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The Size of iPhone's Top Apps Has Increased by 1,000% in Four Years (sensortower.com)
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.
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.
How much did the binaries grow? Because if you added a gigabyte of video to your 300MB app, I just don't care.
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! --
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.
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.