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
"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.

>>Brian_+8m
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.