App Sizes Are Out of Control

Megalith

Megalith

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Blogger Trevor Elkins has noted that iOS apps are getting bigger and bigger: Facebook, for instance, weighed 100MB two years ago, yet the app now measures a “whopping” 354MB. I just compared these with the Android versions on my Note 3, which appear to be significantly lighter…

...the six apps in this picture average roughly 230MB in size, 1387MB in total. That would take an 8Mbit internet connection 24 minutes to download, and I’d still be left with 27 additional apps to update! More and more companies are adopting shorter release cycles (two weeks or so) and it’s becoming unsustainable as a consumer to update frequently. Something this systematic leads me to believe Apple has to intervene. Only two years ago were people complaining about Facebook being 100MB. Now it’s a whopping 354MB!
 
I only update apps on free wifi or someone else's connection because of this. It's getting stupid.
 
My phone keeps running out of space. I have like... 5 apps installed - all of which are pretty light weight. Went and looked at what it was - Messages is eating 4GB+.

Never guessed all those text messages would add up. Still can't quite figure out how that is happening - it's not like I'm getting HD uncompressed video streams via SMS.

Probably all those new emoji...
 
Maybe apple should copy androids delta updates, just the new parts of the app are updated not the whole thing.
 
Megalith said:
Blogger Trevor Elkins has noted that iOS apps are getting bigger and bigger: Facebook, for instance, weighed 100MB two years ago, yet the app now measures a “whopping” 354MB. I just compared these with the Android versions on my Note 3, which appear to be significantly lighter…

...the six apps in this picture average roughly 230MB in size, 1387MB in total. That would take an 8Mbit internet connection 24 minutes to download, and I’d still be left with 27 additional apps to update! More and more companies are adopting shorter release cycles (two weeks or so) and it’s becoming unsustainable as a consumer to update frequently. Something this systematic leads me to believe Apple has to intervene. Only two years ago were people complaining about Facebook being 100MB. Now it’s a whopping 354MB!
Click to expand...


I saw this and pondered why FB needed to seperate out its messaging functionality from its core app (I refuse to install the dedicated messaging app). At first I thought it might be because they wanted to increase ad revenue but then I wondered if they were getting close to some sort of upper limit on app size.

Does apple still enforce the 100MB app limit for OTA downloads?
 
Well if the programmers ever "finished" a product they wouldn't have a job. So they gotta keep putting something into the apps. At this point I believe they are stuffing the Facebook app with bullshit.


No, I mean they type the word bullshit a few thousand times and then compile the update.
 
Megalith said:
Blogger Trevor Elkins has noted that iOS apps are getting bigger and bigger: Facebook, for instance, weighed 100MB two years ago, yet the app now measures a “whopping” 354MB. I just compared these with the Android versions on my Note 3, which appear to be significantly lighter…

...the six apps in this picture average roughly 230MB in size, 1387MB in total. That would take an 8Mbit internet connection 24 minutes to download, and I’d still be left with 27 additional apps to update! More and more companies are adopting shorter release cycles (two weeks or so) and it’s becoming unsustainable as a consumer to update frequently. Something this systematic leads me to believe Apple has to intervene. Only two years ago were people complaining about Facebook being 100MB. Now it’s a whopping 354MB!
Click to expand...

It seems to be going the way of desktop apps where devs no longer care to optimize or anything that even looks like optimization or conserving resources. It is just expected that end user will just have to overspec their machine to run crappy software. Adobe is a great example of this, looks at installed Acrobat which takes up 1.5-2GB of space. It has no media or graphics and frankly I have no idea why it grew so big. Many games are doing the same with uncompressed textures, audio, etc.
 
A lot of the app size is do to bloat, unused code, and duplicate files. Optimization takes time and many app developers have gone to two week update cycles, so they prioritize new features and bug fixes over optimization. Part of that is phone storage has grown exponentially over the last several years and you can now easily get an iPhone with 256gb of storage, so space is not a concern.
 
Brian_B said:
My phone keeps running out of space. I have like... 5 apps installed - all of which are pretty light weight. Went and looked at what it was - Messages is eating 4GB+.

Never guessed all those text messages would add up. Still can't quite figure out how that is happening - it's not like I'm getting HD uncompressed video streams via SMS.

Probably all those new emoji...
Click to expand...
gifs? pictures? videos? but I agree it sucks,

there should be a built-in "data clean-up" app.. clear those caches etc.. right now you mostly need to delete and reinstall apps, or resort to a shady third party app
 
zkostik said:
It is just expected that end user will just have to overspec their machine to run crappy software.
Click to expand...
To be fair, when quad core+ cellphones are considered standard (which is ridiculous overkill) I guess why bother optimizing?
 
nysmo said:
To be fair, when quad core+ cellphones are considered standard (which is ridiculous overkill) I guess why bother optimizing?
Click to expand...
Not ridiculous and they are not true quad cors like you think. They are 2 cores for heavy processing and two cores for efficiency. All 4 cores are generally not going to be used at the same time.
 
Tinfoil hat for Facebook. Basically a web browser variation form of Facebook, without the app that records everything you do on your phone.

It's how I get my daily taste of laughing at everyone's life that updates their status all the time.
 
kju1 said:
I saw this and pondered why FB needed to seperate out its messaging functionality from its core app (I refuse to install the dedicated messaging app). At first I thought it might be because they wanted to increase ad revenue but then I wondered if they were getting close to some sort of upper limit on app size.

Does apple still enforce the 100MB app limit for OTA downloads?
Click to expand...
No, but sometimes. Pic to show I'm not full of shit.
 

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I fail to see how an app like Facebook is over 350mb in size. That's almost as big as some office apps.
 
Spidey329 said:
I fail to see how an app like Facebook is over 350mb in size. That's almost as big as some office apps.
Click to expand...

Ads and spyware.

It's just calling their webapi... you could whip something up in ruby to do the same thing in a few hundred kilobytes.
 
Presbytier said:
A lot of the app size is do to bloat, unused code, and duplicate files. Optimization takes time and many app developers have gone to two week update cycles, so they prioritize new features and bug fixes over optimization. Part of that is phone storage has grown exponentially over the last several years and you can now easily get an iPhone with 256gb of storage, so space is not a concern.
Click to expand...

tell that to my iphone7 plus with 32gb my work provides.. at least it's a step up from the 16GB iphone 6 I had for 2 years!
 
Bounty said:
Well if the programmers ever "finished" a product they wouldn't have a job. So they gotta keep putting something into the apps. At this point I believe they are stuffing the Facebook app with bullshit.


No, I mean they type the word bullshit a few thousand times and then compile the update.
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as a 'finished' product in the programming world.
 
I just refuse to install these app hogs. Not only do they take up a lot of space, they are horribly intrusive with the permissions they ask for. Why do you need my contact list or access to my SMS.

Facebook is being more pushy about it too. Used to be I could get fb messenger to work in chrome. Then only in desktop view. Inconvenient but it worked. Now they borked that. Forget them.
 
admiralperpetual said:
tell that to my iphone7 plus with 32gb my work provides.. at least it's a step up from the 16GB iphone 6 I had for 2 years!
Click to expand...
I never said they shouldn't optimize, but those companies know they can get away with bloat as people are less likely to delete facebook to make room for more apps.
 
And I still remember the days of 10MB hard drives and how you could load every application you had and hardly make a dent in the space.
 
Fundamentally I think this is an issue for all apps, especially games across all platforms. Games are pushing 50-70 gigs now, wtf? Game sizes gone wild?
 
Poor programming and api. I'm still annoyed at why is win8.1 taking up 25GB in just the windows folder and it has none of the fancy gui that win7 had.
 
thesmokingman said:
Fundamentally I think this is an issue for all apps, especially games across all platforms. Games are pushing 50-70 gigs now, wtf? Game sizes gone wild?
Click to expand...
4k textures aren't exactly small. That being said some of the size has to do with thwarting pirates by keeping all the files as uncompressed as possible; the idea being people are not going to want to torrent a 50-60gb download. Some is due to using uncompressed audio; the first Titanfall had all of its audio uncompressed. Still game sizes and the size of the facebook app have no correlation.
 
Spend countless hours getting your app to work with OS libraries, vs. add your own libraries to the app. Gotta hit that release cadence.

Of course, never enough time to go back and refactor / deprecate old versions. Gotta hit that release cadence.
 
Living Weapon said:
Spend countless hours getting your app to work with OS libraries, vs. add your own libraries to the app. Gotta hit that release cadence.

Of course, never enough time to go back and refactor / deprecate old versions. Gotta hit that release cadence.
Click to expand...
That is really the big deal here. The one thing that pisses me off though is they could at least tell me what is in the update. The fact nearly no one puts in patch notes on mobile apps anymore is aggravating.
 
Feature creep and scope creep come to mind when reading this. I'm a programmer and most of my software compiles to less than 1MB (2 of my projects are really big and are 4MB and 7MB). I do typically keep my stuff small, but even the game client-server I'm writing right now has some 5K lines of code and is compiling to 200KB or so. Not sure what the programmers over at FB are doing. Here's my guesses.

- Images, Audio, Video content. This can include the app "theme", sound effects when clicking things, or videos introducing how to use a feature. They may also have 2+ images for each image relating to theme so that the program scales well to any screen size.
- Telemetry and analytics from differing sources in order to circumvent system-wide telemetry and analytics blocking.
- Company-wide standardized API that has too much functionality and should be decoupled.

There really shouldn't be any other reasons. Unused code is thrown out during compilation by the compiler, so that definitely doesn't cost anything. If anyone's curious enough on Android, get an older version of whatever program you want to look at and the new version, then use jadx to view the differences, assuming jadx supports the bytecode ops.
 
To put it into perspective, the Facebook app on iOS is almost 100MB larger than Pokemon Go. Which seems odd.
 
Goodlookinguy said:
Feature creep and scope creep come to mind when reading this. I'm a programmer and most of my software compiles to less than 1MB (2 of my projects are really big and are 4MB and 7MB). I do typically keep my stuff small, but even the game client-server I'm writing right now has some 5K lines of code and is compiling to 200KB or so. Not sure what the programmers over at FB are doing. Here's my guesses.

- Images, Audio, Video content. This can include the app "theme", sound effects when clicking things, or videos introducing how to use a feature. They may also have 2+ images for each image relating to theme so that the program scales well to any screen size.
- Telemetry and analytics from differing sources in order to circumvent system-wide telemetry and analytics blocking.
- Company-wide standardized API that has too much functionality and should be decoupled.

There really shouldn't be any other reasons. Unused code is thrown out during compilation by the compiler, so that definitely doesn't cost anything. If anyone's curious enough on Android, get an older version of whatever program you want to look at and the new version, then use jadx to view the differences, assuming jadx supports the bytecode ops.
Click to expand...

I will say that having dealt with some startup companies, their apps usually lack any sort of optimization in terms of media files. One company I work with thinks saving an image file as a png is enough. Example, a particular small icon file before me: 18Kb, after me 1Kb. Repeat that times eleventy since they often don't reuse assets. I was able to optimize their art files down from 10Mb to 300Kb.

This stems from that they often don't prioritize an actual gfx artist, instead opting for freelance mockups and then the programmers split them up for use with no knowledge of how to properly optimize media delivery. You can do so much with CSS (even more with the CSS4 beta) and a lot of frameworks use that.
 
Spidey329 said:
I will say that having dealt with some startup companies, their apps usually lack any sort of optimization in terms of media files. One company I work with thinks saving an image file as a png is enough. Example, a particular small icon file before me: 18Kb, after me 1Kb. Repeat that times eleventy since they often don't reuse assets. I was able to optimize their art files down from 10Mb to 300Kb.

This stems from that they often don't prioritize an actual gfx artist, instead opting for freelance mockups and then the programmers split them up for use with no knowledge of how to properly optimize media delivery. You can do so much with CSS (even more with the CSS4 beta) and a lot of frameworks use that.
Click to expand...
Its a cost issue. No one except very few people are actually complaining about ballooning app sizes right now. The average user is probably completely unaware it exists, so it is not an actual problem that needs money spent on it.
 
kju1 said:
I saw this and pondered why FB needed to seperate out its messaging functionality from its core app (I refuse to install the dedicated messaging app). At first I thought it might be because they wanted to increase ad revenue but then I wondered if they were getting close to some sort of upper limit on app size.

Does apple still enforce the 100MB app limit for OTA downloads?
Click to expand...

I have the FB messaging app installed on my phone, but I albsolutely refuse to install the full FB app because it sucks battery life and spams notifications like they are going out of style.
 
They are getting bigger but my 64 GB iPhone has not had any space issues since I purchased it a year ago.
 
Goodlookinguy said:
Feature creep and scope creep come to mind when reading this. I'm a programmer and most of my software compiles to less than 1MB (2 of my projects are really big and are 4MB and 7MB). I do typically keep my stuff small, but even the game client-server I'm writing right now has some 5K lines of code and is compiling to 200KB or so. Not sure what the programmers over at FB are doing. Here's my guesses.

- Images, Audio, Video content. This can include the app "theme", sound effects when clicking things, or videos introducing how to use a feature. They may also have 2+ images for each image relating to theme so that the program scales well to any screen size.
- Telemetry and analytics from differing sources in order to circumvent system-wide telemetry and analytics blocking.
- Company-wide standardized API that has too much functionality and should be decoupled.

There really shouldn't be any other reasons. Unused code is thrown out during compilation by the compiler, so that definitely doesn't cost anything. If anyone's curious enough on Android, get an older version of whatever program you want to look at and the new version, then use jadx to view the differences, assuming jadx supports the bytecode ops.
Click to expand...
For iOS, it's generally 3 sizes of each image. For Android, it can be 5 (mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi, xxhdpi, xxxhdpi).

What I've noticed is that very few app updates are actually worth it. Once an app works, the developer/publisher has to somehow grow the userbase, or show a competitive advantage, so that means adding features. Occasionally new features add some value, but in my experience most are useless ("share X on social media!") or worse ("I demand access to your contacts! Trust me!"). And most updates result in worse performance. Unless there's some show-stopping bug that gets fixed, it's not worth the update. I have an older phone. That means I'm limited on flash, RAM, and CPU. Often, I'll go to apkpure or some other source in order to download an older, faster, slimmer version of the apps I'm using.

Do Android Studio and Xcode have a feature to track down unused methods/layouts/images/sounds?

On my last project, we shoehorned all the code into 4KB. :) (embedded software running on an 8-bit microcontroller)
 
Poor code optimization/lazy programmers hit apps just like it did PC programs once resources became plentiful.............say it ain't so!
 
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