4 ms·

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. Wo

by Aperocky 10mo 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 10mo ago
Deserves.
- dieggsy 10mo 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 10mo ago
    I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".
  - anal_reactor 10mo 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 10mo 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.
      - dieggsy 10mo ago
        Gmail is a product, but the comment wasn't saying "Gmail the product deserves to be shamed... ", more like "the Gmail team/devs/company deserves to be shamed...", which is why the plural still made sense to me (given the omission of an explicit "team"). The singular makes sense to me too. In any case, I wasn't really interested in correcting or proving anyone right or wrong, just pointing out an interesting linguistic detail and where the grammar may have come from.
      - toyg 10mo ago
        Can you "shame" a product, though? Obviously not. So you're shaming the people who built Gmail, the organization - hence the plural form is acceptable.
    - NuclearPM 10mo ago
      Ironic.
ExoticPearTree 10mo ago
It is also a conferencing app. That might explain some of the size.
- hadlock 10mo ago
  I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.
  - suprfsat 10mo ago
    Meet was discontinued; its functionality was merged into Duo and the resulting app renamed to Meet.
    - SaltyBackendGuy 10mo ago
      Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.
  - afavour 10mo ago
    My work uses GSuite so I’m using Meet every day. I find it mildly useful to have the functionality built into the Gmail app but at the same time I see zero loss in having it be a separate app.
- tshaddox 10mo ago
  That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.
  - adastra22 10mo ago
    The background images alone would be more than that.
lxgr 10mo ago
I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think. Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps. Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.
- seizethecheese 10mo ago
  Is it plausible that the libraries are so big? I mean, for example, NodeJS is in the order of 100mb and contains the whole v8 engine. The Gmail app size has to be assets, right?
  - reactordev 10mo ago
    Static linking will do that. Imagine you have 400mb of binary objects your app depends on. Libraries your company uses for app analytics, SSO, 2FA, Corporate service bus api, etc. You statically link all those for your 50mb Swift UI app and bam, you’re in the 700mb range.
    - chasil 10mo ago
      The use of Go will definitely do that, as it prefers to statically link everything. https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile If we had an entire POSIX OS built with Go, then we would be back to statically-linked UNIX prior to BSD. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dynamically-linked-go-binaries/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dyna...
      - reactordev 10mo ago
        can you build a Swift UI in go?
        chasil 10mo ago
        There is a single mention of Swift on the developer page that I posted. "Note that you can also invoke GoHelloGreetings from Swift by importing Hello." @import Hello // ... let msg = Hello.GoHelloGreetings("gopher")
jama211 10mo ago
Why? It’s obviously not a problem for them
zamadatix 10mo ago
Gmail started by giving 1 GB of free storage to users as a carrot. Over 2 decades later, how much does it really matter if the app goes from 70% of that down to even 10% of that, and would that outweigh what else people actually want to see done instead? I mean, it's certainly not anything to boast about from a technical perspective. I just don't know whether it's really enough to warrant any shame for the product though.

NuclearPM 10mo ago

Deserves.

dieggsy 10mo 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 10mo ago
  I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".
- anal_reactor 10mo 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 10mo 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.
    - dieggsy 10mo ago
      Gmail is a product, but the comment wasn't saying "Gmail the product deserves to be shamed... ", more like "the Gmail team/devs/company deserves to be shamed...", which is why the plural still made sense to me (given the omission of an explicit "team"). The singular makes sense to me too. In any case, I wasn't really interested in correcting or proving anyone right or wrong, just pointing out an interesting linguistic detail and where the grammar may have come from.
    - toyg 10mo ago
      Can you "shame" a product, though? Obviously not. So you're shaming the people who built Gmail, the organization - hence the plural form is acceptable.
  - NuclearPM 10mo ago
    Ironic.

ExoticPearTree 10mo ago

It is also a conferencing app. That might explain some of the size.

hadlock 10mo ago
I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.
- suprfsat 10mo ago
  Meet was discontinued; its functionality was merged into Duo and the resulting app renamed to Meet.
  - SaltyBackendGuy 10mo ago
    Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.
- afavour 10mo ago
  My work uses GSuite so I’m using Meet every day. I find it mildly useful to have the functionality built into the Gmail app but at the same time I see zero loss in having it be a separate app.
tshaddox 10mo ago
That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.
- adastra22 10mo ago
  The background images alone would be more than that.

lxgr 10mo ago

I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think. Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps. Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.

seizethecheese 10mo ago
Is it plausible that the libraries are so big? I mean, for example, NodeJS is in the order of 100mb and contains the whole v8 engine. The Gmail app size has to be assets, right?
- reactordev 10mo ago
  Static linking will do that. Imagine you have 400mb of binary objects your app depends on. Libraries your company uses for app analytics, SSO, 2FA, Corporate service bus api, etc. You statically link all those for your 50mb Swift UI app and bam, you’re in the 700mb range.
  - chasil 10mo ago
    The use of Go will definitely do that, as it prefers to statically link everything. https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile https://go.dev/wiki/Mobile If we had an entire POSIX OS built with Go, then we would be back to statically-linked UNIX prior to BSD. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dynamically-linked-go-binaries/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/golang-statically-and-dyna...
    - reactordev 10mo ago
      can you build a Swift UI in go?
      - chasil 10mo ago
        There is a single mention of Swift on the developer page that I posted. "Note that you can also invoke GoHelloGreetings from Swift by importing Hello." @import Hello // ... let msg = Hello.GoHelloGreetings("gopher")

jama211 10mo ago

Why? It’s obviously not a problem for them

zamadatix 10mo ago

Gmail started by giving 1 GB of free storage to users as a carrot. Over 2 decades later, how much does it really matter if the app goes from 70% of that down to even 10% of that, and would that outweigh what else people actually want to see done instead? I mean, it's certainly not anything to boast about from a technical perspective. I just don't know whether it's really enough to warrant any shame for the product though.