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The Size of iPhone's Top Apps Has Increased by 1,000% in Four Years (sensortower.com)

Posted by msmash on from the changing-dynamics dept.

Research firm Sensor Tower shares an analysis: As the minimum storage capacity of iPhone continues to increase -- it sits at 32 GB today on the iPhone 7, double the the iPhone 5S's 16 GB circa 2013 -- it's not surprising that the size of apps themselves is getting larger. In fact, Apple raised the app size cap from 2 GB to 4 GB in early 2015. What's surprising is how much faster they're increasing in size compared to device storage itself. According to Sensor Tower's analysis of App Intelligence, the total space required by the top 10 most installed U.S. iPhone apps has grown from 164 MB in May 2013 to about 1.8 GB last month, an 11x or approximately 1,000 percent increase in just four years. [...] Of the top 10 most popular U.S. iPhone apps, the minimum growth we saw in app size since May 2013 was 6x for both Spotify and Facebook's Messenger. As the chart above shows, other apps, especially Snapchat, have grown considerably more. In fact, Snapchat is more than 50 times larger than it was four years ago, clocking in at 203 MB versus just 4 MB at the start of the period we looked at. It's not the largest app among the top 10, however. That distinction goes to Facebook, which, at 388 MB, is 12 times larger than it was in May 2013 when it occupied 32 MB. It grew by about 100 MB in one update during September of last year.

6 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Uber lost a customer when I upgraded phones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I recently found myself in my new phone without a ride hailing app. Turns out Uber was too big to download OTA, but Lyft was not.

  2. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Is it because folks are switching to Swift? I'm assuming that the frameworks and libraries it uses as well as XCode are part of the problem.

    And many developers have this fetish for going apeshit with the OOP paradigm - much of that is to be blamed on academia. When I was forced to take a C++ class for a pre-req (the department didn't care that I had years of on the job experience), I was aghast at what the prof of was teaching. He didn't want to hear different - "In my class we do it my way!" Whatever. Our "hello world" programs were a couple of megabytes. Geeze!

    Those who know do; those who don't know teach.

  3. Useless article by kwerle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How much did the binaries grow? Because if you added a gigabyte of video to your 300MB app, I just don't care.

  4. Is that the APPS' problem, though? by SeaFox · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Let's see the same comparison with Android phones.

    I suspect the issue isn't that iPhone apps are growing at a faster rate than the iPhone's storage options. These top apps are going to be cross-platform ones, not iOS-exclusives. What's more likely happening is app file sizes are trending in line with smartphone storage as a whole. The iPhone is the one not keeping up with everyone else in storage sizes, which is a problem when there's no way for the consumer to upgrade the storage themselves.

    1. Re:Is that the APPS' problem, though? by clonehappy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wait, so the iPhone is behind in storage? Wha-how?

      I didn't know Samsung et al. sold an Android with more than 256GB of onboard storage, which is the largest iPhone you can buy. In fact, I just looked, and the Galaxy S8 ONLY comes in a 64GB model, at least in the USA.

      The iPhone comes in 32GB, 128GB, or 256GB.

      So, we've learned again, just because someone feeds you bullshit and puts it in BOLD TEXT doesn't make it true.

      Or, somehow, 64GB > 256GB in Android fanboy land.

      Android is the one that has ALWAYS lacked in onboard storage. Their hackaround was being able to move apps to the SD card (on phones that actually still supported one), which generally made them run like shit since the SD card is so much slower than onboard flash. I suspect you don't know as much about these things as you think you do.

  5. Re:Farcebook by jittles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    perfecting art of bloatware and spyware.

    This is actually Apple's fault. Every Swift based framework includes a metric ton of extra code so that swift can execute inside of the app. I think it adds about 180MB per framework, if I am remembering correctly. So just using 5 third party Swift libraries puts you at almost a gig of storage just from Swift.