14 ms·

Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?

436 points by thefilmore 9mo ago

HPsquared 9mo ago
The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"
- simonw 9mo ago
  Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?
  - jshchnz 9mo ago
    Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617
    - compiler-guy 9mo ago
      Non X version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html
    - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
      So is the extra space not accounted for from then to now AI related pieces?
    - simonw 9mo ago
      Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog
      - trevor-e 9mo ago
        Yep, localization is a huge size bloat for enterprisey apps that support many locales. There is no Apple provided way to dynamically download select localization packs based on the device locale. Meta came up with their own solution: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs... The small filesize issue is something we commonly see in games, was surprised to see it for Gmail. And btw we open-sourced much of our analysis after being acquired by Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad
      - lynndotpy 9mo ago
        4kB is also the minimum file size on Linux, so I imagine a similar issue could exist on Android.
        jeroenhd 9mo ago
        The Gmail app on Android is 150MiB in size. Android traditionally puts resources into a compressed archive, though, so by simply using an archive for storage, Google may be avoiding the 4k size problem.
      - tonyplee 9mo ago
        Wonder if it is better to create separate localized app download such as gmail-japanese, etc.
        hn8726 9mo ago
        Google Play offers such functionality already, it's called App Bundles. Instead of uploading an entire APK, the developers can upload the app assets that get bundled into device-specific APKs containing only the resources necessary for the end device. So you'd only get native libs for your phone CPU architecture, translations for the device language and image assets matching the device resolution for example. In fact, I think it's mandatory now to use the app bundles format (but you're still free to configure it to some extent) I now see the article is about iOS app, but it looks like the Android app is anywhere between 50mb and 100mb (depending on the apk download side I look at) which is much more reasonable
    - jonny_eh 9mo ago
      Looks like it's mostly strings, probably due to localization. They should consider compressing each localization/language, and decompressing the needed bundle on first startup (or language change). Even better: Download the language bundle when needed.
      - Pxtl 9mo ago
        Well, that's a question for OS level. If the OS doesn't require the user to download the language and so language-switching to a new language is doable as an offline operation, I could see it being frustrating that switching to a new language must be done online. So compression/deduplication is probably the better option. Rather than storing as 1 zip per language, though, you'd probably want a compression format that also eliminates duplication that may occur between languages if you're storing all languages compressed on the system. That means you'd need compression to handle the entire language complex being in one massive compressed blob and you'd just extract out the languages you needed. I assume there are some forms of zipping that do this better than others.
    - thefilmore 9mo ago
      Author here. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they released an updated version of this analysis last year [1]. It matches what I saw when analyzing the IPA. I tried to do a deeper analysis on the code itself using several tools, including Google's own bloaty [2] which was not very useful without symbols, classdumpios [3] which revealed something like 50k interfaces starting with "ComGoogle", and Ghidra [4], which I left running for a day to analyze the binary, but kept hanging and freezing so I gave up on it. Perhaps comparing the Android and iOS code could lead to something more fruitful. [1] https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 [2] https://github.com/google/bloaty https://github.com/google/bloaty [3] https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios [4] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
- Aperocky 9mo ago
  The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked. And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.
  - NuclearPM 9mo ago
    Deserves.
    - dieggsy 9mo ago
      It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs. This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.
      - HPsquared 9mo ago
        I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".
      - anal_reactor 9mo ago
        There's something funny about someone trying to be smart and pointing out a typo or some other minor irrelevant error only to be proven completely wrong.
        WillPostForFood 9mo ago
        He isn't wasn't wrong, and the parent post wasn't even correcting him. Gmail is not a corporation, it is a product - singular.
        9mo ago
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest. Ps pardon my french but I'm really annoyed about this and in this case it's warranted in my opinion. 800MB is ridiculous.
  - rjh29 9mo ago
    Corsair iCUE. 1.1GB to control your RAM lights...
    - jason_oster 9mo ago
      Beautiful example of bloat. Bravo! The software crisis never ended. Instead, we also gained a hardware crisis.
      - rjh29 9mo ago
        I just uninstalled it and Windows reported it as 3.21GB, so it was larger than I thought!
    - encom 9mo ago
      >1.1GB >RAM lights I'm not sure which is dumber.
      - rjh29 9mo ago
        That's like saying Christmas lights are dumb. Each to his or her own though!
  - HPsquared 9mo ago
    It doesn't inspire confidence in privacy when things are so huge, connected and opaque.
- layer8 9mo ago
  As usual, the answer to a question in the title is “no”. ;)
  - achairapart 9mo ago
    Correct, as in Betteridge's law of headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- bdhtu 9mo ago
  It's not just Gmail. Most of the popular apps on iOS are literally 10x bigger than their Android versions. It's hard to find a popular iOS app that's smaller than an Electron app.
  - pfortuny 9mo ago
    Then you look at the desktop backgrounds folder in your Mac and say: WHAT THE FUCK! There are 4k videos there... Just unbelievable.
    - QuantumNomad_ 9mo ago
      They use those videos on the lock screen for example. Not saying it’s a good idea that they ship all of those big video files. Believe me, my MBP M1 with 256GB SSD barely has space left even when I go and clean up various files I no longer need. Foolish as I was, I believed that doubling the amount of storage compared to the MacBook Air I had before it would leave me with plenty of space for years to come. In reality it did not take much time before I was using most of the storage available. So when I bought my latest iPhone not long after I bought that MBP, I opted for the iPhone model that has 1TB storage. And at least on my phone I consistently have a good amount of space left. Every couple of months I move pictures and videos from the phone to an external hard drive. So since it was only a week or so since last I moved pictures and videos from the phone, I am currently using 350 GB of storage on the phone. Out of those currently used 350 GB, just under 40GB is accounted for by music I have downloaded in the SoundCloud app, which is ok even though maybe a little bit silly on my part. I have it set to download all songs that I favourite, and I sometimes manually download whole albums and whole playlists. Not because I want to listen to all of it offline but so that when I am offline I still have a wide selection to choose from. For example on the occasion that I fly by plane once or twice a year. Another 20GB of storage space is used by maps I’ve downloaded in the Organic Maps app to have locally saved maps for various places I’ve been to or want to go to. Again, a little bit silly to keep that much map data even for the places that I am not going to visit for at least 6-12 months, and which will need to be updated again when I do go there to ensure I have up to date maps. But all in all, I can “afford it” with a terabyte total storage. And both the songs in SoundCloud and the map data is data that I could manually go through and delete as much of as I’d like to if I ever were in a pinch and needed to free up space. At times I will hoover around 700 GB of storage used on the phone if it’s been a while since I moved pictures and videos and I have filmed some longer videos. My phone being a few years old now however, it doesn’t have USB-C. So it takes a bit of time to move pictures and videos from it. Even if I transfer over the network it doesn’t seem much faster than USB 2.0, weirdly.
- citizenpaul 9mo ago
  I've noticed in general android apps have been shrinking in size for several years. I'm not sure if recent LLM trends are changing that again.
- BatteryMountain 9mo ago
  Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB
  - trinix912 9mo ago
    Holy... What kinda heavy lifting is Google Play Services doing with those 1330 megs?
    - ChoGGi 9mo ago
      Dunno but my userdata for play services is 623MB.
  - anthk 9mo ago
    Instead of Gboard, get Anysoft keyboard from https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org, enable Gestures in the settings. You'll thank me later. Also, F-Droid has different keyboard layouts for Ansyoft such as better ones for SSH and OFC language related layouts.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 9mo ago
      Futo Keyboard. https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/
fooblaster 9mo ago
10 MB mail app. 690 MB local llm to write snarky emails for you.
datadrivenangel 9mo ago
Google and others are putting 2FA notifications in their regular apps like gmail. I had to open my gmail app to get a 2FA code instead of my google authenticator app today... which is very weird and probably increases the needed security of the gmail app in addition to the size
- inetknght 9mo ago
  You really think 2FA notifications cause so much bloat?
  - datadrivenangel 9mo ago
    Google Auth on ios is 38MB. Assuming the core code is probably ~5-50%, which would be 2-20MB added to the gmail app. On the middle side of that range, extra features adds up fast.
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  They use the YouTube app for this also.
loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app? Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device. Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms. I’m just speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason. You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.
- Kwpolska 9mo ago
  The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.
  - loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
    Probably bundles its own copy of Chrome just in case :)
    - MYEUHD 9mo ago
      No need to. Android does that already and allows apps to use it (the webview)
    - kccqzy 9mo ago
      I can totally imagine someone doing just that. > Product Requirement: Even if the user deletes the Chrome app, the Gmail app must work to display HTML emails, the authentication screen including 2FA options, etc. Can’t rely on WebViews for security reasons.
    - danpalmer 9mo ago
      It doesn't, that's Android Webview which is distributed separately. It may however bundle its own instance of the Chrome networking library which is a few MB itself. For apps like Gmail and a handful of others, they are big enough that they need multiple layers of fallback. e.g. they can't just use a networking layer, they need a fallback separate implementation in case that breaks, so that they can recover. They might have 2 or even 3 options for some of the critical parts, all so that if stuff goes wrong they can as close to guarantee recovery as they can get. Mobile is quite specific in this regard, because you don't have hardware access, network is heavily restricted, battery reduces the amount you can do, etc. Source: I work on mobile SRE things at Google.
mbesto 9mo ago
Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)
- Aachen 9mo ago
  Do you mean the RAM used by the tab? The article is talking about disk space
  - stronglikedan 9mo ago
    There's an app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetools.hackernews&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetool...
    - Aachen 9mo ago
      - They mention Google Chrome tabs - They speak of HN as a single thing, so presumably not a third-party implementation but the official one
    - squeaky-clean 9mo ago
      That's some third party app. And if you look at the Github it's basically an advertising vector for that companies set of mobile development tools.
  - mbesto 9mo ago
    ah I misunderstood...because hilariously my chrome tab is also ~700MB!
    - ksaj 9mo ago
      Pretty wild. Mine (Chromium on Raspberry Pi) was 52mb, bumped up to 58mb to write this response.
jmclnx 9mo ago
The question why is almost all modern apps pushing around 1G. It is dependencies, if you ever compiled almost any GUI application via prots/pkgsrc on a BSD, you will be shocked by the dependencies that application needs, it is obscene.
- tarentel 9mo ago
  It is dependencies but not from the GUI. As someone who has worked on several very large apps I can tell you 99% of the bloat is garbage. Someone somewhere wants this SDK from their friend's company in the app. Some manager wants to track X using this very specific framework. Some designer decided to add in animations in one screen that requires another framework to run and also 10mb in assets. etc, etc, etc. If your app is 10+ years old this all adds up and no one ever cleans any of it up. There's probably like 100mb of crap you can delete that doesn't even work anymore but who has time to remove that?
calin2k 9mo ago
maybe because we need to be pushed to buy minimum the 256GB versions of phones. it is a wintel deja vu
- aaronbrethorst 9mo ago
  Why would Google try to maximize Apple's revenue?
  - dewey 9mo ago
    Google is also selling phones? Not a great point as it's probably not really a revenue driver for them though.
  - wiseowise 9mo ago
    Duopoly. Both get richer.
  - mNovak 9mo ago
    Bloat the apps, push users into a high tier iPhone, some % of users settle for a more affordable Pixel. Not that Android apps are that much better.
dbacar 9mo ago
It is bloatware for a reason, to force you a cloud subscription, not for your money (which helps though) but your data.
- rconti 9mo ago
  Google writes bloatware for iOS to force me to buy a cloud subscription (?) from... Apple?
  - dbacar 9mo ago
    Gmail android size is also ~750MB.
begueradj 9mo ago
>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety". More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.
- Aachen 9mo ago
  Pardon? I can't tell if you're serious. How would adding more lines of code in a program (or assets or whatever make up this size) add security?
  - begueradj 9mo ago
    You must be a developer only :) https://www.securecodewarrior.com/press-releases/secure-code-warrior-survey-finds-86-of-developers-do-not-view-application-security-as-a-top-priority https://www.securecodewarrior.com/press-releases/secure-code...
    - Aachen 9mo ago
      I think the joke is going over my head ^^; Maybe you mean 'just' a regular developer as opposed to a cryptobro? Edit: I see you added in a link. "The research found that more than half of the 1200 developers surveyed are unable to ensure that their code is protected from seven common vulnerabilities", hmm maybe it was not a joke? The article (or the survey it's based on) sounds extremely misguided though, sounding comparable to saying that only X% of farmers never had a single rotten apple so clearly it's not a 'top' priority for them to produce quality at all cost Oh, and I just noticed you're the same person as whom I was responding to above. That explains Fwiw, I do security audits as a day job so I have some idea of which coding practices lead to good security and it's not download size. You can try this "you're just a developer" again on someone else maybe
      - begueradj 9mo ago
CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
AOT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast) Frameworks 150MB Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB AI models 25MB
- einpoklum 9mo ago
  AOT = Ahead Of Time? Attack On Titan? Something else?
  - kachapopopow 9mo ago
    it's ahead of time and AOT compilation is done at OS startup, not sure if that is being measured here.
    - efficax 9mo ago
      OS startup? AOT compilation happens in the build pipeline, before the app is distributed.
      - chasd00 9mo ago
        Wouldn't compilation during the build process be ROT? As in, "Right On Time" compilation? Build is where the compilation step is usually performed.
        jeroenhd 9mo ago
        I don't think iOS does any on-device or in-app-store compilation since Apple deprecated Bitcode.
      - kachapopopow 9mo ago
        AOT is unique because you want to compile it with all the capabilities your device has, so there still has to be some complication done, especially when you have processors that have brand new instructions to make operations significantly more efficient.
crazygringo 9mo ago
> For most of that period, the size of the Gmail app hovered around 12 MB, with a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017... The Gmail app, on the App Store, is currently 760.7 MB in size. With charts: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-taking-up-a-lot-more-space-1513303131 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-tak... I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB. Something like Gmail doesn't have massive hi-resolution bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.
- Aachen 9mo ago
  > I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes
  - paulddraper 9mo ago
    > a few dozen kilobytes A "hello world" Android starts at ~5MB. It is possible to make it smaller if choosing some non-default different tools.
    - vbezhenar 9mo ago
      Hello world Android app includes a lot of dependencies like compat libs, constraint layout, kotlin runtime. These are not essential and can be removed.
    - binaryturtle 9mo ago
      Outch… and I though an ~8KB "Hello, World!" here on my rusty Mac is HUGE already.
    - rabf 9mo ago
      https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid 25Kb
pavel_lishin 9mo ago
I was just wondering why the Adobe Acrobat installer is nearly a gigabyte in size.
- transcriptase 9mo ago
  Personally I always wonder why a pdf tool puts 3-6 background processes on startup that are constantly doing something with my CPU and internet connection when my PC is otherwise idle.
ineedasername 9mo ago
I know that in some cases, apparent bloat like this is related to needing to support so many potential devices and versions of the underlying OS. Google has to support, on iOS, roughly 6 years of devices and their variations + OS variations on them. Each of these may require their own libraries compiled against it, for optimal performance or because it simply is less practical to engineer non-breaking updates against new SDK and HW versions in the same codebase without introducing complexity. Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have to do this. They can integrate at lower levels and even with all else being equal can develop updates with perfect insight on the ecosystem and foresight on things to come. Somewhat supporting this possible explanation is that, similar to Apple on iOS, Google's apps on android are significantly smaller.
lkurtz 9mo ago
I believe it is because it includes a suite of enterprise management features in addition to Gmail-related features. (Search for "google basic mobile device management" for more info.)
Etheryte 9mo ago
For me, the most important takeaway from the article was that the Passwords app supports 2FA codes! I was not aware of this, that's nice and getting rid of Authenticator is one less Google thing to worry about.
- paxys 9mo ago
  Having both your password and 2nd factor in the same place isn't the best idea however.
  - Etheryte 9mo ago
    They're both on my phone anyway, so I don't really see the difference? Whether it's in one app or spilt across two apps makes no difference if there's no extra layers between. Having it all in Passwords is better in that regard, since it requires you to use Face ID to open the app.
  - dangus 9mo ago
    I don’t think it matters much. In 1Password you still need your secret code to login in addition to your password. It essentially acts like a second factor. I could give you my 1Password username and password right now and you wouldn’t be able to access it. Being logged in to my 1Password essentially verifies that you have a physical device of mine.
paxys 9mo ago
I genuinely struggle to understand how apps can get that large. Games with hi-res graphics, sure. But Gmail barely has any assets. And they aren't shipping with custom runtimes or anything of that sort (like an Electron app) because Apple doesn't allow it. So how much code can you possibly write that compiles to 700 MB?
- lostmsu 9mo ago
  Could be similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 (code duplication for locality for a tiny perf gain).
culebron21 9mo ago
Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyond 1,3 gig now. And it's FOSS, not commercial bloatware you might think. I have no idea what they stuff it with. Just yesterday, I wanted to generate a GeoTiff on a macbook. To do it in a simple way, you need libGDAL, a geo-spatial abstraction library that exists since maybe the '90 and supports all thinkable formats. Under Linux, you just install it together with QGIS as a dependency. Mac is still unix, so you may think, a 3-decades old library, with few patches to support modern formats, should be just a couple of megs, right? Brew suggested downloading ~2 GB of ~100 packages!!!! Half of them were aws-* (yes, AWS tools), and 1 GB of LLVM!!! (is it their whole GIT repo with 10M SLOC?) For geotiff, I ended just using standard Tiff library, inserting my 4 geospatial tags with a few lines of code.
- scblock 9mo ago
  I am not sure QGIS is a good comparison to this. The projection information dataset is nearly 800 MB on its own. But it's not really PROJ's fault that there are so many projections to manage.
- maximilianburke 9mo ago
  I just downloaded QGIS to take a look. On my Mac, it takes 2.1GB of disk space after installation, which has some notable space sinks: * 562mb of Python 3.11 and libraries (of which 240mb goes to the qgis python library, 101mb goes to duckdb, and 50mb to PyQt5) * 130mb to i18n * 140mb to `libclntsh.dylib` which I think is the Oracle DB client library? * 80mb to libduckdb.dylib, separate from the Python version * 80mb to libQtWebKit
  - culebron21 9mo ago
    Oh, nice. Yeah, Python got gazillion new versions, incompatible, in million folders in sys.path, and sys.path different in different places, and recently they started to menace you to shutdown old versions (I get such warning, that 3.9 will stop working in October 2026). So, since you can't rely on system Python anymore, they made essentially a docker container. Sigh.
HendrikHensen 9mo ago
Well, something fishy is going on because there is literally no way that Safari, in its entirety, is 5.1 MB. The numbers for the others app seem similarly off. It would be really hard to believe that somehow Apple has found some magic formula to make their apps 100x smaller than Google and Microsoft. Much more likely is that the reporting by the OS is off somehow (probably most of the app functionality is tied up in shared resources counted towards system files, and not counted towards the app's size). With respect, I would expect more from articles posted on Hacker News. More thorough research, and in fact an answer to the question.
- jacobp100 9mo ago
  Safari probably is that size because WebKit is a system framework, so it’s just the size of the UI code
- afavour 9mo ago
  Safari is just a wrapper around the system webview framework so it does make sense, although it makes the comparison very misleading.
  - akho 9mo ago
    So are the other browsers on iOS.
    - afavour 9mo ago
      Not in the EU...
      - immibis 9mo ago
        Yes in the EU. Apple made the alternative browser requirements impossible to meet, and somehow got away with it.
      - zuhsetaqi 9mo ago
        Yes also in the EU.
elpakal 9mo ago
If you're interested in iOS app size analysis, I build and maintain this https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881 ($4.99). Happy to share download codes, HMU at info [at] dotipa.app
kccqzy 9mo ago
The table at the end is seriously misguided. You can’t compare the sizes of an iOS preinstalled app against a non-preinstalled app. It’s just a thin UI shell where the code for all the functionality is inside system frameworks. The Photos app is quoted at 4.2MB. Guess what, if you delete that, you still have system components to render photos, UI for a photo picker, perform analysis on photos such as face recognition, all the iCloud networking code to support iCloud Photo Library, etc.
- tarentel 9mo ago
  You can though because a lot of those things you're talking about are available for any app. Sure Apple does have some private frameworks and what not that aren't available to everyone but I imagine if you wanted to recreate what the photo app is doing you'd be able to in 4.2mb or less.
  - kccqzy 9mo ago
    The iCloud Photo Library doesn’t have any public APIs that I know of. You simply can’t recreate the Photos app completely, regardless of app sizes. Apple values deep integration into the system more than it values giving third party developers a fair chance at cloning their app.
    - tarentel 9mo ago
      You can access iCloud from an iOS app, it has its own public framework called CloudKit, so you could create your own version of it. If you don't like that example Chrome and Edge are both forced to use WebKit on iOS but are still much larger so.
      - morcus 9mo ago
        > You can access iCloud from an iOS app, it has its own public framework called CloudKit, so you could create your own version of it. How is this relevant? The point of having a Google Photos app is to access / back up your photos via Google Photos, not to make an alternative frontend for iCloud.
oenton 9mo ago
It’s wild when you put it into context. I remember when Gmail first opened to the public with a whopping *1 GB* of storage… now the app alone almost exceeds that.
wrs 9mo ago
Not only is the YouTube iOS app huge, it uses an atrocious amount of additional storage. It was using over 2GB on my iPad for...something...and the only way to clean that up was to delete the app and reinstall.
csoups14 9mo ago
The easy answer: Google simply does not care. Some mix of: they don't measure it, they don't look at it, they don't goal around reducing it, nobody's performance review is going to be better because they reduced it, no director is asking product teams why they're increasing the app size. It's not surprising why these companies don't care, because it's a tragedy of the commons. The better question is why is Apple allowing these companies to ship apps that unnecessarily take up a meaningful amount of storage space?
- paxys 9mo ago
  > why is Apple allowing these companies to ship apps that unnecessarily take up a meaningful amount of storage space The answer to this one is obvious - to incentivize you to buy iPhones with more storage and/or higher tier iCloud plans.
Fiveplus 9mo ago
A significant portion of larger sizes is likely due to how Google handles shared code across its iOS suite. They rely heavily on a shared C++ backend (using tools like J2ObjC or similar internal transpilers) to keep logic consistent between Android, iOS and of course the web. When you pull in the gmail dependency from the internal monorepo, you are most likely pulling in the entire visual stack for Google meet, chat and spaces, plus the heavy protocol buffer definitions and gRPC libraries that underpin them. Even if you don't use the "meet" tab, the binary could be including the video codecs, the real-time transmission logic plus the AR filter assets, because the app is compiled as a "Super App" container rather than a modular mail client. I feel it's an organizational artifact as much as a technical one.
- jeffbee 9mo ago
  > and gRPC Right, I wouldn't be surprised of the app includes its own cryptography instead of relying on platform libraries, and/or contains what amounts to a userspace network stack in the form of QUIC (Cronet).
- port11 9mo ago
  Very insightful, rather than unjustified speculation. Of course it doesn’t explain why many other apps are so big, e.g. Withings, Bunq (bank), and Albert Heijn (supermarket) together eat 1GB of my storage. All 3 are things I need to list data, but somehow are the size they are.
  - tralarpa 9mo ago
    I don't know much about app development, but I was curious and downloaded the Albert Heijn apk for ARM64. Inside the apk, the three largest entities are: - libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously) - flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.) - libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think) There is a 640 KByte json file in the assets that stores an animation in base64 format. Now you know what the CPU and storage resources of your devices are used for nowadays...
kccqzy 9mo ago
People need to reread this classic piece from 2001 every so often: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... As a regular user, you are probably using 10% of all features available.
- wackget 9mo ago
  Don't blame the users. Unless Google have hidden a copy of Crysis inside the Gmail app there's no hidden functionality which should come even close to requiring hundreds of megabytes.
- LePetitPrince 9mo ago
  [dead]
- esafak 9mo ago
  Gmail barely has any features, which haven't changed since it's inception. Most of the code is in the cloud.
  - kccqzy 9mo ago
    A lot of features are configurable by the domain administrators. As a user of the @gmail.com email, you won't see any.
- fx1994 9mo ago
  This might be true but most of time its just bloat no one uses.
didip 9mo ago
Because big enough tech companies always shipped their org charts in their products.
tonymet 9mo ago
I’ve noticed most popular apps are pushing 500+MB. Most likely they are shipping debug builds, with loads of third party deps, so they can send crash reports from production with meaningful stack traces. Until Apple penalizes app developers for app size, nothing will happen. Most consumers are not aware of the impact , until they go to clean up their phone. There isn’t much usable free space on the device after the OS, and now having 50+gb of used space from apps, means your own content (photos, music, videos) doesn’t fit. There isn’t much incentive regardless, since Apple merchandise’s iCloud storage. Bloated apps actually drive iCloud sales. A lose-lose for the consumer.
turtlebits 9mo ago
I'm sorry, but that "table" at the end of the article is infuriatingly confusing.
LePetitPrince 9mo ago
[dead]
titzer 9mo ago
My prediction is that this will continue to occur indefinitely. The conversation is always the same, only there is another zero on the end. We'll have terabyte apps in not too long. (100% serious)
eYrKEC2 9mo ago
Can we get dark-mode for another 5MB possibly? (700 MB more is also an acceptable increase for this feature) On second thought, I love looking at on-duty page emails in the middle of the night with 7 million lumens blasting my retinas.
kernal 9mo ago
The Apple vs Google app size comparison is so disingenuous. It doesn't take into account all of the preinstalled iOS dependency libraries used by these Apple apps.
anal_reactor 9mo ago
Because most phones have enough memory to handle all the bloat, and when they don't, Google can sell those people cloud space. Not to mention that adding more memory is how phone manufacturers earn money - out of my ass example just to illustrate the concept: 100GB phone costs $400, same phone but with 200GB memory costs $500, 100GB memory chip costs $20, manufacturer pockets the difference. Having bloated apps and no SD card (iOS doesn't support SD Cards, Android makes them work like shit on purpose) justifies in the eye of the consumer the necessity of extra memory. Most people have fast internet connection so download time is always acceptably small, no matter how much bloat you put, not to mention that updates are in the background anyway. The economic pressure to keep apps small is literally negative.
pgib 9mo ago
This may finally drive me to just use Apple Mail for my Google Workspace account. I know it's not a fair comparison, but an app I made that's in the App Store is only 8MB.
bigbuppo 9mo ago
Probably because it has three embedded versions of libcef
- David_Osipov 9mo ago
  Spot on! We tried to somehow reduce the libcef size in our B2B app - barely could do that. We had to employ some fancy compression techniques, but still this thing is huge!
esafak 9mo ago
Perhaps someone can decompile the app and find out.
agumonkey 9mo ago
2nd order Jevons paradox I guess
ramsj 9mo ago
This is why I use installable PWAs wherever possible. On my Android phone right now, the Outlook PWA uses 281kB. You still get notifications, but I haven't measured if data usage is higher.
rekabis 9mo ago
Maybe because it’s an Electron app? Sure, Electron does not come natively for iOS. But with tools like Capacitor, you can take a web app (even an Electron one) and package it for iOS/Android, adding native features and running in a native WebView, allowing it to be an “Electron for Mobile”.
- conradkay 9mo ago
  usually electron apps are 150-300MB
ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
I'm assuming one reason is frameworks. They can get quite big. Another reason, is rusty code (not Rust. It's a play on the saying "Code doesn't rust", which I used to hear, last century). It does, indeed, rust. Actually, "rots" is probably more apropos. I'll bet that's the reason that Xcode is such a pig (makes GMail look like an anorexic). Code is created that people no longer understand, so they are loath to make large changes. They just do enough to fix a bug, and pray that they don't need to dig any deeper. One of my first software jobs, was exactly like that. When that happens, the code never shrinks. It just accretes.
atmosx 9mo ago
Not sure how many ppl know this: you can use another email provider, e.g. user@yahoo.com, to register to YouTube.
- adzm 9mo ago
  Still need a phone number though
  - atmosx 9mo ago
    Phone number for youtube? I don't think so, need to double-check.
heisenbit 9mo ago
Maybe, just maybe should Apple vary the amount they charge by app size.
phplovesong 9mo ago
Framework mania. This has been the problem for years. Webapps bloat like crazy, and now with AI the sloplevel has gone berzerk.
nromiun 9mo ago
I just looked at Gmail on my Android phone and it is only 164 MB. That is a big difference. Also, one thing that annoyed me when I used iPhones is that you can't remove an app's cache without reinstalling it and losing all your data. And most modern applications think cache is free so they use a lot of it. Many times it will exceed even your installed apps or data size.
3ple_alpha 9mo ago
Android seems to be a bit better in that regard: not in the sense that applications are smaller (though I think they are, slightly), but rather that you can easily unpack or decompile most of them and see what's inside. There it tends to be mostly due to dependencies, including some native libraries in multiple copies for 2-3 CPU architecture.
n4bz0r 9mo ago
Why is my banking app 1.5GB?
transcriptase 9mo ago
You just need to check the version history for mobile apps to see what the developers are doing! It’s a wealth of information on new features and changes. For example here’s the Facebook app for iOS: 543.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2w ago) 542.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3w ago) 541.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 541.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 540.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 539.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 539.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 538.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 538.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 537.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 536.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 535.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 534.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 534.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 533.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 532.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 531.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 530.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 529.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 529.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 528.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 527.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 526.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 525.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 524.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (5mo ago)
waldrews 9mo ago
My whole cat is, what, a couple gigs of DNA?
NelsonMinar 9mo ago
On Android vs iOS, it's worth noting Android apps are smaller than iOS apps. The details are complicated but this report says after installation Android apps take up about half the space as iOS. https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-research/ https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-rese... One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-really-that-much-smaller-than-ios https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-real...
- landr0id 9mo ago
  Android also allows developers to split up their APK so features can be delivered on-demand: https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-delivery https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-deliver... AFAIK iOS does not offer anything similar.
burnt-resistor 9mo ago
The Facebook and Instagram iOS apps were/are enormous codebases. Absurd, sprawling monsters with tons of dead code, duplication, and old stuff.. like being written in mostly Objective-C. I imagine the Gmail app also suffers from having zillions of engineers touch it without being incentivized to make it better or smaller, only to add features and impact for the all-important performance review. Add zillions of instrumentation and third-party frameworks, each with piles of dependencies, and apps will grow without bounds like molecules of gas to fill the container.
nottorp 9mo ago
Incidentally, the last ssd i bought at the beginning of last year now costs double what i paid for it. Ram is what, 3-4x? It's a great time to ship more bloated apps, the suckers will enrich the hardware manufacturers, won't they?
- asadotzler 9mo ago
  Closer to 2.5x right now, likely to hit 3x this year.
metalman 9mo ago
even though I have more data than I ever use on my plan, after 15yr's exclusivly on mobile data, I reflexivly look at the size of anything before I download something, 700mb is bonkers for email, and I have started to reject many other apps, based on there improbable sizes. useing android my phone has gmail iremovably installed on my phone, but was disabled before I even put a sim in it, but in spite of this, having just checked, it has user data, something in cache, and has used some internet data. how creepy is that.
lifestyleguru 9mo ago
Sometimes I allow App Store to use mobile data because how much an app can weight, 50MB? Then suddenly 1GB of mobile data is gone.
unsupp0rted 9mo ago
It does do a lot of auth / security stuff for the entire Google Account... not 700 MB worth, but still thinking of the Gmail app as "just an email app" doesn't do it justice either.
maratc 9mo ago
> Also, can someone explain why Microsoft Authenticator is 150 MB to show 6-digit codes? That one's on the author. Duo Mobile is 2MB and shows the same 6-digit codes just fine.
RachelF 9mo ago
Mine is not 200MB on Android - the base apk is 67MB + 32MB for the ARM v8a specific libs. This is the code, the local caching and other data might make up the rest. For Android, you can check [1] Download the apk, rename it as a zip and look inside to see the files. A quick file analysis of the 67MB shows around 58MB of java code and some 32MB of ARM libs, 31MB of this is the libvideochat. [1] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11-17-840487098-release-release/gmail-2025-11-17-840487098-release-android-apk-download https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11...
j45 9mo ago
I didn't use the Gmail app for the longest time, always used third party, not sure why I started..
HumblyTossed 9mo ago
The article compares the native (iOS) mail app which is (from the article) 8.7MB. What I believe is happening is that the gmail app is not a native app, it is some cross-platform monstrosity, so Google has to bring all the widgets and doo-dads that they wrote so that it looks just like it does on all the other platforms. The native iOS mail app is so tiny because part of iOS that the article mentions taking up 25GB contains all the native widgets and doo-dads that the native mail app can use.
- mattacular 9mo ago
  I think that's true and it's also a convenient way to "smuggle" in Google's most important doodads: their tracking apparatus which includes all of the single sign on and MFA stuff on top of the usual analytics
neuroelectron 9mo ago
Of course it's self-hosted intelligence gathering or metadata auditing. This is Google we're talking about. They're "pushing compute to the edge," taking advantage of more powerful mobile processors to reduce their own infrastructure cost while still providing that sweet sweet Big Data, as they used to call it.
josefresco 9mo ago
1.15 GB for me - dear god. There's a comment in the article with two helpful links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail The bloat? Mostly "localization".
- kuekacang 9mo ago
  Except the text is stored as image, I can't imagine localization would be that large.
danielktdoranie 9mo ago
I just use the gmail mobile website on my smartphone and put a link to it on my Home Screen. So many of these services you don’t necessarily need an app for, unless you just enjoy giving them your personal data or something ha ha
urbandw311er 9mo ago
I’m just guessing but probably because it’s not just GMail, it’s likely chock full of all Google’s other walled garden nonsense. Hey, you installed GMail? Great, here’s a 2FA client for all federated Google logins everywhere too. hell i’m surprised it doesn’t contain the entire chrome browser as well.
KingLancelot 9mo ago
[dead]
Digit-Al 9mo ago
On my Android phone, just the calculator app is 13MB. How in hell is it 13MB just for a calculator? It beggars belief.
tgsovlerkhgsel 9mo ago
Android is slightly less horrendous but still bad - probably because at least in some markets enough people have low end phones that size does somewhat matter. I suspect Uber made optimizing app size a priority once they realized that their 1 GB behemoth was hovering on the top of the "things you can delete instead of your wedding photos if you want to be able to continue to use your phone" list, and they were losing customers over it. But there are still apps that are hundreds of MB with no valid reason to be that fat. Meanwhile, well-written browsers - which are essentially whole operating systems - are in the dozens, so this is 100% bloat. There simply is little incentive to optimize apps for size, because someone else pays the price and there is little consequence for making it big. Slapping another data collection or ad SDK into the app is easy and free. If the EU was serious about it, it would consider it part of the ecodesign rules since it forces people to buy new phones for more storage much earlier than needed. If the app stores were serious about it, they'd either re-introduce the hard cap and stick to it, or at least show the size prominently. Or start charging fees for bloaty apps. At least on the mobile version of the Play store, I don't think you can even see the app size without starting an install - let alone search or filter by it. It's as if they want to encourage bloat.
roesel 9mo ago
It might have to do with the fact that (at least on iOS), you can participate in a Google Meet call with just the Gmail app, as well as authenticate sign-ins, and who know what more. Could the main issue be Google is shipping apps within apps?
ChoGGi 9mo ago
Bloated libraries and support for multiple versions of iOS/phones?
tgma 9mo ago
For perspective, the entire iPhone OS 1.0.x ipsw image was around 100MB in 2007 (and there was a 4GB iPhone SKU for a brief period.)
arjie 9mo ago
One of the reasons the Facebook app was large was that they were using Thrift or something and generating a tremendous amount of code for their API interop. Protobuf+GRPC is similarly heavyweight, so I wouldn't be surprised if some megabytes were dedicated to the generated code. But hundreds of megabytes is wild. It has to be one-package compatibility as opposed to specialized app packages for different form factors etc.
NedF 9mo ago
[dead]
innagadadavida 9mo ago
Size should be a product metric so that it is tracked and optimized. Same goes for memory consumption. It's easy for product to come up with features and run the enxt cool experiment but your users don't care about any of that.
pmontra 9mo ago
My guess: phone get more storage so we can build fatter apps. With RAM and storage getting more expensive maybe developers will face some pressure to deliver slimmer apps but I don't have many hopes for that. It's going to take at least a couple of device replacement cycles with lower and lower RAM and storage for that to happen.
dangus 9mo ago
I’m surprised so few comments have pointed out how this doesn’t matter at all to anybody. The “apps are too bloated” debate is a dessicated horse. 1. You don’t even have to use the Gmail app to use Gmail. Pick whatever flavor of client you want, they all support Gmail. Apple Mail, Outlook, or something else entirely. 2. If you buy the shittiest available new iPhone it has 128GB of storage. Used iPhone 15 on Swappa with 512GB is <$500. How many of you need hundreds of apps installed on your phone? 3. Nobody’s forcing you to use Gmail. Email is an open federated standard. Use something else.
elpakal 9mo ago
I maintain an app size inspection tool that runs locally on your macOS and added the file inspector (Sunburst chart) for Gmail if anyone is interested in exploring its contents. As others have pointed out, the main executable is huge (~300MB) and there are a lot of localization files, but not too much traditional asset duplication. You can click into different slices of the app and see what it's made of if interested: https://dotipa.app/?app=Gmail#examples https://dotipa.app/?app=Gmail#examples
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
isaachinman 9mo ago
On the flip side, our iOS app which _uses the Gmail API_ and also supports raw IMAP is ~14MB: https://marcoapp.io https://marcoapp.io
1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago
Why is the Gmail app not open source Same goes for other other bloated apps mentioned in the blog post
mskogly 9mo ago
I haven’t made iPhone apps but my guess it that the size comes from bundling libraries and dependencies needed, sort of like how venv includes as snapshot of python and all dependencies into your project folder. Apple core apps probably uses iOS libraries (25GB) already on the device
pacifika 9mo ago
If the AppStores would consider app size in ranking we might see an improvement.
MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
And every single update to every single app is another 500MB. Even if the notes are just “we love enhancing our app, so here’s some tiny bug fixes or something. We won’t actually tell you what we have changed”
charles_f 9mo ago
Until someone stops installing gmail because it's too big (and it's coming back as a signal), I doubt anything will be done about it. In the absence of constraints, things just keep growing... without constraints. The costs of pruning/shaking embedded frameworks, refactoring, optimization, etc. cannot be justified if it's not signaled as a problem by customers.
sprinfo 9mo ago
Love how it ends with "Why you ask, your guess is as good as mine" lol.
neop1x 9mo ago
Software has gotten out of control. A simple Gmail client is now larger than an entire operating system was just a few years ago. And their “web apps” like Google Cloud Console, are so slow that they’re practically unusable in Firefox. Pinnacle of software engineering at Google :/
xnx 9mo ago
Good news(?), storage is expensive now, so this may get more attention.
drnick1 9mo ago
Why are such apps needed at all? The point of open standards like IMAP is precisely to avoid the need for multiple clients.
popoflojo 9mo ago
The real reason is Google has no incentive to make it smaller. In fact there is incentive to make it bigger. If your phone runs out of space you need to get a new phone with more memory, or move pictures and the like to the cloud, both of which are good news for Google. So why spend any effort keeping the size down.
tqian 9mo ago
Bigger than Windows 98
theLegionWithin 9mo ago
not having 512gb of storage on your phone in 2026 is the definition of failing

436 points by thefilmore 9mo ago

HPsquared 9mo ago

The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"

simonw 9mo ago
Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?
- jshchnz 9mo ago
  Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617
  - compiler-guy 9mo ago
    Non X version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    So is the extra space not accounted for from then to now AI related pieces?
  - simonw 9mo ago
    Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog
    - trevor-e 9mo ago
      Yep, localization is a huge size bloat for enterprisey apps that support many locales. There is no Apple provided way to dynamically download select localization packs based on the device locale. Meta came up with their own solution: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs... The small filesize issue is something we commonly see in games, was surprised to see it for Gmail. And btw we open-sourced much of our analysis after being acquired by Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad
    - lynndotpy 9mo ago
      4kB is also the minimum file size on Linux, so I imagine a similar issue could exist on Android.
      - jeroenhd 9mo ago
        The Gmail app on Android is 150MiB in size. Android traditionally puts resources into a compressed archive, though, so by simply using an archive for storage, Google may be avoiding the 4k size problem.
    - tonyplee 9mo ago
      Wonder if it is better to create separate localized app download such as gmail-japanese, etc.
      - hn8726 9mo ago
        Google Play offers such functionality already, it's called App Bundles. Instead of uploading an entire APK, the developers can upload the app assets that get bundled into device-specific APKs containing only the resources necessary for the end device. So you'd only get native libs for your phone CPU architecture, translations for the device language and image assets matching the device resolution for example. In fact, I think it's mandatory now to use the app bundles format (but you're still free to configure it to some extent) I now see the article is about iOS app, but it looks like the Android app is anywhere between 50mb and 100mb (depending on the apk download side I look at) which is much more reasonable
  - jonny_eh 9mo ago
    Looks like it's mostly strings, probably due to localization. They should consider compressing each localization/language, and decompressing the needed bundle on first startup (or language change). Even better: Download the language bundle when needed.
    - Pxtl 9mo ago
      Well, that's a question for OS level. If the OS doesn't require the user to download the language and so language-switching to a new language is doable as an offline operation, I could see it being frustrating that switching to a new language must be done online. So compression/deduplication is probably the better option. Rather than storing as 1 zip per language, though, you'd probably want a compression format that also eliminates duplication that may occur between languages if you're storing all languages compressed on the system. That means you'd need compression to handle the entire language complex being in one massive compressed blob and you'd just extract out the languages you needed. I assume there are some forms of zipping that do this better than others.
  - thefilmore 9mo ago
    Author here. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they released an updated version of this analysis last year [1]. It matches what I saw when analyzing the IPA. I tried to do a deeper analysis on the code itself using several tools, including Google's own bloaty [2] which was not very useful without symbols, classdumpios [3] which revealed something like 50k interfaces starting with "ComGoogle", and Ghidra [4], which I left running for a day to analyze the binary, but kept hanging and freezing so I gave up on it. Perhaps comparing the Android and iOS code could lead to something more fruitful. [1] https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 [2] https://github.com/google/bloaty https://github.com/google/bloaty [3] https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios [4] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
Aperocky 9mo ago
The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked. And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.
- NuclearPM 9mo ago
  Deserves.
  - dieggsy 9mo ago
    It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs. This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.
    - HPsquared 9mo ago
      I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".
    - anal_reactor 9mo ago
      There's something funny about someone trying to be smart and pointing out a typo or some other minor irrelevant error only to be proven completely wrong.
      - WillPostForFood 9mo ago
        He isn't wasn't wrong, and the parent post wasn't even correcting him. Gmail is not a corporation, it is a product - singular.
        9mo ago
wolvoleo 9mo ago
There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest. Ps pardon my french but I'm really annoyed about this and in this case it's warranted in my opinion. 800MB is ridiculous.
- rjh29 9mo ago
  Corsair iCUE. 1.1GB to control your RAM lights...
  - jason_oster 9mo ago
    Beautiful example of bloat. Bravo! The software crisis never ended. Instead, we also gained a hardware crisis.
    - rjh29 9mo ago
      I just uninstalled it and Windows reported it as 3.21GB, so it was larger than I thought!
  - encom 9mo ago
    >1.1GB >RAM lights I'm not sure which is dumber.
    - rjh29 9mo ago
      That's like saying Christmas lights are dumb. Each to his or her own though!
- HPsquared 9mo ago
  It doesn't inspire confidence in privacy when things are so huge, connected and opaque.
layer8 9mo ago
As usual, the answer to a question in the title is “no”. ;)
- achairapart 9mo ago
  Correct, as in Betteridge's law of headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
bdhtu 9mo ago
It's not just Gmail. Most of the popular apps on iOS are literally 10x bigger than their Android versions. It's hard to find a popular iOS app that's smaller than an Electron app.
- pfortuny 9mo ago
  Then you look at the desktop backgrounds folder in your Mac and say: WHAT THE FUCK! There are 4k videos there... Just unbelievable.
  - QuantumNomad_ 9mo ago
    They use those videos on the lock screen for example. Not saying it’s a good idea that they ship all of those big video files. Believe me, my MBP M1 with 256GB SSD barely has space left even when I go and clean up various files I no longer need. Foolish as I was, I believed that doubling the amount of storage compared to the MacBook Air I had before it would leave me with plenty of space for years to come. In reality it did not take much time before I was using most of the storage available. So when I bought my latest iPhone not long after I bought that MBP, I opted for the iPhone model that has 1TB storage. And at least on my phone I consistently have a good amount of space left. Every couple of months I move pictures and videos from the phone to an external hard drive. So since it was only a week or so since last I moved pictures and videos from the phone, I am currently using 350 GB of storage on the phone. Out of those currently used 350 GB, just under 40GB is accounted for by music I have downloaded in the SoundCloud app, which is ok even though maybe a little bit silly on my part. I have it set to download all songs that I favourite, and I sometimes manually download whole albums and whole playlists. Not because I want to listen to all of it offline but so that when I am offline I still have a wide selection to choose from. For example on the occasion that I fly by plane once or twice a year. Another 20GB of storage space is used by maps I’ve downloaded in the Organic Maps app to have locally saved maps for various places I’ve been to or want to go to. Again, a little bit silly to keep that much map data even for the places that I am not going to visit for at least 6-12 months, and which will need to be updated again when I do go there to ensure I have up to date maps. But all in all, I can “afford it” with a terabyte total storage. And both the songs in SoundCloud and the map data is data that I could manually go through and delete as much of as I’d like to if I ever were in a pinch and needed to free up space. At times I will hoover around 700 GB of storage used on the phone if it’s been a while since I moved pictures and videos and I have filmed some longer videos. My phone being a few years old now however, it doesn’t have USB-C. So it takes a bit of time to move pictures and videos from it. Even if I transfer over the network it doesn’t seem much faster than USB 2.0, weirdly.
citizenpaul 9mo ago
I've noticed in general android apps have been shrinking in size for several years. I'm not sure if recent LLM trends are changing that again.
BatteryMountain 9mo ago
Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB
- trinix912 9mo ago
  Holy... What kinda heavy lifting is Google Play Services doing with those 1330 megs?
  - ChoGGi 9mo ago
    Dunno but my userdata for play services is 623MB.
- anthk 9mo ago
  Instead of Gboard, get Anysoft keyboard from https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org, enable Gestures in the settings. You'll thank me later. Also, F-Droid has different keyboard layouts for Ansyoft such as better ones for SSH and OFC language related layouts.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 9mo ago
    Futo Keyboard. https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/

fooblaster 9mo ago

10 MB mail app. 690 MB local llm to write snarky emails for you.

datadrivenangel 9mo ago

Google and others are putting 2FA notifications in their regular apps like gmail. I had to open my gmail app to get a 2FA code instead of my google authenticator app today... which is very weird and probably increases the needed security of the gmail app in addition to the size

inetknght 9mo ago
You really think 2FA notifications cause so much bloat?
- datadrivenangel 9mo ago
  Google Auth on ios is 38MB. Assuming the core code is probably ~5-50%, which would be 2-20MB added to the gmail app. On the middle side of that range, extra features adds up fast.
SoftTalker 9mo ago
They use the YouTube app for this also.

loloquwowndueo 9mo ago

> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app? Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device. Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms. I’m just speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason. You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.

Kwpolska 9mo ago
The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.
- loloquwowndueo 9mo ago
  Probably bundles its own copy of Chrome just in case :)
  - MYEUHD 9mo ago
    No need to. Android does that already and allows apps to use it (the webview)
  - kccqzy 9mo ago
    I can totally imagine someone doing just that. > Product Requirement: Even if the user deletes the Chrome app, the Gmail app must work to display HTML emails, the authentication screen including 2FA options, etc. Can’t rely on WebViews for security reasons.
  - danpalmer 9mo ago
    It doesn't, that's Android Webview which is distributed separately. It may however bundle its own instance of the Chrome networking library which is a few MB itself. For apps like Gmail and a handful of others, they are big enough that they need multiple layers of fallback. e.g. they can't just use a networking layer, they need a fallback separate implementation in case that breaks, so that they can recover. They might have 2 or even 3 options for some of the critical parts, all so that if stuff goes wrong they can as close to guarantee recovery as they can get. Mobile is quite specific in this regard, because you don't have hardware access, network is heavily restricted, battery reduces the amount you can do, etc. Source: I work on mobile SRE things at Google.

mbesto 9mo ago

Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)

Aachen 9mo ago
Do you mean the RAM used by the tab? The article is talking about disk space
- stronglikedan 9mo ago
  There's an app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetools.hackernews&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetool...
  - Aachen 9mo ago
    - They mention Google Chrome tabs - They speak of HN as a single thing, so presumably not a third-party implementation but the official one
  - squeaky-clean 9mo ago
    That's some third party app. And if you look at the Github it's basically an advertising vector for that companies set of mobile development tools.
- mbesto 9mo ago
  ah I misunderstood...because hilariously my chrome tab is also ~700MB!
  - ksaj 9mo ago
    Pretty wild. Mine (Chromium on Raspberry Pi) was 52mb, bumped up to 58mb to write this response.

jmclnx 9mo ago

The question why is almost all modern apps pushing around 1G. It is dependencies, if you ever compiled almost any GUI application via prots/pkgsrc on a BSD, you will be shocked by the dependencies that application needs, it is obscene.

tarentel 9mo ago
It is dependencies but not from the GUI. As someone who has worked on several very large apps I can tell you 99% of the bloat is garbage. Someone somewhere wants this SDK from their friend's company in the app. Some manager wants to track X using this very specific framework. Some designer decided to add in animations in one screen that requires another framework to run and also 10mb in assets. etc, etc, etc. If your app is 10+ years old this all adds up and no one ever cleans any of it up. There's probably like 100mb of crap you can delete that doesn't even work anymore but who has time to remove that?

calin2k 9mo ago

maybe because we need to be pushed to buy minimum the 256GB versions of phones. it is a wintel deja vu

aaronbrethorst 9mo ago
Why would Google try to maximize Apple's revenue?
- dewey 9mo ago
  Google is also selling phones? Not a great point as it's probably not really a revenue driver for them though.
- wiseowise 9mo ago
  Duopoly. Both get richer.
- mNovak 9mo ago
  Bloat the apps, push users into a high tier iPhone, some % of users settle for a more affordable Pixel. Not that Android apps are that much better.

dbacar 9mo ago

It is bloatware for a reason, to force you a cloud subscription, not for your money (which helps though) but your data.

rconti 9mo ago
Google writes bloatware for iOS to force me to buy a cloud subscription (?) from... Apple?
- dbacar 9mo ago
  Gmail android size is also ~750MB.

begueradj 9mo ago

>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each. One reason is those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety". More importantly, it's difficult to code without dependencies.

Aachen 9mo ago
Pardon? I can't tell if you're serious. How would adding more lines of code in a program (or assets or whatever make up this size) add security?
- begueradj 9mo ago
  You must be a developer only :) https://www.securecodewarrior.com/press-releases/secure-code-warrior-survey-finds-86-of-developers-do-not-view-application-security-as-a-top-priority https://www.securecodewarrior.com/press-releases/secure-code...
  - Aachen 9mo ago
    I think the joke is going over my head ^^; Maybe you mean 'just' a regular developer as opposed to a cryptobro? Edit: I see you added in a link. "The research found that more than half of the 1200 developers surveyed are unable to ensure that their code is protected from seven common vulnerabilities", hmm maybe it was not a joke? The article (or the survey it's based on) sounds extremely misguided though, sounding comparable to saying that only X% of farmers never had a single rotten apple so clearly it's not a 'top' priority for them to produce quality at all cost Oh, and I just noticed you're the same person as whom I was responding to above. That explains Fwiw, I do security audits as a day job so I have some idea of which coding practices lead to good security and it's not download size. You can try this "you're just a developer" again on someone else maybe
    - begueradj 9mo ago

CGMthrowaway 9mo ago

AOT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast) Frameworks 150MB Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB AI models 25MB

einpoklum 9mo ago
AOT = Ahead Of Time? Attack On Titan? Something else?
- kachapopopow 9mo ago
  it's ahead of time and AOT compilation is done at OS startup, not sure if that is being measured here.
  - efficax 9mo ago
    OS startup? AOT compilation happens in the build pipeline, before the app is distributed.
    - chasd00 9mo ago
      Wouldn't compilation during the build process be ROT? As in, "Right On Time" compilation? Build is where the compilation step is usually performed.
      - jeroenhd 9mo ago
        I don't think iOS does any on-device or in-app-store compilation since Apple deprecated Bitcode.
    - kachapopopow 9mo ago
      AOT is unique because you want to compile it with all the capabilities your device has, so there still has to be some complication done, especially when you have processors that have brand new instructions to make operations significantly more efficient.

crazygringo 9mo ago

> For most of that period, the size of the Gmail app hovered around 12 MB, with a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017... The Gmail app, on the App Store, is currently 760.7 MB in size. With charts: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-taking-up-a-lot-more-space-1513303131 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-tak... I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB. Something like Gmail doesn't have massive hi-resolution bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.

Aachen 9mo ago
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes
- paulddraper 9mo ago
  > a few dozen kilobytes A "hello world" Android starts at ~5MB. It is possible to make it smaller if choosing some non-default different tools.
  - vbezhenar 9mo ago
    Hello world Android app includes a lot of dependencies like compat libs, constraint layout, kotlin runtime. These are not essential and can be removed.
  - binaryturtle 9mo ago
    Outch… and I though an ~8KB "Hello, World!" here on my rusty Mac is HUGE already.
  - rabf 9mo ago
    https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid 25Kb

pavel_lishin 9mo ago

I was just wondering why the Adobe Acrobat installer is nearly a gigabyte in size.

transcriptase 9mo ago
Personally I always wonder why a pdf tool puts 3-6 background processes on startup that are constantly doing something with my CPU and internet connection when my PC is otherwise idle.

ineedasername 9mo ago

I know that in some cases, apparent bloat like this is related to needing to support so many potential devices and versions of the underlying OS. Google has to support, on iOS, roughly 6 years of devices and their variations + OS variations on them. Each of these may require their own libraries compiled against it, for optimal performance or because it simply is less practical to engineer non-breaking updates against new SDK and HW versions in the same codebase without introducing complexity. Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have to do this. They can integrate at lower levels and even with all else being equal can develop updates with perfect insight on the ecosystem and foresight on things to come. Somewhat supporting this possible explanation is that, similar to Apple on iOS, Google's apps on android are significantly smaller.

lkurtz 9mo ago

I believe it is because it includes a suite of enterprise management features in addition to Gmail-related features. (Search for "google basic mobile device management" for more info.)

Etheryte 9mo ago

For me, the most important takeaway from the article was that the Passwords app supports 2FA codes! I was not aware of this, that's nice and getting rid of Authenticator is one less Google thing to worry about.

paxys 9mo ago
Having both your password and 2nd factor in the same place isn't the best idea however.
- Etheryte 9mo ago
  They're both on my phone anyway, so I don't really see the difference? Whether it's in one app or spilt across two apps makes no difference if there's no extra layers between. Having it all in Passwords is better in that regard, since it requires you to use Face ID to open the app.
- dangus 9mo ago
  I don’t think it matters much. In 1Password you still need your secret code to login in addition to your password. It essentially acts like a second factor. I could give you my 1Password username and password right now and you wouldn’t be able to access it. Being logged in to my 1Password essentially verifies that you have a physical device of mine.

paxys 9mo ago

I genuinely struggle to understand how apps can get that large. Games with hi-res graphics, sure. But Gmail barely has any assets. And they aren't shipping with custom runtimes or anything of that sort (like an Electron app) because Apple doesn't allow it. So how much code can you possibly write that compiles to 700 MB?

lostmsu 9mo ago
Could be similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134178 (code duplication for locality for a tiny perf gain).

culebron21 9mo ago

Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyond 1,3 gig now. And it's FOSS, not commercial bloatware you might think. I have no idea what they stuff it with. Just yesterday, I wanted to generate a GeoTiff on a macbook. To do it in a simple way, you need libGDAL, a geo-spatial abstraction library that exists since maybe the '90 and supports all thinkable formats. Under Linux, you just install it together with QGIS as a dependency. Mac is still unix, so you may think, a 3-decades old library, with few patches to support modern formats, should be just a couple of megs, right? Brew suggested downloading ~2 GB of ~100 packages!!!! Half of them were aws-* (yes, AWS tools), and 1 GB of LLVM!!! (is it their whole GIT repo with 10M SLOC?) For geotiff, I ended just using standard Tiff library, inserting my 4 geospatial tags with a few lines of code.

scblock 9mo ago
I am not sure QGIS is a good comparison to this. The projection information dataset is nearly 800 MB on its own. But it's not really PROJ's fault that there are so many projections to manage.
maximilianburke 9mo ago
I just downloaded QGIS to take a look. On my Mac, it takes 2.1GB of disk space after installation, which has some notable space sinks: * 562mb of Python 3.11 and libraries (of which 240mb goes to the qgis python library, 101mb goes to duckdb, and 50mb to PyQt5) * 130mb to i18n * 140mb to `libclntsh.dylib` which I think is the Oracle DB client library? * 80mb to libduckdb.dylib, separate from the Python version * 80mb to libQtWebKit
- culebron21 9mo ago
  Oh, nice. Yeah, Python got gazillion new versions, incompatible, in million folders in sys.path, and sys.path different in different places, and recently they started to menace you to shutdown old versions (I get such warning, that 3.9 will stop working in October 2026). So, since you can't rely on system Python anymore, they made essentially a docker container. Sigh.

HendrikHensen 9mo ago

Well, something fishy is going on because there is literally no way that Safari, in its entirety, is 5.1 MB. The numbers for the others app seem similarly off. It would be really hard to believe that somehow Apple has found some magic formula to make their apps 100x smaller than Google and Microsoft. Much more likely is that the reporting by the OS is off somehow (probably most of the app functionality is tied up in shared resources counted towards system files, and not counted towards the app's size). With respect, I would expect more from articles posted on Hacker News. More thorough research, and in fact an answer to the question.

jacobp100 9mo ago
Safari probably is that size because WebKit is a system framework, so it’s just the size of the UI code
afavour 9mo ago
Safari is just a wrapper around the system webview framework so it does make sense, although it makes the comparison very misleading.
- akho 9mo ago
  So are the other browsers on iOS.
  - afavour 9mo ago
    Not in the EU...
    - immibis 9mo ago
      Yes in the EU. Apple made the alternative browser requirements impossible to meet, and somehow got away with it.
    - zuhsetaqi 9mo ago
      Yes also in the EU.

elpakal 9mo ago

If you're interested in iOS app size analysis, I build and maintain this https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881 ($4.99). Happy to share download codes, HMU at info [at] dotipa.app

kccqzy 9mo ago

The table at the end is seriously misguided. You can’t compare the sizes of an iOS preinstalled app against a non-preinstalled app. It’s just a thin UI shell where the code for all the functionality is inside system frameworks. The Photos app is quoted at 4.2MB. Guess what, if you delete that, you still have system components to render photos, UI for a photo picker, perform analysis on photos such as face recognition, all the iCloud networking code to support iCloud Photo Library, etc.

tarentel 9mo ago
You can though because a lot of those things you're talking about are available for any app. Sure Apple does have some private frameworks and what not that aren't available to everyone but I imagine if you wanted to recreate what the photo app is doing you'd be able to in 4.2mb or less.
- kccqzy 9mo ago
  The iCloud Photo Library doesn’t have any public APIs that I know of. You simply can’t recreate the Photos app completely, regardless of app sizes. Apple values deep integration into the system more than it values giving third party developers a fair chance at cloning their app.
  - tarentel 9mo ago
    You can access iCloud from an iOS app, it has its own public framework called CloudKit, so you could create your own version of it. If you don't like that example Chrome and Edge are both forced to use WebKit on iOS but are still much larger so.
    - morcus 9mo ago
      > You can access iCloud from an iOS app, it has its own public framework called CloudKit, so you could create your own version of it. How is this relevant? The point of having a Google Photos app is to access / back up your photos via Google Photos, not to make an alternative frontend for iCloud.

oenton 9mo ago

It’s wild when you put it into context. I remember when Gmail first opened to the public with a whopping *1 GB* of storage… now the app alone almost exceeds that.

wrs 9mo ago

Not only is the YouTube iOS app huge, it uses an atrocious amount of additional storage. It was using over 2GB on my iPad for...something...and the only way to clean that up was to delete the app and reinstall.

csoups14 9mo ago

The easy answer: Google simply does not care. Some mix of: they don't measure it, they don't look at it, they don't goal around reducing it, nobody's performance review is going to be better because they reduced it, no director is asking product teams why they're increasing the app size. It's not surprising why these companies don't care, because it's a tragedy of the commons. The better question is why is Apple allowing these companies to ship apps that unnecessarily take up a meaningful amount of storage space?

paxys 9mo ago
> why is Apple allowing these companies to ship apps that unnecessarily take up a meaningful amount of storage space The answer to this one is obvious - to incentivize you to buy iPhones with more storage and/or higher tier iCloud plans.

Fiveplus 9mo ago

A significant portion of larger sizes is likely due to how Google handles shared code across its iOS suite. They rely heavily on a shared C++ backend (using tools like J2ObjC or similar internal transpilers) to keep logic consistent between Android, iOS and of course the web. When you pull in the gmail dependency from the internal monorepo, you are most likely pulling in the entire visual stack for Google meet, chat and spaces, plus the heavy protocol buffer definitions and gRPC libraries that underpin them. Even if you don't use the "meet" tab, the binary could be including the video codecs, the real-time transmission logic plus the AR filter assets, because the app is compiled as a "Super App" container rather than a modular mail client. I feel it's an organizational artifact as much as a technical one.

jeffbee 9mo ago
> and gRPC Right, I wouldn't be surprised of the app includes its own cryptography instead of relying on platform libraries, and/or contains what amounts to a userspace network stack in the form of QUIC (Cronet).
port11 9mo ago
Very insightful, rather than unjustified speculation. Of course it doesn’t explain why many other apps are so big, e.g. Withings, Bunq (bank), and Albert Heijn (supermarket) together eat 1GB of my storage. All 3 are things I need to list data, but somehow are the size they are.
- tralarpa 9mo ago
  I don't know much about app development, but I was curious and downloaded the Albert Heijn apk for ARM64. Inside the apk, the three largest entities are: - libflutter.so 140 MBytes (flutter, obviously) - flutter_assets 29 MBytes (this is a directory. The name is a bit misleading because it mostly consists of AH-specific icons.) - libapp.so 20 MBytes (also related to flutter, I think) There is a 640 KByte json file in the assets that stores an animation in base64 format. Now you know what the CPU and storage resources of your devices are used for nowadays...

kccqzy 9mo ago

People need to reread this classic piece from 2001 every so often: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv-bloatware-and-the-8020-myth/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv... As a regular user, you are probably using 10% of all features available.

wackget 9mo ago
Don't blame the users. Unless Google have hidden a copy of Crysis inside the Gmail app there's no hidden functionality which should come even close to requiring hundreds of megabytes.
LePetitPrince 9mo ago
[dead]
esafak 9mo ago
Gmail barely has any features, which haven't changed since it's inception. Most of the code is in the cloud.
- kccqzy 9mo ago
  A lot of features are configurable by the domain administrators. As a user of the @gmail.com email, you won't see any.
fx1994 9mo ago
This might be true but most of time its just bloat no one uses.

didip 9mo ago

Because big enough tech companies always shipped their org charts in their products.

tonymet 9mo ago

I’ve noticed most popular apps are pushing 500+MB. Most likely they are shipping debug builds, with loads of third party deps, so they can send crash reports from production with meaningful stack traces. Until Apple penalizes app developers for app size, nothing will happen. Most consumers are not aware of the impact , until they go to clean up their phone. There isn’t much usable free space on the device after the OS, and now having 50+gb of used space from apps, means your own content (photos, music, videos) doesn’t fit. There isn’t much incentive regardless, since Apple merchandise’s iCloud storage. Bloated apps actually drive iCloud sales. A lose-lose for the consumer.

turtlebits 9mo ago

I'm sorry, but that "table" at the end of the article is infuriatingly confusing.

LePetitPrince 9mo ago

[dead]

titzer 9mo ago

My prediction is that this will continue to occur indefinitely. The conversation is always the same, only there is another zero on the end. We'll have terabyte apps in not too long. (100% serious)

eYrKEC2 9mo ago

Can we get dark-mode for another 5MB possibly? (700 MB more is also an acceptable increase for this feature) On second thought, I love looking at on-duty page emails in the middle of the night with 7 million lumens blasting my retinas.

kernal 9mo ago

The Apple vs Google app size comparison is so disingenuous. It doesn't take into account all of the preinstalled iOS dependency libraries used by these Apple apps.

anal_reactor 9mo ago

Because most phones have enough memory to handle all the bloat, and when they don't, Google can sell those people cloud space. Not to mention that adding more memory is how phone manufacturers earn money - out of my ass example just to illustrate the concept: 100GB phone costs $400, same phone but with 200GB memory costs $500, 100GB memory chip costs $20, manufacturer pockets the difference. Having bloated apps and no SD card (iOS doesn't support SD Cards, Android makes them work like shit on purpose) justifies in the eye of the consumer the necessity of extra memory. Most people have fast internet connection so download time is always acceptably small, no matter how much bloat you put, not to mention that updates are in the background anyway. The economic pressure to keep apps small is literally negative.

pgib 9mo ago

This may finally drive me to just use Apple Mail for my Google Workspace account. I know it's not a fair comparison, but an app I made that's in the App Store is only 8MB.

bigbuppo 9mo ago

Probably because it has three embedded versions of libcef

David_Osipov 9mo ago
Spot on! We tried to somehow reduce the libcef size in our B2B app - barely could do that. We had to employ some fancy compression techniques, but still this thing is huge!

esafak 9mo ago

Perhaps someone can decompile the app and find out.

agumonkey 9mo ago

2nd order Jevons paradox I guess

ramsj 9mo ago

This is why I use installable PWAs wherever possible. On my Android phone right now, the Outlook PWA uses 281kB. You still get notifications, but I haven't measured if data usage is higher.

rekabis 9mo ago

Maybe because it’s an Electron app? Sure, Electron does not come natively for iOS. But with tools like Capacitor, you can take a web app (even an Electron one) and package it for iOS/Android, adding native features and running in a native WebView, allowing it to be an “Electron for Mobile”.

conradkay 9mo ago
usually electron apps are 150-300MB

ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago

I'm assuming one reason is frameworks. They can get quite big. Another reason, is rusty code (not Rust. It's a play on the saying "Code doesn't rust", which I used to hear, last century). It does, indeed, rust. Actually, "rots" is probably more apropos. I'll bet that's the reason that Xcode is such a pig (makes GMail look like an anorexic). Code is created that people no longer understand, so they are loath to make large changes. They just do enough to fix a bug, and pray that they don't need to dig any deeper. One of my first software jobs, was exactly like that. When that happens, the code never shrinks. It just accretes.

atmosx 9mo ago

Not sure how many ppl know this: you can use another email provider, e.g. user@yahoo.com, to register to YouTube.

adzm 9mo ago
Still need a phone number though
- atmosx 9mo ago
  Phone number for youtube? I don't think so, need to double-check.

heisenbit 9mo ago

Maybe, just maybe should Apple vary the amount they charge by app size.

phplovesong 9mo ago

Framework mania. This has been the problem for years. Webapps bloat like crazy, and now with AI the sloplevel has gone berzerk.

nromiun 9mo ago

I just looked at Gmail on my Android phone and it is only 164 MB. That is a big difference. Also, one thing that annoyed me when I used iPhones is that you can't remove an app's cache without reinstalling it and losing all your data. And most modern applications think cache is free so they use a lot of it. Many times it will exceed even your installed apps or data size.

3ple_alpha 9mo ago

Android seems to be a bit better in that regard: not in the sense that applications are smaller (though I think they are, slightly), but rather that you can easily unpack or decompile most of them and see what's inside. There it tends to be mostly due to dependencies, including some native libraries in multiple copies for 2-3 CPU architecture.

n4bz0r 9mo ago

Why is my banking app 1.5GB?

transcriptase 9mo ago

You just need to check the version history for mobile apps to see what the developers are doing! It’s a wealth of information on new features and changes. For example here’s the Facebook app for iOS: 543.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2w ago) 542.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3w ago) 541.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 541.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 540.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 539.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 539.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 538.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (1mo ago) 538.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 537.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 536.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 535.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 534.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 534.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (2mo ago) 533.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 532.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 531.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 530.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (3mo ago) 529.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 529.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 528.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 527.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 526.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 525.0.0 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (4mo ago) 524.1 — Our teams have solved many crashes, fixed issues you’ve reported and made the app faster. (5mo ago)

waldrews 9mo ago

My whole cat is, what, a couple gigs of DNA?

NelsonMinar 9mo ago

On Android vs iOS, it's worth noting Android apps are smaller than iOS apps. The details are complicated but this report says after installation Android apps take up about half the space as iOS. https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-research/ https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-rese... One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-really-that-much-smaller-than-ios https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-real...

landr0id 9mo ago
Android also allows developers to split up their APK so features can be delivered on-demand: https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-delivery https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/feature-deliver... AFAIK iOS does not offer anything similar.

burnt-resistor 9mo ago

The Facebook and Instagram iOS apps were/are enormous codebases. Absurd, sprawling monsters with tons of dead code, duplication, and old stuff.. like being written in mostly Objective-C. I imagine the Gmail app also suffers from having zillions of engineers touch it without being incentivized to make it better or smaller, only to add features and impact for the all-important performance review. Add zillions of instrumentation and third-party frameworks, each with piles of dependencies, and apps will grow without bounds like molecules of gas to fill the container.

nottorp 9mo ago

Incidentally, the last ssd i bought at the beginning of last year now costs double what i paid for it. Ram is what, 3-4x? It's a great time to ship more bloated apps, the suckers will enrich the hardware manufacturers, won't they?

asadotzler 9mo ago
Closer to 2.5x right now, likely to hit 3x this year.

metalman 9mo ago

even though I have more data than I ever use on my plan, after 15yr's exclusivly on mobile data, I reflexivly look at the size of anything before I download something, 700mb is bonkers for email, and I have started to reject many other apps, based on there improbable sizes. useing android my phone has gmail iremovably installed on my phone, but was disabled before I even put a sim in it, but in spite of this, having just checked, it has user data, something in cache, and has used some internet data. how creepy is that.

lifestyleguru 9mo ago

Sometimes I allow App Store to use mobile data because how much an app can weight, 50MB? Then suddenly 1GB of mobile data is gone.

unsupp0rted 9mo ago

It does do a lot of auth / security stuff for the entire Google Account... not 700 MB worth, but still thinking of the Gmail app as "just an email app" doesn't do it justice either.

maratc 9mo ago

> Also, can someone explain why Microsoft Authenticator is 150 MB to show 6-digit codes? That one's on the author. Duo Mobile is 2MB and shows the same 6-digit codes just fine.

RachelF 9mo ago

Mine is not 200MB on Android - the base apk is 67MB + 32MB for the ARM v8a specific libs. This is the code, the local caching and other data might make up the rest. For Android, you can check [1] Download the apk, rename it as a zip and look inside to see the files. A quick file analysis of the 67MB shows around 58MB of java code and some 32MB of ARM libs, 31MB of this is the libvideochat. [1] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11-17-840487098-release-release/gmail-2025-11-17-840487098-release-android-apk-download https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11...

j45 9mo ago

I didn't use the Gmail app for the longest time, always used third party, not sure why I started..

HumblyTossed 9mo ago

The article compares the native (iOS) mail app which is (from the article) 8.7MB. What I believe is happening is that the gmail app is not a native app, it is some cross-platform monstrosity, so Google has to bring all the widgets and doo-dads that they wrote so that it looks just like it does on all the other platforms. The native iOS mail app is so tiny because part of iOS that the article mentions taking up 25GB contains all the native widgets and doo-dads that the native mail app can use.

mattacular 9mo ago
I think that's true and it's also a convenient way to "smuggle" in Google's most important doodads: their tracking apparatus which includes all of the single sign on and MFA stuff on top of the usual analytics

neuroelectron 9mo ago

Of course it's self-hosted intelligence gathering or metadata auditing. This is Google we're talking about. They're "pushing compute to the edge," taking advantage of more powerful mobile processors to reduce their own infrastructure cost while still providing that sweet sweet Big Data, as they used to call it.

josefresco 9mo ago

1.15 GB for me - dear god. There's a comment in the article with two helpful links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30443570 https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail The bloat? Mostly "localization".

kuekacang 9mo ago
Except the text is stored as image, I can't imagine localization would be that large.

danielktdoranie 9mo ago

I just use the gmail mobile website on my smartphone and put a link to it on my Home Screen. So many of these services you don’t necessarily need an app for, unless you just enjoy giving them your personal data or something ha ha

urbandw311er 9mo ago

I’m just guessing but probably because it’s not just GMail, it’s likely chock full of all Google’s other walled garden nonsense. Hey, you installed GMail? Great, here’s a 2FA client for all federated Google logins everywhere too. hell i’m surprised it doesn’t contain the entire chrome browser as well.

KingLancelot 9mo ago

[dead]

Digit-Al 9mo ago

On my Android phone, just the calculator app is 13MB. How in hell is it 13MB just for a calculator? It beggars belief.

tgsovlerkhgsel 9mo ago

Android is slightly less horrendous but still bad - probably because at least in some markets enough people have low end phones that size does somewhat matter. I suspect Uber made optimizing app size a priority once they realized that their 1 GB behemoth was hovering on the top of the "things you can delete instead of your wedding photos if you want to be able to continue to use your phone" list, and they were losing customers over it. But there are still apps that are hundreds of MB with no valid reason to be that fat. Meanwhile, well-written browsers - which are essentially whole operating systems - are in the dozens, so this is 100% bloat. There simply is little incentive to optimize apps for size, because someone else pays the price and there is little consequence for making it big. Slapping another data collection or ad SDK into the app is easy and free. If the EU was serious about it, it would consider it part of the ecodesign rules since it forces people to buy new phones for more storage much earlier than needed. If the app stores were serious about it, they'd either re-introduce the hard cap and stick to it, or at least show the size prominently. Or start charging fees for bloaty apps. At least on the mobile version of the Play store, I don't think you can even see the app size without starting an install - let alone search or filter by it. It's as if they want to encourage bloat.

roesel 9mo ago

It might have to do with the fact that (at least on iOS), you can participate in a Google Meet call with just the Gmail app, as well as authenticate sign-ins, and who know what more. Could the main issue be Google is shipping apps within apps?

ChoGGi 9mo ago

Bloated libraries and support for multiple versions of iOS/phones?

tgma 9mo ago

For perspective, the entire iPhone OS 1.0.x ipsw image was around 100MB in 2007 (and there was a 4GB iPhone SKU for a brief period.)

arjie 9mo ago

One of the reasons the Facebook app was large was that they were using Thrift or something and generating a tremendous amount of code for their API interop. Protobuf+GRPC is similarly heavyweight, so I wouldn't be surprised if some megabytes were dedicated to the generated code. But hundreds of megabytes is wild. It has to be one-package compatibility as opposed to specialized app packages for different form factors etc.

NedF 9mo ago

[dead]

innagadadavida 9mo ago

Size should be a product metric so that it is tracked and optimized. Same goes for memory consumption. It's easy for product to come up with features and run the enxt cool experiment but your users don't care about any of that.

pmontra 9mo ago

My guess: phone get more storage so we can build fatter apps. With RAM and storage getting more expensive maybe developers will face some pressure to deliver slimmer apps but I don't have many hopes for that. It's going to take at least a couple of device replacement cycles with lower and lower RAM and storage for that to happen.

dangus 9mo ago

I’m surprised so few comments have pointed out how this doesn’t matter at all to anybody. The “apps are too bloated” debate is a dessicated horse. 1. You don’t even have to use the Gmail app to use Gmail. Pick whatever flavor of client you want, they all support Gmail. Apple Mail, Outlook, or something else entirely. 2. If you buy the shittiest available new iPhone it has 128GB of storage. Used iPhone 15 on Swappa with 512GB is <$500. How many of you need hundreds of apps installed on your phone? 3. Nobody’s forcing you to use Gmail. Email is an open federated standard. Use something else.

elpakal 9mo ago

I maintain an app size inspection tool that runs locally on your macOS and added the file inspector (Sunburst chart) for Gmail if anyone is interested in exploring its contents. As others have pointed out, the main executable is huge (~300MB) and there are a lot of localization files, but not too much traditional asset duplication. You can click into different slices of the app and see what it's made of if interested: https://dotipa.app/?app=Gmail#examples https://dotipa.app/?app=Gmail#examples

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

isaachinman 9mo ago

On the flip side, our iOS app which _uses the Gmail API_ and also supports raw IMAP is ~14MB: https://marcoapp.io https://marcoapp.io

1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago

Why is the Gmail app not open source Same goes for other other bloated apps mentioned in the blog post

mskogly 9mo ago

I haven’t made iPhone apps but my guess it that the size comes from bundling libraries and dependencies needed, sort of like how venv includes as snapshot of python and all dependencies into your project folder. Apple core apps probably uses iOS libraries (25GB) already on the device

pacifika 9mo ago

If the AppStores would consider app size in ranking we might see an improvement.

MagicMoonlight 9mo ago

And every single update to every single app is another 500MB. Even if the notes are just “we love enhancing our app, so here’s some tiny bug fixes or something. We won’t actually tell you what we have changed”

charles_f 9mo ago

Until someone stops installing gmail because it's too big (and it's coming back as a signal), I doubt anything will be done about it. In the absence of constraints, things just keep growing... without constraints. The costs of pruning/shaking embedded frameworks, refactoring, optimization, etc. cannot be justified if it's not signaled as a problem by customers.

sprinfo 9mo ago

Love how it ends with "Why you ask, your guess is as good as mine" lol.

neop1x 9mo ago

Software has gotten out of control. A simple Gmail client is now larger than an entire operating system was just a few years ago. And their “web apps” like Google Cloud Console, are so slow that they’re practically unusable in Firefox. Pinnacle of software engineering at Google :/

xnx 9mo ago

Good news(?), storage is expensive now, so this may get more attention.

drnick1 9mo ago

Why are such apps needed at all? The point of open standards like IMAP is precisely to avoid the need for multiple clients.

popoflojo 9mo ago

The real reason is Google has no incentive to make it smaller. In fact there is incentive to make it bigger. If your phone runs out of space you need to get a new phone with more memory, or move pictures and the like to the cloud, both of which are good news for Google. So why spend any effort keeping the size down.

tqian 9mo ago

Bigger than Windows 98

theLegionWithin 9mo ago

not having 512gb of storage on your phone in 2026 is the definition of failing