It kills me when I download a simple app to my phone that’s 60 mb. When I was a child we built the world off 1.44 mb floppies. How did we stray so far from God’s light?
The Uber App on my phone is 1 GB!
Even 10years ago, I considered having an app over around 40mb to be huge, but now 60mb is kind of the norm
Isn’t it about a web engine being roughly 60MB? 😕
Do you mean by that that many apps are just website wrappers? Or did I get it wrong?
Indeed many apps tend to be that, at least many of my apps are open source at least and they tend not to have trackers and other bloat😅
I think I was thinking about desktop apps when I answered, but I feel out of context now 😬
Ohhh, I was talking about android apps😆
Hmm, I havent checked much how big computer applications are on average
ads, tracking, and the use of shitty bloated frameworks (like electron) so the tech bro owners can save time and money.
There’s sort of an unholy synergy between hardware companies wanting to sell more hardware and software shops wanting to cut development costs. The selection pressures are to build bloated software that needs fast hardware to run.
Because storage is cheap, so it’s not worth optimizing that heavily for, because the optimization creates a huge amount of headaches.
There’s a reason that today you can just download an app, and it just installs, runs, and uninstalls itself cleanly.
There’s no fighting with dependencies, or installing versions of libraries or frameworks before you can install an app, or having apps conflict with other apps, or having bits of app installations lying around conflicting with things.
That’s because we used to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that only a single copy of each dependency was installed on a system. If two apps both relied on the same library, one would install it, and the other would then be dependent on it as well and not install its own copy. If they were both dependent on different major versions of a library, you could run into conflicts and compatibility issues (hello dll hell). Either the apps would have to manage all that, or the OS would, or eventually the user often would.
Now every app just bundles all its dependencies with it. It means the app comes as a clean bundle, there’s no conflicts, it can install cleanly, and there’s so much less time spend on packaging apps and debugging various system configurations.
Quite frankly this makes way more sense as a model for distributing anything. Yes it costs more in storage, but it pays off massively in resiliency and time savings for everyone.
Except that it’s not just storage, but also increased memory footprint and CPU usage in a lot of cases. Take something like Slack which is a huge resource hog.
It’s also worth noting apps have to ship higher resolution assets now, due to higher resolution displays. This can include video, audio, images, etc. Videos and images may be included at multiple resolutions, to account for different sized displays.
For images, many might assume vectors are the answer, but vectors have to be rendered at runtime, which increases startup time in the best case scenario, and isn’t even always supported on all platforms, meaning they have to be shipped alongside raster assets of a few different sizes, further increasing package bloat. And of course the code grows to add the logic to properly handle all the different asset types and sizes.
All this (packaging dependencies, plus assets/asset handling) to say it isn’t always malware, ads, electron, etc. Sometimes it’s just trying to make something that looks nice and runs well (enough) on any machine.
Bigger monitors, smaller phones, higher color depth, lower latencies, customizable window decorations, chronal themes, AI, blockchain, more devices, trackers, architectures, platforms, malwares, internet protocols, programming languages, human languages, ads, ads, ads, ads, doom, power saving, content, content moderation and I’m sure there’s plenty more reasons that might contribute to the growth.
Not saying I like or want all those things, simply that they might be contributing to size increases. Part of me wishes we could go back, then i fire up windows xp pro sp3 on an eee pc netbook i have that miraculously still works and i remember why i prefer to stay in the present, at least until AI kills us all.
Not IT though, I’m just a guy.
Where did you get “smaller phones” from?
Why is it in the 2000’s it took 30-60 seconds to open, Word, Photoshop, Gimp or some other program. With today’s computing power it still takes 30-60 seconds to open same said programs… Also fuck MS Teams.
Gimp opens on linux pretty much in an instance though
Maybe I should give it another shot then, it’s been a few years. But last time I used it as default to open pictures on my set up it would pop up with its image and take at least 10 seconds to load the image. I got to annoyed with it I change it to just open in my browser.
Cause they work better. Brand new ads, awesome new subscriptions. Flashy new AI features that definitely work super well and are definitely useful.
/s
Electron is the devils own pile of shit
