3 ms·

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.
• SapporoChris 9mo ago
  To add to the comparisons. Protonmail is showing as 180 MB on GrapheneOS. Add in user data and cache and it's 495 MB. I don't consider myself a big email user so I am a bit appalled.
  • ChoGGi 9mo ago
    Pixel OS16 with fastmail is 20MB for app, 60 for usercache and 7 for cache. I use it once or twice a week if that
• derkades 9mo ago
  K-9 mail (aka Thunderbird) is a nice 12MB, 70MB installed.
  • okanat 9mo ago
    The app size is 44 MiBs for me. With user data just above 70 though.