Ask HN: Why are your mobile app sizes so huge? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are your mobile app sizes so huge?

18 pointslawgimenez9 comments

It seems iPhone 64GB storage is not ideal anymore. Twitter app size is 168.7 MB, I’m a mobile app programmer too and my largest app size I remember is barely only 10 MB and that includes SDKs for error monitoring and analytics. LinkedIn size is almost 300 MB. What the hell? I kept digging all the different engineering blogs and I can’t seem to find any company addressing this mobile app size issue? Your users are not all in Silicon Valley, majority are in Asia. Have some respect. At least give us an option to delete cache.

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The boilerplate for their mobile apps is dozens of ad, tracking, and profiling libraries and components. This little feature of signing in to your account and submitting a post is the last concern for the app owners.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26277501

Lots of dependencies, debugging symbols, multiple versions of the same media in different resolutions, mostly. Managers believe fat apps look important. That's why I'd only install an app unless it's absolutely necessary, and consume the rest from the web with [empty data when browser is closed] turned on.

From android you get the option to delete the cache for almost all apps and that is normally massive.

This is not possible on iOS. I tried to delete Twitter's cache but it says I only have 3kb to remove.

For instance for the google photos app (one of my biggest) I can see:

App 134 Mb Data 228 Mb Cache 285 Mb Total 647 Mb

I can clear the cache at any time from settings, I also get an option to delete app data but there is no explanation as to the repercussions of that.

Reasons: 1) External libraries 2) Cross platform functionality 3) Different resources - 2x, 2.5x, 3x, etc 4) (still) missing SWIFT ABI

Tracking libraries

And people (developers) are always complaining about a few mb of JavaScript for the web.

Apps are literally hundreds of mb

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