[Discuss] Nexus 5X

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 9/29/2015 3:45 PM, Kent Borg wrote:
> On 09/29/2015 03:22 PM, Shirley M?rquez D?lcey wrote:
>> One word on why an app needs 100MB: games. All those visuals and
>> sounds take up space.
> 
> Yes, sampling reality with pictures and sound recordings is expensive,
> and making up an artificial reality also takes up space.
> 
> But why does my Kindle app need 125MB, not counting books?
> 
> Why does the Wall Street Journal need 20MB just for the app? (Not data.)
> Boston Globe: 18MB?
> Chrome browser: 67MB?
> Firefox: 52MB?
> TuneIn Radio Pro: 53MB?
> Google Hangouts: 54MB?
> Twitter: 51MB?
> Kayak reservations program: 40MB?
> Calendar: 36MB?
> Gmail: 37MB?
> FlightView Free: 29MB?
> Wordpress client app: 27MB?
> 
> For all of these I am not counting what is reported as "Data" or
> "Cache",  these are just the "App" numbers.
> 
> These seem like crazy big numbers to me. It looks to me like these apps
> are growing to fill space. And now that the .apk file limit has doubled,
> I am assuming many of these numbers are set to double, because they can.

You've got me curious enough that I'm going to pull some of these apps
down and pull them apart to see what they have in them, but my initial
guess is that they're all embedding some sort of cross-platform UI engine.

All of these organizations want iOS and Android apps, and they want to
minimize costs of application development, because that's pure overhead.
 So they're probably using some sort of framework to make a UI
consistent across platforms.  So the size probably comes from them using
very little of the built-in UI constructs.  Even if it's not a UI
framework specifically, my guess is that it's a ton of third-party
libraries.

The other thing that tends to take up space is the icons/resources.  It
makes sense for a lot of these apps to bundle all the icons into the app
so they don't need to be pulled from the web all the time (keeps the app
responsive even in low-bandwidth situations).

I'll try to find time today to pull apart a few of those apps to really
find out though.

Matt