You're discounting the numerous DLLs which the explorer uses, or even other shared resources which are used system-wide.
I see this argument brought up in demoscene discussions ("your .exe is 4KB but it uses several GB of system libraries and device drivers!") and the rebuttal is the same: I'm assuming this UWP one itself makes use of other system DLLs too, like any other Windows application will, so the comparison is between 5MB + shared and 55MB + shared.
Even the 'Google' app on Android is 285 MB
Android is a whole other story altogether. The bloat is endemic there, and emulating that is not at all something to be proud of. Windows applications can be far more efficient, as Windows' own explorer.exe shows (and even that is probably not anywhere close to "perfection", but the difference is already enormous.)
It's not just a matter of using random system functionality; I think Explorer uses the same UI code as Open/Save dialogs, in which case the UI itself necessarily lives in system DLLs. (But I'm a novice when it comes to Windows, so I could be wrong.)
Yeah, all the file tree view/list view stuff, shell namespace etc. etc. is implemented in shell32.dll, so we should probably compare with explorer.exe + shell32.dll. Everything else are basic widgets and OS interaction which clearly exists in both environments so shouldn't be counted.
And with that it is still only 4.27MB+6.81MB = 11.08MB on my system. So yeah, the bloat is real no matter how you look at it.
I see this argument brought up in demoscene discussions ("your .exe is 4KB but it uses several GB of system libraries and device drivers!") and the rebuttal is the same: I'm assuming this UWP one itself makes use of other system DLLs too, like any other Windows application will, so the comparison is between 5MB + shared and 55MB + shared.
Even the 'Google' app on Android is 285 MB
Android is a whole other story altogether. The bloat is endemic there, and emulating that is not at all something to be proud of. Windows applications can be far more efficient, as Windows' own explorer.exe shows (and even that is probably not anywhere close to "perfection", but the difference is already enormous.)