Comment by rustystump

How does an app for Reddit make sense? It’s an image and text platform. There’s no weird hardware apis required.

Native apps make sense when you need to tap in to platform specific features like the Lidar api and such. They don’t make any sense for most websites.

I too switched from Reddit to HN during the API protests of '23. But I always browsed through old.reddit anyway, I never used the third party apps. I'm aware of names like RIF and that everyone said they were great, but what was great about them?

That's because reddit on mobile browser sucks ass (feels like it's intentionally made to suck) even more so than its native app.

I don't think being nativr is what made 3rd party apps great

> Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great.

Because they were competently designed. But you could put that same design into a web page and it would work fine.

I use HN+Tildes instead. I left a couple years before the API fiasco because I was sick of the ragebait and toxic culture.

Redreader is still around as a good 3rd party app.

Some of the third party apps were quite good, certainly better than the reddit mobile site, but that's mostly because the reddit mobile site is just so deliberately awful.

There aren't really any major technical reasons why the mobile site couldn't be as good.

Yeah but if you want some restricted content the app is the only way

You never experienced the horror that is XAML. Not HTML, not native control either, it’s a weird middle ground of platform lock-in that you couldn’t escape until recently.

What I miss are the days where one could Win32 call a window up, and it looked like every other. Not sugar for me and none for thee.

I cut my teeth programming GUIs, I still like making GUIs - immediate mode guis, event based guis, animated guis and informational guis. I left front-end web dev when every 6 months there was a new framework, a new new, and everyone dropped everything for it. I understand why React ate the world at the time but it’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer standards driven, its ecosystem driven, and even then it’s leaking.

What I love about these hybrid apps though is that from Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) onwards, they’ve all looked really really good. Proving that a normal user can’t tell the difference. Which makes solo-dev or small-dev dev easier. Go with what you know. No need to learn flutter, or SwiftUI, or Kotlin.

> uber: 582

Not to defend Uber, but there was a post here some time ago where one engineer explained why it's so large (sadly can't find it anymore): it's due to a lot of different implementations for different markets (some masks may have slight differences in different countries) and their choise to re-implement the masks multiple times.

> of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...

You can find that in the phone storage settings:

    iOS:           12 G
    Keynote:      498 M
    Numbers:      482 M
    Pages:        455 M
    Clips:        213 M
    Maps:          81 M
    Watch:         70 M
    Find My:       60 M
    Music:         38 M
    iTunes U:      35 M
    Support:       34 M
    Podcasts:      32 M
    Books:         31 M
    iCloud Drive:  30 M
    Freeform:      19 M
    Fitness:       18 M
    Notes:         17 M
    Journal:       15 M
    Home:          10 M
    App Store:      8 M
    Weather:        8 M
    Mail:           7 M
    Files:          4 M
    Health:         3 M
    Measure:        3 M
    Voice Memos:    3 M
    Calendar:       2 M
    Clock:          2 M
    Safari:         2 M
    Shortcuts:      2 M
    Translate:      2 M
    TV:             2 M
    Calculator:     1 M
    Facetime:       1 M
    iTunes Store:   1 M
    Tips:           1 M
    Wallet:       934 K
    Messages:     860 K
    Photos:       791 K
    Compass:      712 K
    Camera:       635 K
    Contacts:     598 K
    Phone:        570 K
    Magnifier:    516 K
    Passwords:    213 K

There's also an "Apple Inc." listing, which appears to be "shared" between a lot of their apps which clocks in at 204M

My takeaway from having gone through the list and compared to the various 3rd party apps:

1) Apps can absolutely be smaller. Plenty of stuff in the <200MB range including things like Signal, OBD Fusion and Infuse

2) Games are often big, but there's a surprising number of "simple" apps that are larger than some of the games

3) The largest apps seem to be from companies that you would expect to be doing the most tracking of your data

4) Apple's first party app sizes probably explain a little about why they weren't in a hurry to upgrade storage sizes

I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest megabyte.

   Gmail: 612mb
   Facebook: 359mb
   YouTube: 303mb
   Amex: 365mb

I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe someone else can check the actual IPAs?

edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)

On Android, is the Gmail app actually a PWA? Saying this as Google tried to push PWA hard, but it doesn’t seem like they do it for their own stuff.

Now I understand why those 128 GB get full so quick.

Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that.

Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of different languages.

Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it’s really hard to support Outside.

Is it? You can't easily tell with iOS apps because the container might be that big, but the app on your phone is a fraction of that. The container might contain multiple versions.