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> Why? There are two big factors at play, and both are tied to moves by Apple itself. First, the iPhone maker has been raising the cap on the size of apps, most
by xienze 9y ago
> Why? There are two big factors at play, and both are tied to moves by Apple itself. First, the iPhone maker has been raising the cap on the size of apps, most recently lifting the maximum to 4GB in early 2015. Secondly, the phones themselves are also coming with more memory, increasing consumer's willingness to put up with bigger apps.
Saying "there's more space and apps can be bigger" is not an explanation for _why_ the apps are bigger.
- Gaelan 9y agoDevs spend less time on making them smaller?
- koolba 9y agoThat was the logic for desktop apps in the 90s. Double memory in your new computer? Great! Let's use it all up!
- nolepointer 9y agoMemory or storage? I hate when these terms get used interchangeably.
- savanaly 9y agoHow is it not? It doesn't seem reasonable to you to model the expected size of an app as a function with the size of the phone on which the app will be installed as one of the inputs and the function's first derivative w.r.t. the phone size being always positive? It's not like it's the only factor but of course it would play some role. If you accept a higher size then all sorts of benefits follow. You can make the assets higher res, hold more of their data locally, just take less development time optimizing the app.
- coldtea 9y ago>Saying "there's more space and apps can be bigger" is not an explanation for _why_ the apps are bigger. Sounds like a great explanation. Apps tend to fill up to take all available disk space, and we've known that since 1981 or so. Every time computers got more disk/memory, apps grew in size. Back in the day you could fit most apps in a single 360K floppy disk or two.
- doktrin 9y ago> Apps tend to fill up to take all available disk space Basically this. It's not just software, either. "Stuff takes up the available time / space available" is about as broadly applicable of an axiom as any I can think of.
- oblio 9y agoTo be honest once I got 1TB HDDs I kind of stopped caring about app sizes. Not even the biggest games will fill that. Media files will, though.
- coldtea 9y agoGames no, but something like NI Komplete will easily fill 20% of that or more.
- prostoalex 9y ago> Saying "there's more space and apps can be bigger" is not an explanation for _why_ the apps are bigger. In large multi-app companies it leads to product decisions on bundling vs. shipping separate apps. For example, Uber vs. UberEATS. The latter would probably benefit from being bundled in the former and having immediate access to a wider audience, but it's asset-rich as it's much more visual.