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Are App Sizes Out of Control?

Posted by BeauHD on from the systemic-problems dept.

In a blog post, Trevor Elkins points out the large sizes of common apps like LinkedIn and Facebook. "I went to update all my apps the other day when something caught my eye... since when does LinkedIn take up 275MB of space?!" Elkins wrote. "In fact, the six apps in this picture average roughly 230MB in size, 1387MB in total. That would take an 8Mbit internet connection 24 minutes to download, and I'd still be left with 27 additional apps to update! More and more companies are adopting shorter release cycles (two weeks or so) and it's becoming unsustainable as a consumer to update frequently."

Should Apple do something to solve this "systematic" problem? Elkins writes, "how does an app that occasionally sends me a connection request and recruiter spam take up 275MB?"

Further discussion via Hacker News.

3 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Re:lol know nothings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, they ARE re-using code. These days every schmoe has a library that is "built on" some other schmoe's library. You can't even flush the urinal without going through 99 million layers of schmoe software. It's schmoes all the way down.

    These clowns are worried about size -- frankly, it's a damn miracle that any of it even functions at all.

  2. Re:Natural consequence by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, that's not true. Facebook for example is huge because of code size, not because of asset size.

    They have literally thousands of classes for a super simple application. In fact, their code is so large, unwieldy and complex that they wrote an entire IDE, because the traditional IDEs couldn't deal with the sheer amount of code they have.

    I don't know why it didn't occur to them to just write better code, but apparently it didn't.

  3. Re:BACK IN MY DAY WE FIT THINGS ON FLOPPIES by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't miss the size constraint nature of floppies, but I do miss the portable environment nature of floppies.

    It was awesome to have my own little box of 5.25 floppies that I could bring from home and then in computer class, boot the Apple ][ with my own disks and utilities.

    I kind of wish it was more practical to do this with Windows. Of course there are close workalikes, (RDP, web based environments, Windows to go, etc) but nothing with the elegant simplicity of just booting the dumb thing from a 128 GB USB stick and using it as normal, and then carting it off.