1. Believe it or not the LinkedIn app is huge in terms of the amount of things it does. It’s basically a super-app for professionals. News, social interactions, an entire chat app, a job board, recruiting and sales tools, etc. Of course it relies on a lot of frameworks.
2. You don’t need a “high end” phone or expensive data plan to have this size of install be reasonable. A brand new $159 Samsung A03s phone can take a 1TB SD card which itself only costs $60 from a reputable brand. You can get an unlimited data plan for $30/month from Mint mobile. Basically, the poorest consumer in the US can “afford” to install the app. Mobile download speeds in the US are far into the double digit Mbps. I’ve seen speeds go up into the hundreds of Mbps. Of course the option exists to have your apps update over WiFi automatically and use no mobile data at all.
3. Install Size != Slow performance. Grand Theft Auto V is a 100GB install on my computer, but it runs at a buttery smooth framerate on modest hardware.
4. Those criticizing LinkedIn for having a large development team that has to rely on frameworks rather than custom-building tightly integrated functionality are just on another planet entirely. The app is optimized for ease of development, not install size or perfect performance. LinkedIn isn’t going to hire a bunch of expensive, impossible to find 10X developers just to over-optimize their app so that somebody will notice that it only consumed 50MB of space instead of 500.