heptal

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.