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Comment by pzo | Hacker News Reader

I encourage everyone to go to app store -> profile -> swipe refresh, and see how heavy all those apps updates on iOS are few examples:

Gmail: 570 MB

Facebook: 345 MB

Booking.com: 260 MB

AirAsia: 510 MB

Reddit: 330 MB

Slack: 400 MB

X: 290 MB

Google Translate: 180 MB

Uber: 480 MB

Speedtest: 150 MB

It's horrible how heavy all those apps are. I barely can find app update that is less 100 MB.

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Yes it's one of the thing i noticed when I switched from android to iPhone, ios apps are so much bigger.

For instance, Gmail android app bundle (2 app, arm64-v8a + armeabi-v7a) is 59mb.

Ios doesn't even have to care about armeabi yet it's 20 times bigger. What's going on ?

Material design components maybe?

And to think I was mildly concerned when our app inflated out to 36.8MB recently

Our app has ~20K MAU and download size is around 3.5 MB, it was 3.2 MB before though.

Great work! Pass on my thanks to your team. I feel the effort.

Well done, keep it up! I also strive to keep my apps small and lean.

It's ridiculous, and many websites are just as bloated.

Not for the first time, I blame CSS, and the marketing-driven economic incentives that popularized it. Too much graphic design turned the web from something resembling a living book to something resembling a glossy magazine, along with the ads and the promotion of sensation over substance. I sometimes find myself missing TUIs and being able to meaningfully customize your user experience.

But this was always unavoidable, because it turns out non-HN users like glossy magazines. So the internet will always either be niche and text-only or glossy and popular

On the plus side, my latest app (a browser for multiple Japanese shopping websites with unified search, and an icon!) is just 200KB (400KB installed). I use zero frameworks to achieve this. I also target iOS 15 just for kicks.

Is it horrible? I recently bought a 512 GB microSD card for $52.

I could fit over 1000 of these apps on that card with no problem.

Which iPhone has microSD support? Macbooks only recently (starting from from m1) have sd card slot and only most expensive macbooks pro. 1-2 years ago they were still selling macbook pro starting with 128GB ssd and of course they are soldered. At one point when buying iphone they allowed you to choose one with 64GB or ... 256GB even if I wanted 128GB.

And for me its no problem - I sync photos with my macbook photos and remove from phone. But not everybody has Macbook. Support for syncing on windows used to be totally terrible - there was no syncing just download all photos with arbitrary names and folder names.

On top of that when syncing iphone with macbook by accident you forgot to check on this small box "delete synced medias from iphone" you will have to delete all photos one by one selecting... there is not option like delete all photos - ridiculous.

Samsung A series phones have SD card slots.

Most smartphones are not iPhones.

Also, iPhones support numerous photo upload/sync/remote storage solutions. You don’t have to use Apple’s solution.

Google Photos, Nextcloud, Immich, etc etc etc.

the whole conversation is about Santader and other apps on iOS being heavy so not sure how info about Samsung A series have SD is helpful in this context. Other syncing app on iOS have serious API limitation what can do compared Apple app.

It's also not only about storage. It's wasteful to make app upgrades that are several GB altogether each time - both for user bandwidth and apple server bandwidth (especially when they talk so much about ecology)

> iPhones support numerous photo upload/sync/remote storage solutions

That really doesn’t help you with apps though…

If you're using a device which allows storage extension using microSD cards - i.e. if you're using Android - that is a solution but Apple iOS devices do not offer such options. You get to buy the same storage for a far higher price without the possibility of extending it later on, better bite the sour apple and pay that ridiculous price for the 512GB or 1TB version now because you know you'll be even more sorry if you didn't later on.

I feel like it’s either this, or some super optimized app that weighs in at <10 MB and does what it should perfectly. I really wish there was a middle ground.

Google Docs/Sheets/Slides are particularly infuriating. I’m pretty sure they all contain 90% identical code and assets.

I like this for simple mobile projects:

https://quasar.dev/

In some cases, going with an SVG icon pack etc. can save a bit of space. =3

The Affinity apps (Photo, Designer, Publisher) are all 95% the same, too. They are basically the same shared frameworks with a slightly different UI. They can all open the same documents, for example. Whilst you can only create a table in Publisher you can edit it in any of the apps. Ridiculous. But then they get to sell you the "same" app three times.

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