7 ms·

I think app size is a lurking problem that needs to be addressed. I thought it was just me as a “power user” but then I noticed that my wife and kids were spen

I think app size is a lurking problem that needs to be addressed. I thought it was just me as a “power user” but then I noticed that my wife and kids were spending hours deleting stuff to make room for app updates. It’s a silent problem that people just seem to monkey around with. Some apps are huge, I have 256GB because I ran into problems with only 64GB. “enterprise” apps that use up lots of app storage and then require local data storage for caches to edit files. A big offender is Microsoft where the office apps are each 500MB and different apps are needed: Excel, Word, Office, OneDrive, PowerPoint. Why is Edge 200MB? It’s common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase as my credit card and their app is 300MB. I keep the app because their web site is horrible and requires MFA to login, so the app is easier. It was impossible to use my phone with “only” 64GB without constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed at the time. I remember the days of small hard drives when bloat really mattered, but it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app and it’s not reasonable that the Gmail app requires 300MB or PayPal needs 250.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
It still boggles my mind to this day that in the early 2010's, I was debating getting a 8gb or 16gb iPod Touch. Now I can't even imagine anything less than 128gb if I'm including videos and pictures on my phone. That's even with only essential or primarily used apps. If I had everything I'd want on it, 128gb still feels like not enough. Not to mention Android taking up an absurd amount of space.
grawprog 5y ago
I'm really surprised sometimes at the size of what should seemingly be tiny apps. An app with a single screen that does literally one thing can clock in at anywhere from 20-70MB it's ridiculous. Yet at the same time there's apps that manage to do a lot, but don't gobble up the space. Looking at something like the Infinity reddit client vs the official one. Infinity clocks in around 38MB the official client is around 100MB. They provide essentially the same functionality, the layout and UI is even very similar, yet one manages to be almost 2/3rds smaller in size.
- Solocomplex 5y ago
  Analytics libraries
- pydry 5y ago
  You made me curious enough to look and I discovered that the default keyboard on my xiaomi phone "emoji keyboard" is 1.1GB. So, thats worrying for a number of reasons.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    Does the "emoji keyboard" support searching for animated stickers or something? My guess is that it's littering your phone with thousands of tiny clips.
    - pydry 5y ago
      I'm not sure but the main side effect of clearing the cache and the data was to throw up a contract with a big i agree button. not clicking that.
      - grawprog 5y ago
        I personally disable my stock keyboard immediately upon getting a new phone and use AnySoftKeyboard myself.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  I always thought this was an Android problem, so I nuked every default Google app. For some reason, Google search/voice app I probably used 6 times a year had ~500mb space. 300 of that was just "data" for god knows what. Gmail was reaching a gig. Youtube also half a gig even though I never save anything and maps was just wild. All these apps are over 200mb solo dolo. Why? One would think the best paid devs in the world, in one of the wealthiest companies in the world would ship the best apps. They don't. Not even close. It's actually sad.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app It's the "people have powerful computers now so we can be as lazy as we want" culture. We have amazing computers but they feel less powerful than an 80s arcade machine.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Today my Windows 10 PC told me that the "Snipping Tool" had been deprecated and would I like to try the new W10 version? So I did. And when I took a screenshot, it said something like "please wait while we make your screenshot" for about 20 seconds! What could POSSIBLY take so long‽
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    > What could POSSIBLY take so long‽ This is something I find myself asking more and more almost every time I use a computer or mobile device. I have multiple cores here. Why is anything stuttering? Why are these processes taking so much memory up? Why is this web page pulling down 100MB of traffic? Why do I remember text console DOS apps being so much more responsive than today's click-then-wait UI apps? Before spinning hard drives dropped out of fashion, you could hear that thing grinding away, doing who knows what, while the computer was sitting there supposedly idle! What gives software developers the idea that they can just have their software just wake up and do things without the user commanding it? Just a particularly egregious example: If there's one thing that nothing on the entire system should preempt, it's the mouse cursor. If I move the mouse, the cursor should move instantly. There is nothing more important that the computer should be doing. I thought this was like a basic, very well understood rule and a solved problem. Hell, I recall a long time ago things like mouse cursor drawing were driven off a hardware interrupt. On today's "modern" computers, if I have a lot of applications running in the background, the mouse cursor will stutter and lag, and text input will be buffered and show up N seconds after I type. Totally unacceptable, yet software continues to ship like this. EDIT: Sorry, the rant kind of drifted off of the "nobody cares about bloat" problem and into the general "nobody cares about performance" problem.
    - 5y ago
pnutjam 5y ago
300MB? Wow, I thought my Capital One app was big at 128MB.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  iPhone: BoA - 457MB AMEX - 130MB USAA - 109 MB I only have BoA because I haven't canceled my CC with them yet (kept because AMEX is not accepted everywhere). It seems I deleted my other bank apps (after I'd closed the accounts, makes sense, right?) but IIRC they were somewhere in the 150MB-200MB range. Some people just really like bloat I guess.
  - a3n 5y ago
    USAA offers a CC.
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      They do, and I signed up for it. I literally just haven't bothered canceling the BoA CC yet. It's not been used since I got the USAA card (which is only used when the AMEX isn't accepted).
  - Causality1 5y ago
    The app my credit union uses for online banking and card control functions is only 81MB.
    - pnutjam 5y ago
      My CU's is only 16mb.
- benlivengood 5y ago
  I'm curious why people trust apps published by banks/credit unions instead of using the substantially similar web pages with a trusted browser and password manager. I've seen a mix of anything from awful to OK from mobile banking apps. My only use case for apps is mobile check deposits, presumably because asking for camera control on mobile devices was beyond the ability of their web developers.
mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
> it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app and it’s not reasonable that the Gmail app requires 300MB or PayPal needs 250. s/devs/product managers
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Product managers want a faster, smaller install. It means less cancelled/failed installs. It's a metric they'd love to optimize for. Why are you bashing PM's? At the end of the day, if delivering a new feature on time adds another 5 MB, it is what it is. Pretty useless to try to assign blame to either devs or PM's, or portray them as somehow opposing teams. They both want success for the business.
  - mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
    I'm not "bashing" anyone, and I wouldn't say the person who I replied to was "bashing" developers, either. I agree that both developers and product managers want success for the business. I probably should have said product owner here rather than product manager. I only meant to call attention to the fact that it's often others in an organization beyond the developers making decisions around whether to optimize for this sort of thing. On average, more technically-minded folks are more likely to want to optimize for technical things like app install size where the business impact can be a bit more abstract and difficult to measure, particularly when compared to folks like product managers who are likely to have their individual performance evaluated by even less technical stakeholders on their ability to quantify the impact of whatever ends up getting shipped. Again, I'm generalizing here - of course there are highly thoughtful and competent folks capable of balancing competing priorities across domains in any type of role.
meowster 5y ago
On Android, Microsoft has an app called "Office" that combines Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other feature. It's just 133MB.
eertami 5y ago
Until recently I was using a Oneplus X with 16GB storage just fine. I was never tempted to download apps except the ones I completely needed (because I really didn't have room for it.) Now, with a Pixel 4a the System/OS singlehandedly uses 18GB of storage. Today, I do not see myself ever filling up another 100GB of apps but who knows what app sizes will look like in 5 more years.
- uchiga 5y ago
  My pixel fill up to 30gb system storage. I free up 15gb of system storage by clearing app caches.
magicalhippo 5y ago
> It was impossible to use my phone with “only” 64GB without constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed at the time. I too have 64GB. I just checked and my phone says apps take 11GB, and I have about 33GB free. At 250MB each (and many on my phone take less) that would be over 250 apps on a 64GB phone... Do you actually use that many apps. Am I just a Luddite?
- prepend 5y ago
  Apps were 35GB for me. My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of storage (OneDrive will eat up space). 10GB was OS, there rest was music, photos, videos.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    > My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of storage Ah, that'll change the equation. I just use Teams and Outlook apps for work on my phone (besides calls and texts).
- least 5y ago
  I don't think you're a luddite, though people do use their phones for different things, some of which are just naturally going to take up more space over time. Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space, especially when you don't have them sync to the cloud. Some apps like reddit clients, comic readers, or music apps can take a lot of space up with cached images, music, and other files. Games also take up a ton of space.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    > Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space Right, but this was a discussion on app sizes. Photos and videos aren't due to the size of the apps, and can easily go on an SD card. > cached images, music, and other files Good point about caches. Should be some global policy for that IMHO. One thing is things like map apps downloading regions on demand for offline use, but just plain old caching... > Games also take up a ton of space. True, that's an issue even on my desktop computer with a 1TB SSD. Though I don't consider those regular apps. Still, point taken.
Joeri 5y ago
It used to be that everyone wrote all of their own code and applications were tiny. Now it’s easy to pull in dozens of libraries and their hundreds or thousands of transitive dependencies. The resulting app bloat becomes a ticket on the pile, to be solved some day going on never.
- markrages 5y ago
  Parent comment is evergreen. It could have been written in 1996. I feel the same way. But as we curmudgeons stand athwart history, the whole of software development is moving toward the largest sizes the technology will allow.
mornaT 5y ago
> Why is Edge 200MB? Edge is Chromium + various integration libraries. The barebone Chromium 64-bit build on Android, without any google integration, is 130MB. Add to that several video codecs, replacements for google proprietary libraries (crash reporting, malware/malicious page scanning engine, push messages etc), and you quickly reach 200MB.
j1elo 5y ago
When talking about raw local performance ("why my 4 cores today work similar or worse than 1 core yesterday?") I think part of the answer is: because yesterday we had comparatively less software, but it was written in closer to the metal languages (i.e. C/C++ and similar) while now there are x1000 more devs out there, most of them looking into writing their desktop applet with JavaScript / other languages similarly far from the metal, and wanting to know as little as possible about the hardware, thus relying on dozens of abstraction layers just to make their lives much easier (and their softwate much crappier). Typical counterpoint is VSCode, wtitten in Electron. But you know, VSCode has had some serious engineering and optimisation effort ($$$) so not really a typical example at all.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  VSCode is least crappy Electron application, but that doesn't mean its not crappy. It does less than half things that Intellij IDEs do at base install, and stillmanages to be slow and regularly lock up. And that is a comparison for feature rich use. If one compares VSCode the editor vs Kate/Emacs/Kdevelop there is no performance match.
  - j1elo 5y ago
    I agree, but I have a counterpoint. Kate has been my editor of choice for all text editing things, I think since times of KDE 3 (so you see it's a long lasting preference by now). However, I have always used JEdit to copy-paste huge text, like anything beyond 100k log lines from some software. JEdit seems to handle everything fine, while Kate has always hung up on me during some 10s of seconds (any kind of parsing or colorization are disabled in Kate, and the minimap is too... after that wait, everything works fine though). Turns out, VSCode handles this kind of pasting nicely too, so I've replaces JEdit with it. Which drives me to think there is some low hanging fruit performance wise in Kate.
    - e3bc54b2 5y ago
      I've had similar waiting experience with Sublime for large text bodies. VSCode, IME (been couple years since I tried) absolutely choked and eventually had to terminate. These days, I stick to Emacs and Vim (terminal) for large files. Perks of being in a Linux shop, I guess.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
the office apps are each 500MB and different apps are needed: Excel, Word, Office, OneDrive, PowerPoint. Why is Edge 200MB? It’s common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase as my credit card and their app is 300MB. For what it’s worth, 200 to 300MB per app seems entirely reasonable to me. I’m not sure why it would be smaller or different. I was expecting you to point out a 5GB app. That’d be overboard. But 200MB? Sure, why not? Not to say you’re wrong. It’s likely me, not you. It just… seems fine.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
Doesn't it depends on what you're doing? I can't remember with Galaxy S2 16GB, Galaxy S3 32GB, Galaxy S4 64GB, Lumia 1520 64GB? iPhone 7 Plus 128GB, OnePlus6 256GB Deleting apps or anything else to get more free space on my phone's. I don't have a main browser, I always used Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Samsung browser or Internet. All the Facebook apps with Instagram. Always trying to get the biggest app and load my maps from Google drive for Offline navigation too. Double or triple photos And still didn't run out of storage.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
why cant we set a system wide cache limit on apps? i don't need to keep 5 billion page cache on browser or reddit or youtube or whatever. for people who have fast internet, or even those who don't, cache does not work because these apps "assume" you are always connected so they break the flow if it detects no internet so cache is worthless then. other than that, i have been requesting app devs on github, foss apps at that to have a cache limit inside so if i set to 100mb or even 0, that works
toast0 5y ago
When apps target users in developing countries, there is pressure to keep apps small. Those users tend to have phones with less storage and tend to sort by size when deleting apps to install something else. Some users will build up a cycle of delete A and B to install C, then delete it to put back A and B. The smaller your app is, the more likely it is to stay installed because it's not as helpful to delete it. The biggest obstacles are small storage phone users are well represented in non-Play store installs, which often means a fat apk that has binary libraries for all platforms and raster images for all dpis. The other big issue is translated strings; Android standard string translations can't be compressed (apk is a zip, but not everything in a zip is compressed), even though they would be very compressible. There's a lot of languages out there, and not using the standard translation tool is hard to sell (and you still need it for somethings anyway). Doesn't help for US based banks though. Mostly their customers are going to have enough space that a bank app isn't going to get deleted to make space for whatever else.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

It still boggles my mind to this day that in the early 2010's, I was debating getting a 8gb or 16gb iPod Touch. Now I can't even imagine anything less than 128gb if I'm including videos and pictures on my phone. That's even with only essential or primarily used apps. If I had everything I'd want on it, 128gb still feels like not enough. Not to mention Android taking up an absurd amount of space.

grawprog 5y ago

I'm really surprised sometimes at the size of what should seemingly be tiny apps. An app with a single screen that does literally one thing can clock in at anywhere from 20-70MB it's ridiculous. Yet at the same time there's apps that manage to do a lot, but don't gobble up the space. Looking at something like the Infinity reddit client vs the official one. Infinity clocks in around 38MB the official client is around 100MB. They provide essentially the same functionality, the layout and UI is even very similar, yet one manages to be almost 2/3rds smaller in size.

Solocomplex 5y ago
Analytics libraries
pydry 5y ago
You made me curious enough to look and I discovered that the default keyboard on my xiaomi phone "emoji keyboard" is 1.1GB. So, thats worrying for a number of reasons.
- yorwba 5y ago
  Does the "emoji keyboard" support searching for animated stickers or something? My guess is that it's littering your phone with thousands of tiny clips.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I'm not sure but the main side effect of clearing the cache and the data was to throw up a contract with a big i agree button. not clicking that.
    - grawprog 5y ago
      I personally disable my stock keyboard immediately upon getting a new phone and use AnySoftKeyboard myself.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vagrantJin 5y ago
I always thought this was an Android problem, so I nuked every default Google app. For some reason, Google search/voice app I probably used 6 times a year had ~500mb space. 300 of that was just "data" for god knows what. Gmail was reaching a gig. Youtube also half a gig even though I never save anything and maps was just wild. All these apps are over 200mb solo dolo. Why? One would think the best paid devs in the world, in one of the wealthiest companies in the world would ship the best apps. They don't. Not even close. It's actually sad.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app It's the "people have powerful computers now so we can be as lazy as we want" culture. We have amazing computers but they feel less powerful than an 80s arcade machine.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
Today my Windows 10 PC told me that the "Snipping Tool" had been deprecated and would I like to try the new W10 version? So I did. And when I took a screenshot, it said something like "please wait while we make your screenshot" for about 20 seconds! What could POSSIBLY take so long‽
- ryandrake 5y ago
  > What could POSSIBLY take so long‽ This is something I find myself asking more and more almost every time I use a computer or mobile device. I have multiple cores here. Why is anything stuttering? Why are these processes taking so much memory up? Why is this web page pulling down 100MB of traffic? Why do I remember text console DOS apps being so much more responsive than today's click-then-wait UI apps? Before spinning hard drives dropped out of fashion, you could hear that thing grinding away, doing who knows what, while the computer was sitting there supposedly idle! What gives software developers the idea that they can just have their software just wake up and do things without the user commanding it? Just a particularly egregious example: If there's one thing that nothing on the entire system should preempt, it's the mouse cursor. If I move the mouse, the cursor should move instantly. There is nothing more important that the computer should be doing. I thought this was like a basic, very well understood rule and a solved problem. Hell, I recall a long time ago things like mouse cursor drawing were driven off a hardware interrupt. On today's "modern" computers, if I have a lot of applications running in the background, the mouse cursor will stutter and lag, and text input will be buffered and show up N seconds after I type. Totally unacceptable, yet software continues to ship like this. EDIT: Sorry, the rant kind of drifted off of the "nobody cares about bloat" problem and into the general "nobody cares about performance" problem.
  - 5y ago

pnutjam 5y ago

300MB? Wow, I thought my Capital One app was big at 128MB.

Jtsummers 5y ago
iPhone: BoA - 457MB AMEX - 130MB USAA - 109 MB I only have BoA because I haven't canceled my CC with them yet (kept because AMEX is not accepted everywhere). It seems I deleted my other bank apps (after I'd closed the accounts, makes sense, right?) but IIRC they were somewhere in the 150MB-200MB range. Some people just really like bloat I guess.
- a3n 5y ago
  USAA offers a CC.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    They do, and I signed up for it. I literally just haven't bothered canceling the BoA CC yet. It's not been used since I got the USAA card (which is only used when the AMEX isn't accepted).
- Causality1 5y ago
  The app my credit union uses for online banking and card control functions is only 81MB.
  - pnutjam 5y ago
    My CU's is only 16mb.
benlivengood 5y ago
I'm curious why people trust apps published by banks/credit unions instead of using the substantially similar web pages with a trusted browser and password manager. I've seen a mix of anything from awful to OK from mobile banking apps. My only use case for apps is mobile check deposits, presumably because asking for camera control on mobile devices was beyond the ability of their web developers.

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago

> it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app and it’s not reasonable that the Gmail app requires 300MB or PayPal needs 250. s/devs/product managers

crazygringo 5y ago
Product managers want a faster, smaller install. It means less cancelled/failed installs. It's a metric they'd love to optimize for. Why are you bashing PM's? At the end of the day, if delivering a new feature on time adds another 5 MB, it is what it is. Pretty useless to try to assign blame to either devs or PM's, or portray them as somehow opposing teams. They both want success for the business.
- mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
  I'm not "bashing" anyone, and I wouldn't say the person who I replied to was "bashing" developers, either. I agree that both developers and product managers want success for the business. I probably should have said product owner here rather than product manager. I only meant to call attention to the fact that it's often others in an organization beyond the developers making decisions around whether to optimize for this sort of thing. On average, more technically-minded folks are more likely to want to optimize for technical things like app install size where the business impact can be a bit more abstract and difficult to measure, particularly when compared to folks like product managers who are likely to have their individual performance evaluated by even less technical stakeholders on their ability to quantify the impact of whatever ends up getting shipped. Again, I'm generalizing here - of course there are highly thoughtful and competent folks capable of balancing competing priorities across domains in any type of role.

meowster 5y ago

On Android, Microsoft has an app called "Office" that combines Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other feature. It's just 133MB.

eertami 5y ago

Until recently I was using a Oneplus X with 16GB storage just fine. I was never tempted to download apps except the ones I completely needed (because I really didn't have room for it.) Now, with a Pixel 4a the System/OS singlehandedly uses 18GB of storage. Today, I do not see myself ever filling up another 100GB of apps but who knows what app sizes will look like in 5 more years.

uchiga 5y ago
My pixel fill up to 30gb system storage. I free up 15gb of system storage by clearing app caches.

magicalhippo 5y ago

> It was impossible to use my phone with “only” 64GB without constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed at the time. I too have 64GB. I just checked and my phone says apps take 11GB, and I have about 33GB free. At 250MB each (and many on my phone take less) that would be over 250 apps on a 64GB phone... Do you actually use that many apps. Am I just a Luddite?

prepend 5y ago
Apps were 35GB for me. My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of storage (OneDrive will eat up space). 10GB was OS, there rest was music, photos, videos.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  > My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of storage Ah, that'll change the equation. I just use Teams and Outlook apps for work on my phone (besides calls and texts).
least 5y ago
I don't think you're a luddite, though people do use their phones for different things, some of which are just naturally going to take up more space over time. Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space, especially when you don't have them sync to the cloud. Some apps like reddit clients, comic readers, or music apps can take a lot of space up with cached images, music, and other files. Games also take up a ton of space.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  > Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take up a lot of space Right, but this was a discussion on app sizes. Photos and videos aren't due to the size of the apps, and can easily go on an SD card. > cached images, music, and other files Good point about caches. Should be some global policy for that IMHO. One thing is things like map apps downloading regions on demand for offline use, but just plain old caching... > Games also take up a ton of space. True, that's an issue even on my desktop computer with a 1TB SSD. Though I don't consider those regular apps. Still, point taken.

Joeri 5y ago

It used to be that everyone wrote all of their own code and applications were tiny. Now it’s easy to pull in dozens of libraries and their hundreds or thousands of transitive dependencies. The resulting app bloat becomes a ticket on the pile, to be solved some day going on never.

markrages 5y ago
Parent comment is evergreen. It could have been written in 1996. I feel the same way. But as we curmudgeons stand athwart history, the whole of software development is moving toward the largest sizes the technology will allow.

mornaT 5y ago

> Why is Edge 200MB? Edge is Chromium + various integration libraries. The barebone Chromium 64-bit build on Android, without any google integration, is 130MB. Add to that several video codecs, replacements for google proprietary libraries (crash reporting, malware/malicious page scanning engine, push messages etc), and you quickly reach 200MB.

j1elo 5y ago

When talking about raw local performance ("why my 4 cores today work similar or worse than 1 core yesterday?") I think part of the answer is: because yesterday we had comparatively less software, but it was written in closer to the metal languages (i.e. C/C++ and similar) while now there are x1000 more devs out there, most of them looking into writing their desktop applet with JavaScript / other languages similarly far from the metal, and wanting to know as little as possible about the hardware, thus relying on dozens of abstraction layers just to make their lives much easier (and their softwate much crappier). Typical counterpoint is VSCode, wtitten in Electron. But you know, VSCode has had some serious engineering and optimisation effort ($$$) so not really a typical example at all.

e3bc54b2 5y ago
VSCode is least crappy Electron application, but that doesn't mean its not crappy. It does less than half things that Intellij IDEs do at base install, and stillmanages to be slow and regularly lock up. And that is a comparison for feature rich use. If one compares VSCode the editor vs Kate/Emacs/Kdevelop there is no performance match.
- j1elo 5y ago
  I agree, but I have a counterpoint. Kate has been my editor of choice for all text editing things, I think since times of KDE 3 (so you see it's a long lasting preference by now). However, I have always used JEdit to copy-paste huge text, like anything beyond 100k log lines from some software. JEdit seems to handle everything fine, while Kate has always hung up on me during some 10s of seconds (any kind of parsing or colorization are disabled in Kate, and the minimap is too... after that wait, everything works fine though). Turns out, VSCode handles this kind of pasting nicely too, so I've replaces JEdit with it. Which drives me to think there is some low hanging fruit performance wise in Kate.
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    I've had similar waiting experience with Sublime for large text bodies. VSCode, IME (been couple years since I tried) absolutely choked and eventually had to terminate. These days, I stick to Emacs and Vim (terminal) for large files. Perks of being in a Linux shop, I guess.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

the office apps are each 500MB and different apps are needed: Excel, Word, Office, OneDrive, PowerPoint. Why is Edge 200MB? It’s common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase as my credit card and their app is 300MB. For what it’s worth, 200 to 300MB per app seems entirely reasonable to me. I’m not sure why it would be smaller or different. I was expecting you to point out a 5GB app. That’d be overboard. But 200MB? Sure, why not? Not to say you’re wrong. It’s likely me, not you. It just… seems fine.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

Doesn't it depends on what you're doing? I can't remember with Galaxy S2 16GB, Galaxy S3 32GB, Galaxy S4 64GB, Lumia 1520 64GB? iPhone 7 Plus 128GB, OnePlus6 256GB Deleting apps or anything else to get more free space on my phone's. I don't have a main browser, I always used Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Samsung browser or Internet. All the Facebook apps with Instagram. Always trying to get the biggest app and load my maps from Google drive for Offline navigation too. Double or triple photos And still didn't run out of storage.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

why cant we set a system wide cache limit on apps? i don't need to keep 5 billion page cache on browser or reddit or youtube or whatever. for people who have fast internet, or even those who don't, cache does not work because these apps "assume" you are always connected so they break the flow if it detects no internet so cache is worthless then. other than that, i have been requesting app devs on github, foss apps at that to have a cache limit inside so if i set to 100mb or even 0, that works

toast0 5y ago

When apps target users in developing countries, there is pressure to keep apps small. Those users tend to have phones with less storage and tend to sort by size when deleting apps to install something else. Some users will build up a cycle of delete A and B to install C, then delete it to put back A and B. The smaller your app is, the more likely it is to stay installed because it's not as helpful to delete it. The biggest obstacles are small storage phone users are well represented in non-Play store installs, which often means a fat apk that has binary libraries for all platforms and raster images for all dpis. The other big issue is translated strings; Android standard string translations can't be compressed (apk is a zip, but not everything in a zip is compressed), even though they would be very compressible. There's a lot of languages out there, and not using the standard translation tool is hard to sell (and you still need it for somethings anyway). Doesn't help for US based banks though. Mostly their customers are going to have enough space that a bank app isn't going to get deleted to make space for whatever else.