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> Beautiful. Our APK weighs in at approximately 1.5Mb. WTF? This Hello World app is 1.5 MB, but MS Paint, a program with much richer functionality, is not even

> Beautiful. Our APK weighs in at approximately 1.5Mb. WTF? This Hello World app is 1.5 MB, but MS Paint, a program with much richer functionality, is not even a third of that! I know that MS Paint is ancient, but if it takes 1.5 MB by default to put text on a screen, multiple levels of something have failed, especially when it can squeeze down to <100 KB without too much trouble.

kogus 9y ago
I don't necessarily disagree, but MS Paint on my Windows 10 machine weighs in at 6.5Mb. Notepad++ is just 2.5Mb though. And the Windows Media Player is just 163k.
- drak0n1c 9y ago
  Aren't there also dll dependencies that allow modern Windows apps to be so small?
  - kogus 9y ago
    Often yes. Sometimes not. I don't know about the specific ones I mentioned. You can definitely build a self-contained WinForms app in under a meg, though.
  - georgemcbay 9y ago
    Yes. The Windows Media Player referenced is a perfect example, since it is basically just a shell app where all the UI functionality is pulled in from plugins and all of the codec support is handled through external codec libraries. There is definitely a bit of bloat when it comes to Android apps that use the support libraries, as the OP article mentions, but the benefit you get for that bloat is worth it if you're writing full featured real-world applications. (The support libs make it easy to support newer Android features backward compatibly to very old handsets).
duiker101 9y ago
Thing is, space and bandwidth are way cheaper now compared to the age of MS Paint. 1Mb, 10Mb, even 40 or 50 don't do much difference to most users but they can make things easier to develop/maintain/whatever. Which in the end could save a lot of money to a company.
- flukus 9y ago
  Sure 50MB is nothing, until everyone thinks like that and now I'm out of space on my phone. I'd love to install your app, but first I'd have to remove another app by another developer that optimized for their development speed instead of my resources. Doesn't matter how much money the company saved on development if users can't install it. This isn't hypothetical, this is reality for many of your customers with low end to mid range phones, or even aging flagships. Same goes on the desktop in terms of storage and memory, 64GB total and 4GB of RAM or less are still very common. Developers need to start using low end devices.

kogus 9y ago

I don't necessarily disagree, but MS Paint on my Windows 10 machine weighs in at 6.5Mb. Notepad++ is just 2.5Mb though. And the Windows Media Player is just 163k.

drak0n1c 9y ago
Aren't there also dll dependencies that allow modern Windows apps to be so small?
- kogus 9y ago
  Often yes. Sometimes not. I don't know about the specific ones I mentioned. You can definitely build a self-contained WinForms app in under a meg, though.
- georgemcbay 9y ago
  Yes. The Windows Media Player referenced is a perfect example, since it is basically just a shell app where all the UI functionality is pulled in from plugins and all of the codec support is handled through external codec libraries. There is definitely a bit of bloat when it comes to Android apps that use the support libraries, as the OP article mentions, but the benefit you get for that bloat is worth it if you're writing full featured real-world applications. (The support libs make it easy to support newer Android features backward compatibly to very old handsets).

duiker101 9y ago

Thing is, space and bandwidth are way cheaper now compared to the age of MS Paint. 1Mb, 10Mb, even 40 or 50 don't do much difference to most users but they can make things easier to develop/maintain/whatever. Which in the end could save a lot of money to a company.

flukus 9y ago
Sure 50MB is nothing, until everyone thinks like that and now I'm out of space on my phone. I'd love to install your app, but first I'd have to remove another app by another developer that optimized for their development speed instead of my resources. Doesn't matter how much money the company saved on development if users can't install it. This isn't hypothetical, this is reality for many of your customers with low end to mid range phones, or even aging flagships. Same goes on the desktop in terms of storage and memory, 64GB total and 4GB of RAM or less are still very common. Developers need to start using low end devices.