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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Looks like fighting the symptoms, not taking care of the root causes.

There's probably so much bloat in frameworks, (illegal) telemetry and whatnot under the hood of those apps that should be tackled.

For example: Why is the the Amazon app 229 MB heavy? 195 MB is the app itself, then there's ~61 MB of "data" and only ~26,5 MB of cache.

It's a website, nothing more. How can it take 200+ MB of space? It's sick.

edit: How does Android even calculate those numbers? They don't add up at all...

edit2: see this recent post for reference: "I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30442529

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> edit: How does Android even calculate those numbers? They don't add up at all...

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)

You should install a few more copies of that app to free up space on the device!

DownloadMoreStorage.com

How do you get these tiny android app sizes. Even the most basic android app from Android studio is like 500kB

Or even 1MB for the hello world app, I know. But that's because of the AppCompat (and relative) libraries.

If you program using the built in api only (this means the functions available to the target sdk, nothing newer) then your app size will be basically all assets, as code is very compact by itself.

But of course, coding is by far more complex, you are like doing native programming (although easier than c). My apps are small tools, so I can.

Oh, and don't use Kotlin. It's a wonderful language and far better than java, but horribly optimized.

Will try this for sure

Google can't force people to not use frameworks. So they work on the bits they can control.

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)

> Google can't force people to not use frameworks. So they work on the bits they can control.

Couldn't they just penalize app size in play store rankings the same way they penalize slow sites in search results? Obviously for games and some types of applications you can't get around it, but I imagine Google has the resources to work around needlessly punishing those.

I don't think inherently large apps like games would be a problem on paper. Your game is competing against similarly sized games, not, say, a todo list app.

And if someone else can publish an equally enjoyable game with a smaller size, then there's no reason not to reward them for it.

How does game app size factor into the enjoyment in any way? Android phones aren't like iPhones and most have sd card slots which are dirt cheap nowadays.

I do not recommend using SD cards to store apps. I think SD cards are for storing media like photos we take or music we listen to…

SD card is just not nearly as fast as NVMe storage or even UFS 3.

shorter novels are better than longer novels? shorter movies better than longer movies? I don't think measuring on number of bytes is really a good metric. Tic-Tac-Toe is pretty small but I'd rather play GTA5

Novels and movies aren’t baked into app binaries, they’re served on demand. And most people looking to download games have specific criteria in mind, e.g. genre, rating, publisher, price etc. It’s very unlikely that Tic-tac-toe and GTA5 fall under the same criteria for any given consumer.

the tic tac toe game that's 5mb should beat the one that's 500mb in search results.

App size is penalized naturally for some classes of apps.

I worked on the main app for a top hotel brand and they wanted convincing why we should take several sprints shaving space off their builds.

They're struggling to get people off their phone lines and into the app.

Say a customer's on a mobile connection or crappy airport wifi trying to book a hotel. When a 30 minute download for your 400 mb app starts, guess what they're going to do?

Cancel it and call in.

They could, but it might be a pain to identify what's actually bloat.

That sounds like a very fun project. There is of course the technical work in identifying unused code and resources, a data science framing where statistical questions regarding bloat could be assessed, a process framing component where tooling and dev-platform interactions could be incentivized toward reducing bloat, and and economics framing where structural changes in Play store could change dev strategies toward bloat. Someone in charge of leading such a project has a lot of options available for analyzing and solving the problem, none of them mutually exclusive.

App size is inherently penalized, right? Why does it need more?

Google can make it easier to identify which apps are taking up space and slowing the system down, so that users will uninstall and developers will respond. I had an Android up until July and the interface for understanding and removing app memory usage was still poor.

Yeah, it would be nice if this was exposed to us. With just three apps open on my iPhone, sometimes I'll go back to one and it has to relaunch. Did it crash, use too much memory, or was it squeezed out by high memory consumption of the other two apps?

Even desktop OS don't go far enough. Would be nice if Windows and macOS came with a top 5 {mem,cpu} consumers drop-down in the global menu bar without having to install a tool or open task manager. We complain about bloated apps but without providing insights to the user, there's no pressure for apps to optimize.

If it seems like too much of a power-user feature, how about your run-tracking app silently closing on a long run because you were also listening to Spotify in the foreground? That's not a good experience. With no insights, all you have to act on is superstition. Do I need to find a run-tracker that doesn't crash or should I try a different music player? No data so who knows.

We still insulate users from this data for some reason even on mobile devices that LRU-close apps when memory is tight. Let the people know, dammit.

It's the OS's fault for silently killing apps that are 'in use'.

An app can already say 'I'm still doing a user visible action' (like logging a run, or playing music). Whenever one of those apps has to be killed to free up memory, a messagebox should be displayed saying "Spotify has quit due to low memory. Spotify was using 647MB and RunGPS was using 1454MB out of 3000MB system memory".

The problem is that device manufacturers employ additional killers and "efficiency managers" because too many app vendors use one of the various workarounds to collect data or whatever the fuck they are doing otherwise.

Google won't do much against it because the worst of the data hoarders are the f2p games that make money for themselves by selling the user data they can get their hands on and make also a lot of money for Google via all the IAP commissions.

Google could still choose to provide a clean and powerful interface on their flagship phones (Pixel) and the Android One certified phones. The existence of the latter program is evidence that Google does (or at least did) recognize the value in protecting the user experience from bad manufacturer incentives for consumers who are willing to pay a small premium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One

I'd guess a built-in web browser like Electron apps? But that wouldn't make much sense since I'm sure android has a WebView built in which should use mostly built-in browser libraries / tech.

The size of apps has gotten so bad Google is now forced to develop 2 versions of their core apps and 2 versions of their OS, one for devices with expendable resources (regular Android) and one for devices with limited resources (Android Go edition).

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!

Also "Google Play Services" is doing everything and nothing, it seems. I know it's a wrapper for various functions, but man... 500 MB...

I get why smaller companies use generic janky frameworks to throw up an app quickly and keep maintenance costs down. But why doesn't Amazon have the most streamlined and elegant app on the planet? They have the resources, expertise, and scale for it to make sense to invest heavily.

Amazon isn't going to care about the size of the app if consumers don't care. And the majority don't probably even realize.

I use the Amazon app regularly and my phone has enough storage to fit the app more that 600 times. It's not a particularly expensive phone either.

Given that I'm not sure why I should care as long as it works.

As a dev I agree it's technically interesting to find out why, as a user I think it just doesn't matter.

You have over 100 gig of storage space free on your 'old' phone? I just upgraded a year ago to 32 total gigs.

I can see why jumbo app wouldn't affect you.

I've got 7t on my desktop. Would you mind if chrome automatically updated to 1t. It's not a new computer pre-owned 2015

I don't know your exact context, but a ~$200 phone from Samsung comes with 64GB of storage...

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a32_5g-10648.php

You still can't fit 600 Amazon apps. You would need over 100 gigs.

Are we doing reductio an absurdum here?

Or just trying to figure out how we can do "smartphone death by a 1000 Amazon apps"? :-))

I have a Realme GT Neo2 which comes with 128gig at about 330€. Of course if it occupies a significant portion, it would be an issue. On the other hand when I look at the kind of updates that Steam and Playstation are pulling, 200mb feels like nothing.

But if 10% or even just 1% of users do care, it's absolutely worth it for Amazon. That's the point.

Will that 1% stop buying from Amazon, or will they just use the website instead? Gut instinct (and personal experience) says they're not really losing anything here.

Yes, I think people absolutely will buy less from Amazon if the mobile experience is just a bit slower or more annoying. We know from both other companies and Amazon's behavior that reducing friction has substantial impact on amount purchased.

If I had a choice between an app and a web site the web site almost always wins. ("app" rhymes with "crap")

Will you actually not buy things from Amazon due to their app size? If the answer is that you’ll continue spending money with them, you don’t care.

I absolutely have given up on trying to buy something from them because their mobile app crashed, which is the kind of thing that could be due to them mindlessly lashing together a bunch of app frameworks rather than building something streamlines. I've also given up when trying to do something really simple like set precise price filters that are bafflingly not available on mobile.

Crashes are not what we are talking about here.

My comment that started the sub-thread you are replying to specifically generalized the question, and I did so because I think app size, stability, and general well-built-ness are tightly connected.

> I get why smaller companies use generic janky frameworks to throw up an app quickly and keep maintenance costs down. But why doesn't Amazon have the most streamlined and elegant app on the planet? They have the resources, expertise, and scale for it to make sense to invest heavily.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30613893#30614531

Another way to say this: the root reason for app bloat is something that causes general app badness, so the question "Why is the app so bloated?" is not well explained by your implied answer "Because users do not reduce purchases on account of app size".

Fair. And for what it’s worth I would very much like for the app stores to penalize apps that are bloated. Institute a 20MB limit on the app size unless it’s a paid app or has specifically applied for a large app permission and justified why it needs more storage. That would drive developers away from bloat.

But I think large apps and apps that crash frequently is correlated but not strongly. I have never seen Amazon crash. I have seen 4MB apps crash. Bloat by itself just means I have to buy a more expensive phone to fit everything I want, which sucks but isn’t the end of the world.

I don't have amazon on my phone due to the bloat and opt to wait until I get in front of a desktop. Which means probably 80% of potential impulse buys from my phone are forgotten by the time i'm back home and they've missed out on sales. It's lost opportunity that they can't measure and so it will forever be swept under a rug.

You might be the exception here but (a) Amazon.com is accessible from your mobile phone, do you not use that? And (b) “impulse buys from my phone” is indeed hard to quantify. How do we know that you’d make any impulse buys if the app was in front of you? Going to their website on a phone is as easy if not easier than using their app and the content is identical. Yet you don’t say that you make impulse buys that way. 80% of 0 is still 0.

It would stopping app usage and promote website usage.

Again, have you ever in your life wanted to buy a product from Amazon but then didn’t because of their app size? If not, as far as Amazon is concerned you don’t care about the app size in any meaningful way.

even if they buy less because of the bloated app, you're still balancing dev resources against profit margins. It might just not be worth the effort for that extra tiny bit of revenue the app will generate by being small.

But that's my point about scale: if the revenue-vs-developer-time tradeoff makes it worth it for any company to make a good app, it will be worth it for Amazon. They are so huge that a 0.01% increase in sales translates to many millions of dollars per year.

Everything else they do also scales though. Not proportionally to each other, but I wouldn't be surprised if putting their devs on, say, better product recommendations is much more revenue than app size.

Then they should hire more devs.

Again, the cost is likely not be worth it.

It would also be foolish to think we know the answers of how to make amazon more money from our comfy arm chairs.

The push to get everyone on the company app will be less so. Why they want everyone on the app I don't understand but whatever those reasons are they won't benefit from it

I doubt even 0.1% users care.

I'm confident the same question has been asked countless times before when it comes to their website as well. I don't have any answers, I don't know either. Familiarity I guess?

Businesses don’t want irreplaceable anything, including engineers.

Here's Emerge Tools' size analysis of United's Android app: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/united-android

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 have no idea what your suggestion is here? Do you want Google to just ban apps which are "too large"? They can't ban everything that's 229MB, that's reasonable for many types of games.

I can't even imagine the anger on the HN post.

"Google kicked my app off Play because it was too big. WTF?"

What would happen is all of the content would load on first install.

Google knows how many installs you have. I think once an app crosses some threshold, the app requirements should be stricter. If you have 100 million installs, then you better be able to justify the resource requirements of your app. 100 MB of bloat might not seem like much individually, but multiply that by 100 million and it adds up.

This is user-hostile behaviour and they don't like it, otherwise they wouldn't make the move forward to implement this feature.

I'd love to see them get in their walled garden and clean up the ecosystem. They are doing reviews obviously, so they can/should tackle the bloat, too.

Look here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30442529 ("I shaved 187MB off United Airlines' 439MB iOS app (telkins.dev)")

Another way to treat the symptom is to uninstall the app and use the website.

> Why is the the Amazon app 229 MB heavy?

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.

And it even seems to provide less information than the website.

Yesterday I was looking really hard on who exactly would be the seller for an item. Did not find that information on the app, while it's easily findable in the web version.

Or do I have some quirky version of the app due to some A/B testing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com