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I don't understand why some mobile app are so large. If Twitter can write a webpage that provides the functionality in only 1Mb then what is in the mobile app?

• AndrewStephens 10y ago
  Answering my own question, I just unpacked the iOS Twitter client thinking that it must contain massive graphic resources or something. Nope: mostly frameworks, the biggest being the T1Twitter.framework - 80.1Mb of who-knows-what. That doesn't include the 17 other frameworks all over 1Mb in size (there are innumerable other smaller frameworks) for periscope and other features. Seems to me they could ship a 5Mb app that just wraps the Twitter web site and provides iOS native experience (notifications, apple watch, etc) and call it a day.
  • trvr 10y ago
    This is pure speculation on my part. I believe that, currently, if you iOS app uses any Swift code, you have to include the Switch libraries in your app. This has something to do with how quickly Swift has been changing, and Apple wanting you to reference your own library instead of the system one for now. This has caused a number of apps to balloon in size lately, but the hope is that it is temporary.
    • AndrewStephens 10y ago
      The Twitter app uses swift and does include some 20 libSwitch* frameworks that account for a grand total of 20Mb - most of them are pretty small. It is unfortunate that apps can't dynamically link to standard swift libraries in the OS, but that still doesn't explain the other 150Mb of binaries.