zlacker

>>foxfir+(OP)
I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine.

Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest website is a few mb. They dont let you highlight text and have other bizarre design choices. Even worse, they request importing contacts list which isnt even an option on the web.

Native apps could be butter but more often than not they are like margarine. Smooth, oily, and not good for you.

>>rustys+Fg
500MB average seems like a gross exaggeration. I agree apps are oversize but I have maybe 2 native apps on mobile that are so large.

>>andrew+Fi
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.

>>dbtc+8j
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.

>>cosmic+Hj
Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it

>>frollo+zk
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.