before Docker etc so I changed the install to apt-get and included a zipped chrooted Debian with everything already installed in it. Suddenly install.sh was over 100s of mbs and worked on any x86 Linux. It indeed made sales jump with people saying in forums that ours was bigger than even the largest competitor install download so it must be better. It is lame but true; especially when people pay for stuff, they want to get bang for their buck.
Their server returns results instantly but found that if they showed a loading animation (even fancy ones like an animated svg or gif of a cartoon passenger in an airplane) that people trusted the results more
No one can tell me that our species can write 1K ZX Chess (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess) – an entire chess game with intelligent opponents which only takes up 672 bytes – and yet we can't write an email client which isn't a million times that size.
When it comes to the code, the reason that they are bigger is how apps are distributed and have isolated runtimes. There are several commonly used sdks and libraries but because of how mobile app distribution works, these common libraries have to be bundled with each app and are not installed as a reusable library (like you can do with Linux, for example).
But a lot of these webview kind of apps just download the whole thing anyways, so it's literally just a matter of if the bytes are classified under "application size" or "cache" by the OS.
(Precisely so they have the whole thing available for when you need to use it offline)
The issue is that the Gmail app isn’t just an email client, it does way more than that. That doesn’t excuse the abusive behavior, but it does explain it.