Ask HN: Why are mobile apps ballooning in size recently?

6 pointsheptal12y ago3 comments

Many of these well-known apps on the App Store are ostensibly just a skin over an API. Are they not just pushing and pulling text, images, and videos to and from a service and presenting it? Why have they grown to such huge sizes? None of these appear to have significant media assets:

Facebook: 59.3MB LinkedIn: 51.3MB Pinterest: 37.8MB Google+: 35.3MB Yelp: 30.0MB Sleep Cycle: 25.8MB Twitter: 18.9MB Clear: 13.7MB Speedtest: 13.9MB

For contrast, here are a couple apps proving a decent amount of functionality can be contained in sensible bundle sizes:

McTube: 6.6MB Hacker News by Ashish Gandi: 405KB

Safari.app's application bundle on OSX is 28MB.

3 comments

3 comments · 3 top-level

ianstallings12y ago

A lot of it has to do with multiple renditions of creative assets, such as @2x images. Because even if I add multiple code frameworks and libraries it usually doesn't amount to much. Creative assets typically take up the most space.

I will say one thing though - I do wonder if some of it is driven by multi-platform tools that are stuffing their own internals in there. Then you throw it all into one big package instead of splitting it up for different platforms. I've seen some internal app builder tools become quite large before. Especially by firms that think they need to roll their own version of everything, which AFAIK is standard operating procedure for a lot of those you mentioned.

coralreef12y ago

@2x png's take up a deceptive amount of space

morkfromork12y ago

Facebook 11.0.ipa - the app downloaded from iTunes to your computer is 62.2MB. Uncompressed it is 88MB. Facebook binary is 54MB of that 88MB. The rest of the files are mostly .png files, a few audio files and assorted other file types.

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