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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.

20 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Farcebook by cyberchondriac · · Score: 4, Funny

    perfecting art of bloatware and spyware.

    --

    Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
    1. Re:Farcebook by Chewbacon · · Score: 2

      I was just looking at my mother-in-law's full iPhone yesterday and at the top of the list was Facebook at 650mb. I can't even download hardly any apps over cellular anymore because of the limit the appstore puts on them.

      --
      Chewbacon
      The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
    2. Re:Farcebook by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I was just looking at my mother-in-law's full iPhone yesterday and at the top of the list was Facebook at 650mb. I can't even download hardly any apps over cellular anymore because of the limit the appstore puts on them.

      That's like TRIPLE the size of Windows 98... The WHOLE OS!!!!

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      WTF?!?

    3. 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.

    4. Re:Farcebook by unrtst · · Score: 2

      Where the fuck is the "fact" that, "Facebook users actually make use of the features (the Facebook app) offers"?!?!

      The Facebook app was 32mb in 2013, and around 180mb last year. It's now 388mb. They haven't added that many features, and "Messenger" was split off to its own app (so the snapchat-ish/instragram-ish chat parts aren't part of the main app).

      But then facts don't really fit in your narrative, do they? :-P

  2. Age old truism by fustakrakich · · Score: 2

    We will always use all the space and time we have.

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    1. Re:Age old truism by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      We will always use all the space and time we have.

      This truism isn't true anymore. When disk space was scarce, drives were alway 95-99% full. I remember years ago, walking around the office trying to convince people to delete or compress files on a network drive to free up enough space for me to get my work done. Today, we have 60% free space on our servers. It is so cheap that we don't even bother to clean up anymore. It is more cost effective to just slap on a few more terabytes.

      Likewise with cpu time. In the olden days, I can remember logging into a timeshare machine on Christmas Eve, just to experience the luxury of a 4 Mhz machine all to myself.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:Uber lost a customer when I upgraded phones by binarybum · · Score: 2

      How recently? Why in the world was uber your first go to anyway? You are aware Uber's primary MO is to track you until they can corner you in a dark ally and steal your kidney right?

      --
      ôó
  4. Planned obsolescence by hazardPPP · · Score: 2

    I feel like the OS manufacturers (Apple and Google) are doing this on purpose to make people's phones obsolete - especially the lower end models.

    Google force feeds you updates of their core apps (Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Play Store, Play Services) which originally were in the ROM (and therefore did not impact you storage) but then eat up your internal storage (these apps, of course, can't be moved to the SD card). Often, if you reject these updates, these apps will just stop working (esp. if you don't update Play Services).

    It's like the manufacturers are saying - if you purchased a phone for less than US$200-250 (I'm talking about full price here, unlocked, no contract) then we're just not going to LET YOU to use it more than 2 years...we will bloat the software as to make your phone unusable. The increase on the app limit does the same thing.

    If you buy the $600-900 phones, then you might be good for 4 years, 5 if you're lucky.

    1. Re:Planned obsolescence by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 5, Informative

      In Canada all phones are unlocked.

      Only in third world countries like the US do you have locked phones.

      --
      -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  5. 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.

  6. 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 Altus · · Score: 2

      Yeah because the storage on android phones has gone up 1000 fold in the last 4 years.

      --

      "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

    2. 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.

    3. Re:Is that the APPS' problem, though? by dhawton · · Score: 2

      200GB, eh? https://www.amazon.com/Samsung...

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

      Also, the largest you seen is 64GB? First phone I pulled up: https://store.google.com/confi...

  7. Blame Javascript by dtougas · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the hottest trends in app building these days is to use Javscript frameworks such as React Native (invented by Facebook) or NativeScript. Everyone seems to be jumping on that bandwagon (it isn't necessarily without merit, as it allows developers to create a native UI experience with cross-platform tools, and share code with the web as well).

    One of the side-effects of this is a huge javascript dependency graph, with (often) thousands of packages. A simple hello world app written in React Native is probably somewhere near 100MB.

    1. Re:Blame Javascript by esmrg · · Score: 2

      Exactly. A couple of years ago payload growth was due to asset storage. As more and more resolutions were released, games would store multiple copies of each image (sprite or texture) so they would match the resolution of each device they supported. This avoids resampling artifacts at the cost of payload size. Many options were invented to reduce payload bloat such as:
      - Apple Introduced app thinning; where the bundle contains all assets but the device only downloads its resolution
      - Download resources after installation - popular with freemium games
      - SVG, Core Graphics, OpenGL, and Metal rendering to textures
      - Using unicode glyphs for icons
      Using some combination of these techniques allow me to reduce the size of my app package over the years while adding features. If you take a look at the facebook ipa and open er' up, you will see they got the asset size real small, but their frameworks weigh in at 295 MB. The only way around that is to stop using react or bring it into iOS as a shared library. But that would add even more bloat to an already bloated operating system.

  8. Re:What are they doing with that space? by Joce640k · · Score: 2

    What on Earth are they stuffing into their apps to make them balloon in size so quickly?

    'Frameworks'.

    People want to program in Python via a Javascript bytecode interpreter and HTML5 graphics interface that layers on top of the host device's own sandboxed bytecode interpreter in the web browser.

    They also want a library with every possible multimedia and database access function and an access layer for the advertising/payment framework.

    All of that just so they can show a picture of a cat.

    --
    No sig today...