
Ask HN: Why are mobile apps ballooning in size recently? - heptal
Many of these well-known apps on the App Store are ostensibly just a skin over an API. Are they not just pushing and pulling text, images, and videos to and from a service and presenting it? Why have they grown to such huge sizes? None of these appear to have significant media assets:<p>Facebook: 59.3MB
LinkedIn: 51.3MB
Pinterest: 37.8MB
Google+: 35.3MB
Yelp: 30.0MB
Sleep Cycle: 25.8MB
Twitter: 18.9MB
Clear: 13.7MB
Speedtest: 13.9MB<p>For contrast, here are a couple apps proving a decent amount of functionality can be contained in sensible bundle sizes:<p>McTube: 6.6MB
Hacker News by Ashish Gandi: 405KB<p>Safari.app&#x27;s application bundle on OSX is 28MB.
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ianstallings
A lot of it has to do with multiple renditions of creative assets, such as @2x
images. Because even if I add multiple code frameworks and libraries it
usually doesn't amount to much. Creative assets typically take up the most
space.

I will say one thing though - I do wonder if some of it is driven by multi-
platform tools that are stuffing their own internals in there. Then you throw
it all into one big package instead of splitting it up for different
platforms. I've seen some internal app builder tools become quite large
before. Especially by firms that think they need to roll their own version of
everything, which AFAIK is standard operating procedure for a lot of those you
mentioned.

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coralreef
@2x png's take up a deceptive amount of space

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morkfromork
Facebook 11.0.ipa - the app downloaded from iTunes to your computer is 62.2MB.
Uncompressed it is 88MB. Facebook binary is 54MB of that 88MB. The rest of the
files are mostly .png files, a few audio files and assorted other file types.

