6 ms·

I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine. Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest website is a few mb. They do

I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine. Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest website is a few mb. They dont let you highlight text and have other bizarre design choices. Even worse, they request importing contacts list which isnt even an option on the web. Native apps could be butter but more often than not they are like margarine. Smooth, oily, and not good for you.

andrewstuart2 1y ago
500MB average seems like a gross exaggeration. I agree apps are oversize but I have maybe 2 native apps on mobile that are so large.
- dbtc 1y ago
  Chase Mobile for iOS is 350MB; far from 500, but still baffling why an app would need to be that large just to show me some numbers. Capital One is 435MB... Garmin Connect is 518MB for some stupid reason, while Strava is half that and Gaia GPS (great app), is under 100.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that. Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of different languages.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used. Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic wand they’re sold as.
        frollogaston 1y ago
        Cross-platform is very much not a magic wand, but it's still often easier than building the same thing in two different native SDKs, and I can see why people do it. Disagree about UIKit, mainly cause of Autolayout, unless it's gotten reworked in the past 8 years. When I started using RN, I had zero web experience, and still it was way quicker to set up a basic UI than in the UIKit stuff I'd been doing for years. And for all that setup, Autolayout doesn't even seem to future-proof your stuff that well. An abandoned ObjC iPhone app I wrote in high school using C-style macros for layout worked perfectly fine on the newer screen sizes that broke most other apps. I thought maybe I was stupid, but the other iPhone devs I worked with constantly had problems with Autolayout. Maybe a real expert iPhone dev won't, but it shouldn't take that.
        cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        The thing about UIKit is that you really need to forget about the drag and drop UI editor (XIBs and storyboards). They make everything including autolayout much more painful than they need to be. Pure code UIKit using autolayout’s anchors API is quite serviceable, and if you follow recommendations (use safe area and keyboard constraints! They exist for a reason) reasonably futureproof. The iOS apps I’ve worked on have needed very little change year to year for quite some time at this point.
        frollogaston 1y ago
        That's true, though some will tell you the opposite. But even then, the pure code autolayout seemed a lot harder to use than HTML/CSS. The fact that so many people got it that wrong says something. Like yeah a desktop website might break on mobile, but I'm talking about a mobile screen just getting slightly longer or something.
    - Brian_K_White 1y ago
      "clock in well under the 100MB mark" But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically gross. The fact that we can afford it these days is an irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        Yeah, especially if I can make a desktop app under 10 MB with the same functionality and features (obviously non-Electron).
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely to be highly functional, while simple apps are very small. For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list, there’s a social media site reader app that’s 7.6MB and a text editor that’s 697KB. Those sizes aren’t the least bit unreasonable.
        tomrod 1y ago
        What are these you are listing?
    - AbstractH24 1y ago
      Whats the business case to invest in building these well and as small as possible? Heck, if you are a world business and the app isn't your core value prop, whats your case for investing anything more than the bare minimum in creating your app?
  - megablast 1y ago
    Is it? You can't easily tell with iOS apps because the container might be that big, but the app on your phone is a fraction of that. The container might contain multiple versions.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - LostMyLogin 1y ago
    Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it’s really hard to support Outside.
    - dbtc 1y ago
      Yes, the Outside aspect is annoying. Did you switch to another app?
- boznz 1y ago
  The UK's new electronic visa application form app is over 200MB and it is literally only a 3 page application form. Program efficiency at its finest!
- socalgal2 1y ago
  Average, yes, probably an exaggeration. Some apps iOS: wechat: 740meg gmail: 672 google chat: 585 uber: 582 tiktok: 572 headspace: 498 instagram: 467 doulingo: 462 bank of america: 456 capital one: 435 expedia: 412 linkedin: 402 doordash: 392 google: 379 facebook: 365 unitied airlines:355 chase: 352 google photos: 348 line: 346 amex: 339 google maps: 336 youtube: 329 booking.com: 320 citi: 319 amazon music: 317 snapchat: 316 lyft: 307 wells fargo: 292 strava: 283 twitch: 279 rotten tomatoes: 262 airbnb: 254 youtube music: 245 whatsapp: 239 mlb: 220 discord: 212 tinder: 202 of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc... I am quite surprised at a few apps I know are just a webpage, because I can to go to the webpage and see it's exactly the same, are still 40meg to 80meg. I'd expect them be able to be as small as a few K. Open a webview, navigate to https://mycompany.com https://mycompany.com. The end
  - mh- 1y ago
    I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest megabyte. Gmail: 612mb Facebook: 359mb YouTube: 303mb Amex: 365mb I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe someone else can check the actual IPAs? edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)
    - jazzypants 1y ago
      Amex being 300mb is genuinely hilarious. What does that app even do?
      - justinclift 1y ago
dsp_person 1y ago
Funny cause I was just thinking about the tradeoff of "internal wasm app" vs "internal native app". The former has convenient distribution, but worse performance and other limitations. The latter can be tricky to keep updated, ensure the environment is the same for everyone and/or cross-platform differences, etc., but significantly better/faster. But both binaries about the same size. Assuming using something like sokol or SDL3.
ljm 1y ago
A lot of native apps are just wrappers around a JS context with a few bridges into native APIs and they are pure data grabs. Reddit always asks you to use its native app, for example. Why the fuck would I care so much about Reddit that I want it outside of my browser? Same goes for any other website.
- spauldo 1y ago
  Reddit is one of the cases where a native app makes sense. Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great. But I'll eat my hat before I'll install Reddit's own app. Reddit killing off 3rd party apps is why I post here and not there.
  - andoando 1y ago
    That's because reddit on mobile browser sucks ass (feels like it's intentionally made to suck) even more so than its native app. I don't think being nativr is what made 3rd party apps great
  - card_zero 1y ago
    I too switched from Reddit to HN during the API protests of '23. But I always browsed through old.reddit anyway, I never used the third party apps. I'm aware of names like RIF and that everyone said they were great, but what was great about them?
    - jombib 1y ago
      Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.
      - card_zero 1y ago
        So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features, smoother, better. What? Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not mattering.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Most apps, these days, seem to be “hybrid,” where they use a system like Ionic or React. These systems usually slap on some considerable libraries. I understand why, but I’m not a fan of hybrid apps. I like to do native, which results in much smaller, faster, and more efficient apps. It’s just not as cost-effective, if you want to support multiple platforms. However, native apps aren’t automatically well-behaved ones. In fact, they usually have access to even more tools for eroding privacy or user agency. Good behavior is up to the app developers, and that doesn’t seem to be much of a priority, these days.
- 65 1y ago
  If it's not a game or a large company's app, it's probably a web view app. At my company I work on the website, and we have an app that is essentially just a bunch of web views of the website. Why we need an app I don't know. I suppose people are just used to apps more than they are websites, which makes me sad.
riedel 1y ago
It is just the app producers forcing you. Like AliExpress, the app is just the website (it does not even respect the default text size), but only the app allows you to do reviews. Some only give you rebates if you install their spyware. Many do not support notifications for no obvious reason. IMHO we need more user scripts to fix some of those stupidities.
BrtByte 1y ago
It's such a basic interaction, yet so many apps disable it
abeindoria 1y ago
What makes margarine not "good for you?"
W3zzy 1y ago
:-) be nice to margarine. It can be used to better your health. Because it's not butter, it can be supplemented with vitamins and minerals and can be used to lower cholesterol. But, I get your point.
quitit 1y ago
I am particularly incensed by governments that require citizens use apps to access their digital services. Especially so in the EU, where on one hand they're annoyed at big tech, and on the other they're forcing citizens to be customers. Even services which are web-based rely on an app for login authentication.
- Sammi 1y ago
  Why tha hell am I required to use a locked down american device to access my public services in Europe? This is not ok.
croisillon 1y ago
and don't forget imdb and airbnb, who absolutely _need_ the latest ios to work
77pt77 1y ago
> where even the heaviest website is a few mb Not nowadays they aren't. And haven't been for at least a decade!
burnte 1y ago
I totally agree. So many sites nag me to use an app, nope, your website is perfect, I don't need your code running on my device 24/7.

andrewstuart2 1y ago

500MB average seems like a gross exaggeration. I agree apps are oversize but I have maybe 2 native apps on mobile that are so large.

dbtc 1y ago
Chase Mobile for iOS is 350MB; far from 500, but still baffling why an app would need to be that large just to show me some numbers. Capital One is 435MB... Garmin Connect is 518MB for some stupid reason, while Strava is half that and Gaia GPS (great app), is under 100.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that. Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of different languages.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used. Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic wand they’re sold as.
      - frollogaston 1y ago
        Cross-platform is very much not a magic wand, but it's still often easier than building the same thing in two different native SDKs, and I can see why people do it. Disagree about UIKit, mainly cause of Autolayout, unless it's gotten reworked in the past 8 years. When I started using RN, I had zero web experience, and still it was way quicker to set up a basic UI than in the UIKit stuff I'd been doing for years. And for all that setup, Autolayout doesn't even seem to future-proof your stuff that well. An abandoned ObjC iPhone app I wrote in high school using C-style macros for layout worked perfectly fine on the newer screen sizes that broke most other apps. I thought maybe I was stupid, but the other iPhone devs I worked with constantly had problems with Autolayout. Maybe a real expert iPhone dev won't, but it shouldn't take that.
        cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        The thing about UIKit is that you really need to forget about the drag and drop UI editor (XIBs and storyboards). They make everything including autolayout much more painful than they need to be. Pure code UIKit using autolayout’s anchors API is quite serviceable, and if you follow recommendations (use safe area and keyboard constraints! They exist for a reason) reasonably futureproof. The iOS apps I’ve worked on have needed very little change year to year for quite some time at this point.
        frollogaston 1y ago
        That's true, though some will tell you the opposite. But even then, the pure code autolayout seemed a lot harder to use than HTML/CSS. The fact that so many people got it that wrong says something. Like yeah a desktop website might break on mobile, but I'm talking about a mobile screen just getting slightly longer or something.
  - Brian_K_White 1y ago
    "clock in well under the 100MB mark" But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically gross. The fact that we can afford it these days is an irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Yeah, especially if I can make a desktop app under 10 MB with the same functionality and features (obviously non-Electron).
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely to be highly functional, while simple apps are very small. For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list, there’s a social media site reader app that’s 7.6MB and a text editor that’s 697KB. Those sizes aren’t the least bit unreasonable.
      - tomrod 1y ago
        What are these you are listing?
  - AbstractH24 1y ago
    Whats the business case to invest in building these well and as small as possible? Heck, if you are a world business and the app isn't your core value prop, whats your case for investing anything more than the bare minimum in creating your app?
- megablast 1y ago
  Is it? You can't easily tell with iOS apps because the container might be that big, but the app on your phone is a fraction of that. The container might contain multiple versions.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- LostMyLogin 1y ago
  Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it’s really hard to support Outside.
  - dbtc 1y ago
    Yes, the Outside aspect is annoying. Did you switch to another app?
boznz 1y ago
The UK's new electronic visa application form app is over 200MB and it is literally only a 3 page application form. Program efficiency at its finest!
socalgal2 1y ago
Average, yes, probably an exaggeration. Some apps iOS: wechat: 740meg gmail: 672 google chat: 585 uber: 582 tiktok: 572 headspace: 498 instagram: 467 doulingo: 462 bank of america: 456 capital one: 435 expedia: 412 linkedin: 402 doordash: 392 google: 379 facebook: 365 unitied airlines:355 chase: 352 google photos: 348 line: 346 amex: 339 google maps: 336 youtube: 329 booking.com: 320 citi: 319 amazon music: 317 snapchat: 316 lyft: 307 wells fargo: 292 strava: 283 twitch: 279 rotten tomatoes: 262 airbnb: 254 youtube music: 245 whatsapp: 239 mlb: 220 discord: 212 tinder: 202 of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc... I am quite surprised at a few apps I know are just a webpage, because I can to go to the webpage and see it's exactly the same, are still 40meg to 80meg. I'd expect them be able to be as small as a few K. Open a webview, navigate to https://mycompany.com https://mycompany.com. The end
- mh- 1y ago
  I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest megabyte. Gmail: 612mb Facebook: 359mb YouTube: 303mb Amex: 365mb I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe someone else can check the actual IPAs? edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)
  - jazzypants 1y ago
    Amex being 300mb is genuinely hilarious. What does that app even do?
    - justinclift 1y ago

dsp_person 1y ago

Funny cause I was just thinking about the tradeoff of "internal wasm app" vs "internal native app". The former has convenient distribution, but worse performance and other limitations. The latter can be tricky to keep updated, ensure the environment is the same for everyone and/or cross-platform differences, etc., but significantly better/faster. But both binaries about the same size. Assuming using something like sokol or SDL3.

ljm 1y ago

A lot of native apps are just wrappers around a JS context with a few bridges into native APIs and they are pure data grabs. Reddit always asks you to use its native app, for example. Why the fuck would I care so much about Reddit that I want it outside of my browser? Same goes for any other website.

spauldo 1y ago
Reddit is one of the cases where a native app makes sense. Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great. But I'll eat my hat before I'll install Reddit's own app. Reddit killing off 3rd party apps is why I post here and not there.
- andoando 1y ago
  That's because reddit on mobile browser sucks ass (feels like it's intentionally made to suck) even more so than its native app. I don't think being nativr is what made 3rd party apps great
- card_zero 1y ago
  I too switched from Reddit to HN during the API protests of '23. But I always browsed through old.reddit anyway, I never used the third party apps. I'm aware of names like RIF and that everyone said they were great, but what was great about them?
  - jombib 1y ago
    Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.
    - card_zero 1y ago
      So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features, smoother, better. What? Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not mattering.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

Most apps, these days, seem to be “hybrid,” where they use a system like Ionic or React. These systems usually slap on some considerable libraries. I understand why, but I’m not a fan of hybrid apps. I like to do native, which results in much smaller, faster, and more efficient apps. It’s just not as cost-effective, if you want to support multiple platforms. However, native apps aren’t automatically well-behaved ones. In fact, they usually have access to even more tools for eroding privacy or user agency. Good behavior is up to the app developers, and that doesn’t seem to be much of a priority, these days.

65 1y ago
If it's not a game or a large company's app, it's probably a web view app. At my company I work on the website, and we have an app that is essentially just a bunch of web views of the website. Why we need an app I don't know. I suppose people are just used to apps more than they are websites, which makes me sad.

riedel 1y ago

It is just the app producers forcing you. Like AliExpress, the app is just the website (it does not even respect the default text size), but only the app allows you to do reviews. Some only give you rebates if you install their spyware. Many do not support notifications for no obvious reason. IMHO we need more user scripts to fix some of those stupidities.

BrtByte 1y ago

It's such a basic interaction, yet so many apps disable it

abeindoria 1y ago

What makes margarine not "good for you?"

W3zzy 1y ago

:-) be nice to margarine. It can be used to better your health. Because it's not butter, it can be supplemented with vitamins and minerals and can be used to lower cholesterol. But, I get your point.

quitit 1y ago

I am particularly incensed by governments that require citizens use apps to access their digital services. Especially so in the EU, where on one hand they're annoyed at big tech, and on the other they're forcing citizens to be customers. Even services which are web-based rely on an app for login authentication.

Sammi 1y ago
Why tha hell am I required to use a locked down american device to access my public services in Europe? This is not ok.

croisillon 1y ago

and don't forget imdb and airbnb, who absolutely _need_ the latest ios to work

77pt77 1y ago

> where even the heaviest website is a few mb Not nowadays they aren't. And haven't been for at least a decade!

burnte 1y ago

I totally agree. So many sites nag me to use an app, nope, your website is perfect, I don't need your code running on my device 24/7.