of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...
I am quite surprised at a few apps I know are just a webpage, because I can to go to the webpage and see it's exactly the same, are still 40meg to 80meg. I'd expect them be able to be as small as a few K. Open a webview, navigate to https://mycompany.com. The end
Not to defend Uber, but there was a post here some time ago where one engineer explained why it's so large (sadly can't find it anymore): it's due to a lot of different implementations for different markets (some masks may have slight differences in different countries) and their choise to re-implement the masks multiple times.
> of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...
You can find that in the phone storage settings:
iOS: 12 G
Keynote: 498 M
Numbers: 482 M
Pages: 455 M
Clips: 213 M
Maps: 81 M
Watch: 70 M
Find My: 60 M
Music: 38 M
iTunes U: 35 M
Support: 34 M
Podcasts: 32 M
Books: 31 M
iCloud Drive: 30 M
Freeform: 19 M
Fitness: 18 M
Notes: 17 M
Journal: 15 M
Home: 10 M
App Store: 8 M
Weather: 8 M
Mail: 7 M
Files: 4 M
Health: 3 M
Measure: 3 M
Voice Memos: 3 M
Calendar: 2 M
Clock: 2 M
Safari: 2 M
Shortcuts: 2 M
Translate: 2 M
TV: 2 M
Calculator: 1 M
Facetime: 1 M
iTunes Store: 1 M
Tips: 1 M
Wallet: 934 K
Messages: 860 K
Photos: 791 K
Compass: 712 K
Camera: 635 K
Contacts: 598 K
Phone: 570 K
Magnifier: 516 K
Passwords: 213 K
There's also an "Apple Inc." listing, which appears to be "shared" between a lot of their apps which clocks in at 204M
My takeaway from having gone through the list and compared to the various 3rd party apps:
1) Apps can absolutely be smaller. Plenty of stuff in the <200MB range including things like Signal, OBD Fusion and Infuse
2) Games are often big, but there's a surprising number of "simple" apps that are larger than some of the games
3) The largest apps seem to be from companies that you would expect to be doing the most tracking of your data
4) Apple's first party app sizes probably explain a little about why they weren't in a hurry to upgrade storage sizes
No idea, those are the numbers as reported in the settings app. I would assume it's part of the OS since it's a framework for other apps to tap into mapping functionality. For comparison Sygic is 324 MB. Waze is 170 MB, Tom Tom is 251 MB, Magic Earth is 135 MB and OSM And is 238 MB
I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest megabyte.
I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe someone else can check the actual IPAs?
edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)
Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that.
Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of different languages.
But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically gross.
The fact that we can afford it these days is an irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.
I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely to be highly functional, while simple apps are very small.
For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list, there’s a social media site reader app that’s 7.6MB and a text editor that’s 697KB. Those sizes aren’t the least bit unreasonable.
Whats the business case to invest in building these well and as small as possible?
Heck, if you are a world business and the app isn't your core value prop, whats your case for investing anything more than the bare minimum in creating your app?
UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used.
Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic wand they’re sold as.
Cross-platform is very much not a magic wand, but it's still often easier than building the same thing in two different native SDKs, and I can see why people do it.
Disagree about UIKit, mainly cause of Autolayout, unless it's gotten reworked in the past 8 years. When I started using RN, I had zero web experience, and still it was way quicker to set up a basic UI than in the UIKit stuff I'd been doing for years. And for all that setup, Autolayout doesn't even seem to future-proof your stuff that well. An abandoned ObjC iPhone app I wrote in high school using C-style macros for layout worked perfectly fine on the newer screen sizes that broke most other apps.
I thought maybe I was stupid, but the other iPhone devs I worked with constantly had problems with Autolayout. Maybe a real expert iPhone dev won't, but it shouldn't take that.
The thing about UIKit is that you really need to forget about the drag and drop UI editor (XIBs and storyboards). They make everything including autolayout much more painful than they need to be.
Pure code UIKit using autolayout’s anchors API is quite serviceable, and if you follow recommendations (use safe area and keyboard constraints! They exist for a reason) reasonably futureproof. The iOS apps I’ve worked on have needed very little change year to year for quite some time at this point.
That's true, though some will tell you the opposite. But even then, the pure code autolayout seemed a lot harder to use than HTML/CSS. The fact that so many people got it that wrong says something. Like yeah a desktop website might break on mobile, but I'm talking about a mobile screen just getting slightly longer or something.
Is it? You can't easily tell with iOS apps because the container might be that big, but the app on your phone is a fraction of that. The container might contain multiple versions.
