Comment by dbtc
8 months ago
Chase Mobile for iOS is 350MB; far from 500, but still baffling why an app would need to be that large just to show me some numbers.
Capital One is 435MB...
Garmin Connect is 518MB for some stupid reason, while Strava is half that and Gaia GPS (great app), is under 100.
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.
"clock in well under the 100MB mark"
But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically gross. The fact that we can afford it these days is an irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.
Yeah, especially if I can make a desktop app under 10 MB with the same functionality and features (obviously non-Electron).
I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely to be highly functional, while simple apps are very small.
For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list, there’s a social media site reader app that’s 7.6MB and a text editor that’s 697KB. Those sizes aren’t the least bit unreasonable.
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Whats the business case to invest in building these well and as small as possible?
Heck, if you are a world business and the app isn't your core value prop, whats your case for investing anything more than the bare minimum in creating your app?
Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it
UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used.
Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic wand they’re sold as.
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Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it’s really hard to support Outside.
Yes, the Outside aspect is annoying. Did you switch to another app?
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.