Will throw a spanner into the 'we can't release that feature as it will increase app size' thinking that I've witnessed in my mobile dev career. I've never seen it actually impact metrics that much.
Makes me feel old. I'm sure 20 years ago I could have told you say what app/game had been installed from floppies and which was "CD ROM only" My phone apps? Couldn't even guess as to their storage requirements. Probably a good thing that storage is so plentiful we normally don't care - but cynic in me thinks that a company selling storage with a massive markup, maybe doesn't have aligned interests.
If 0.1% of people install an app, and it consumes a gig rather than 500Meg - and we sell millions of phones. That does turn into a real money pretty fast.
If they really want your app, they'll look through the storage settings on their phone, and start deleting their biggest apps.
So if your app is too big, many people won't even install it, and if they do, it'll be the first app to go if they need more space.
I just moved from android to apple and the IOS apps are 2x - 5X larger
It's really a disgusting tax and I install a lot less apps as a result.
They could easily fix this by adding intelligence in the App store, to serve up the binary for my device's architecture, but no, I have to get the universal bloated binary pig.
Example: You're about to pay your bill at a restaurant. The server tells you that they have an app that will get you a discount/loyalty points. Your cell has a 4G connection. On android, the download size is 20-50MB. No problem. On IOS, the download size is 40-240MB. Problem!
See the app thinning section here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/doing-advanc... (which is automatically done on all apps distributed through the App Store)
I am also an Android dev and maintaining APK size has always been part of the dev process from the start. Apple is just so bad in policing their IPA size. And it is getting worse.
And in some places 200 MB can still be a big deal, the whole world isn't on 20 GB data plans.
Last year we ran a test which involved artificially bloating one of our IPAs from 160mb to 260mb* and compared the app performance metrics* before and after the change, we saw no meaningful difference between the two versions.
By using the app thinning mechanism, you can create a different IPA sizes for different devices.
* CPI, CPS etc.
A great example is 'make that feature entirely as a WebView to our site so we don't increase app size'.
Some of the other features may require an app.
- Getting warned about app size over cellular, which in iOS happens at 200MB.
- In geographies where cellular data is expensive, slow or intermittent.
- At the margin when you have many millions of users. The data bears out that it does have a small but measurable impact.