Android: Freeing up 60% of storage for apps by removing parts of the app

I do agree that Amazon's app does seem to basically be their website, so I don't understand why it needs to be so big.

(And the numbers on my phone add up)

No idea, but I would also like to know. My apps are so small that once they reported a negative size.

(Found the picture! https://imgur.com/a/KDI9Y4M)

I have removed most of Google's apps from my phone because of their extreme size.

Looking on my phone it looks like the award for most bloated goes to Google Play Services at 500MB. Wow!

As you can see from the breakdown: 34% of the app is native libraries, another 34% is dex, 23% is resources, and another 8% is assets.

Unfortunately they're still not using AABs, have about 4 MB of download size savings from just image optimization, have 1.1 MB of Emoji gif files , and are not optimizing their Native libraries for the specific architecture (using AABs would solve this)

I checked mine. 201 MB app, 115 MB "data", 202 MB cache, 518 MB total

Yes, the Amazon app, which literally feels like a webview wrapper around the mobile website, is taking up half a gigabyte of space on my phone.

It's also why Apple has pushed some technologies for developers to reduce initial app size; optimized builds per device (you send Apple a bundle with e.g. multiple images at different resolutions, Apple only installs the ones the phone actually needs), dynamically loading content like levels (so the initial download is only the core libraries + the first level, the rest is downloaded and offloaded dynamically), etc.

Turn iCloud Photos on? Even with "Optimize storage", that'll keep about 3-5GB of local thumbnails on your device, wasting space.

iCloud Notes on? Your 5+GB of notes will all be stored locally; no storage optimization there.

Use Apple Music? It'll use about 7-8GB of local storage, not for any downloaded songs (I haven't downloaded any) but purely for album artwork, cache, and other junk. There is no way to ever delete that Apple Music cache; not even cancelling Apple Music, turning off Cloud Library, or deleting the Apple Music app. The only way, is to reset the iPad completely, and delete the Music app before it can start syncing anything from the cloud. i.e.: you have to switch to Spotify.

These are all Apple apps.

When an iPad has low free storage, it'll delete user data from 3rd-party apps, and those apps have to redownload user data from the cloud every time you open the app. Notability is a good example. Everything's gone, wait 5min for it to resync.

The iPad might be my main device if Apple fixed this, and it would lock me much deeper into Apple's ecosystem, but they don't seem to understand the value of minimizing storage use.

On that, the larger your app is the bigger the target. When I run out of space on my phone I sort by largest app and start booting off the worst offenders. Small apps, even if I use them less often, are likely to fly under the radar.

This way it frees up the space used by the application data, without removing it altogether, so that the associated user data can still remain with it.

It’s the same concept as iOS’ feature to offload unused apps, but this appears to be implemented in a way that is backwards compatible with older devices since the Play Store is able to manage the process of replacing and restoring the app package and not the core OS.

Maybe your hobby horse is different to other people's hobby horse, but that doesn't mean that other people's hobby horses aren't important.

This issue probably affects lower income people disproportionately, too.