Because the app stores keep adding new requirements that you have to add code to deal with and it gets worse every year and seemingly every day.
Isn’t it strange that a shop is demanding code?
Why are you asking? Are you trying to prematurely optimize these apps?
They only came out 10 years ago. If we optimize now, how will we integrate an AI chat agent feature next year?
Why does notepad requires 320 GBs now?
Certainly not for running an LLM on all your files to figure out which ads to show you in the start menu. Why would you even imply something like that?
*shifty eyes* Um yes
And every CoD and most big title games…
Because companies give zero fucks. They will tell you they need tons of IT people, when in reality they want tons of underpaid programmers. They want stuff as fast and cheap as possible. What doesn’t cause immediate trouble is usually good enough. What can be patched up somehow is kept running, even when it only leads you further up the cliff you will fall off eventually.
Management is sometimes completely clueless. They rather hire twice as many people to keep some poorly developed app running, than to invest in a new, better developed app, that requires less maintenance and provides a better user experience. Zero risk tolerance and zero foresight.
It still generates money, you keep it running. Any means are fine.
Ironically the management that does have a clue often is hamstrung somewhere up the chain.
Electron everywhere.
Web “Apps” are also quite bad. Lots of and lots of stuff we’re downloading and it feels clunky.
Sometimes that’s bad coding, poor optimization, third party libraries, or sometimes just including trackers/ads on the page.
I vaguely recall a recent-ish article that an average web page is 30mb. That’s right, thirty megabytes.
It’s amazing how much faster web browsing becomes when I run PiHole and block most of it.
Suddenly the TV is pretty snappy, and all browsers feel so much smoother.
And I’m sitting here uneasy thinking how the hell I’m going to compress my map data any further so that my entire web app is no bigger than 2 mb. 😥
No, you need to go further: https://512kb.club/
Oh god, I’m not ready for the trauma and the emotional scars… D:
That’s straight up not true. It’s not even remotely close to that.
Some devs will include a whole library for one thing instead of trying to learn another way to do that thing.
from * import *A whole library which was meant to to 10 things, but you only use one. And that for x libraries
Nowadays libraries are built with tree-shaking in mind, so when it’s time to deploy the app only the code that’s actually used gets bundled.
And analytics. And offloading as much computation to the client, because servers are expensive and inefficiency is not an issue if your users are the ones paying for it.
I saw an ad request with an inline 1.4 MB game. Like, you could fit Mario in there.
The Samsung shop hands out 1.4mb JSON responses for order tracking, with what I estimate 99% redundant information that is repeated many times in different parts of the structure.
Tap for spoiler
Get electroned
AHHH, please trigger warning
I’d rather have the Rickroll, please 😐
Lazy devs not removing old non functional commented code and background code additions ?
Though I do get it if they don’t want to remove the old code if their employer is an asshole
That’s not why. It’s the dependency trees that run a dozen layers deep and end up importing “isEven”. If you’re building a react app odds are good you’ll import way more code than you ever write yourself.
And no one should be leaving commented-out code in their app, that’s what source control is for.
Did my husband made this meme? Because he is constantly saying this 😂😂😂😂
It’s all because of Electron, unnecessary libraries, and just bad coders. Asus Armoury Crate weighs a lot and is so slow, but it’s basically a simple app. Total Commander has much more features, but it’s fast, lightweight, and consumes 9 MB of RAM.
I’ve said this on reddit before, but once for a joke I tried to make a windows program to play doot.wav during October at random, and tried programming it on Linux.
Sinds playing audio and working with the system tray was tricky, I ended up with electron.
So yeah, an atrocious 120 mb application to play a 6kb wav file with a
Math.random(). I don’t remember the memory consumption, but it was probably just as gross.Once I wrote an annoying program adding acceleration to the mouse cursor, so it was difficult to click any UI item. It was written in Object Pascal with Win API and weighted 16 KB. And I think in C it would be even smaller.
I remember there was a pretty funny prank program that would make the user’s mouse pointer leave behind little poops on the screen at random.
Which faang company are you sr. engineer at?
Paypal has 500 mb and just shows a number and you can press a button to send a number to their server.
It’s insane
Has to send a number to Apple’s server too! actually not even sure if that’s client side.
Check out the apps Hermit and Native Alpha. They make web pages run like an app. I’ve only run into a couple sites where they don’t work right.
Native alpha sounds good since it’s foss and uses vanadium’s webview. Are you still logged in to paypal (any annoying website) a couple of months later. Or does it revoke your rights after a while?
I only use it rarely and I hate providing my info for 5 minutes just to do one transaction.
Dude!! What a badass concept, cannot wait to give this a shot!!
You made me check it, and on my android device it’s 337 (just the app). Jesus Christ.
Mine has 660MB with 7MB user data, 15MB cache.
LMAO, he also made me check it.
347 MB for me, no wonder why I am always struggling with storage for my 128 GB phone (with not expandable storage of course), and I don’t even have that many games, even less ROMs 😅
isn’t it a combination of younger developers not learning to programme under the restrictions of limited memory and cpu speed, on top of employers demanding code as soon as possible rather than code that is elegant or resource efficient or even slightly planned out
Mostly the latter. We don’t do any optimizations on our product whatsoever. Most important thing is to say yes to all the customers and add every single feature they want. Every sprint is spent adding and adding and adding to the code as much as we can and as quickly as we can. Not a single second is allotted to any discussion about performance or efficiency. Maybe when something breaks, but otherwise we keep piling on more crap at full speed non-stop. I have repeatedly been told “the fast way is the right way” followed by laughter. I was told to “merge this now” on multiple occasions even when I knew that the code was shit, and told the team as much. I am expected to write code now and think about it later.
As you can expect, the codebase is a bloated nightmare. Slow as shit, bugs galore, ugly inconsistent UI, ENORMOUS memory use, waaaaaay too frequent DB access with a shit ton of duplicate requests that are each rather inefficient themselves. It is a rather complex piece of lab management software, but not so complex that it should be struggling to run on dedicated servers with 8 gigs of RAM. Yet it does.
Much the latter.
Plus everything better work perfecly out of the box on any hardware, and there is a lot of different hardware. Compatibility layers are often built into the package.
Java, for instance, recommenda that you package the whole (albeit slimmed down) JVM inside the package for the target platform, rather than relying on the java runtime installed already.
The users arent expected to know any of that anymore.
yep, a lot of apps are just repackaged chrome running a web page.
which begs the question to companies that require use of the app instead of just having a working website i can use on my copy of chrome/firefox that’s already on my phone…
why do you need hardware access to my device?
1 reason is that they want as much data as possible. They sell the user data. Or they use the user data to improve their targeted advertising. They want more ad clicks.
Re app versus site, many know how to block ads on browsers. With an app, the firm is hoping they can show you ads. Ads can be removed from some apps but the layperson doesn’t know.
Generally maybe but for apps specifically, it’s the default choice of IDE, Android Studio, bundling tons of libraries for added functionality bound to Play Services.
Which would probably be illegal in EU now, if any judge had the tech see-through for it.
Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.
64kb should be enough for anyone
is that the size of doom or something lol
Its a reference to an old he said she said quote attributed to bill gates from the 1990’s
“640K ought to be enough for anyone” — Bill Gate
Yep. Apps are 20x bigger with no new features…that you are using.
Let’s not forget that the graphics for applications has scaled with display resolution, and people generally demand a smooth modern look for their apps.
In the case of normal apps like PayPal graphics shouldn’t be a huge factor since it should be vectorized and there is pretty much no graphics in apps like PayPal.
The issue comes from frameworks.
Yeah, though the joke is funny, this is the real answer.
Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.
Also the storage is the cost for the user, and google in the case of play store. So the developers have no incentive to reduce the size.
Storage is cheap on a PC, it’s not cheap on mobile where it’s fixed and used as a model differentiator. They overcharge you so much. Oh, and they removed SD card slots from nearly all phones.
Nah it’s fine. Clean up used apps every once in a while. Base phones have more than enough space.
Bloatware, spyware, scope creep from middle managers feeling uncomfortable letting a dev have a slow day.
It’s just that we have to make space for our 5,358 partners and the telemetry data they need.
That still wouldn’t account for it. The code to collect this is tiny and the data isn’t stored locally. The whole point is for them to suck it up into their massive dataset.
* legitimate telemetry data
Legitimate interest to train AI
Let me (lemme?) translate this into customer-friendly business language:
Enhanced user experience
Usually, instead of having 8-bit art, you have epic songs and very high definition textures. That is a good deal of why.
Backed devs: sweats
I think the epic songs and 4K textures are missing in my MS Office.
Yeah but they made xlookup, that’s worth a few hundred megabytes
All hail xlookup
That’s weird. Have you tried reinstalling?
Textures and songs are not a thing on most apps right? For android, using Kotlin has created much bigger appsize than old java
Kotlin doesn’t have much impact on binary size.
For smaller apps maybe. I’ve seen apps that should take less than 1mb rise to 15mb or so
That’s not due to kotlin.
Why else?
How would I know without looking at the app binary?
