App sizes

[Ipadonly1]

Why do we have such variation in sizes of apps? I get some of is to do with code efficiency, but the variation still seems big and even similar apps from the same developer (Apple) have wildly different sizes.

For instance:
- Monzo ~(550mb) versus Chase (~240mb) both do literally the same thing
- Apple Podcasts with no dowloaded episodes (~700mb) vs Apple TV (~27mb)
- The Storygraph (<10mb) vs Rippple (~150mb). Rippple really is a great app though, no shade, just confused as it’s calling an external database just like The Storygraph

The wildest one for me is always Apple’s Podcast app…

 

[01cowherd]

Code bloat is one reason, but assets (images/audio/etc) are a source of large app sizes. If an app has lots of custom images, it will be much larger than an app that only uses default symbols built-in to iOS.
Apple Podcasts is <40MB on my device, fwiw.

 

[Cobalt Blizzard]

My podcasts app is 160 mb, size depends on cached content I think.

 

[!!!]

It's a combination of many things, this is an interesting blog post about how so many apps are unnecessarily large. Some excerpts:

• duplicate localization files
• duplicate fonts, particularly those that shouldn't even be included
• unnecessary swift symbols
• More than half of it is the LINKEDIT segment containing the symbol table. Since this binary isn't a dynamic framework, we can be more aggressive with symbol stripping and even remove the global symbols.
• [not] using some image compression techniques
• 18% of the app is debugging symbols
• The Lyft app has hundreds of duplicate files, the largest consumer of space is a single asset catalog copied 73 times

Basically, developers are leaving duplicate assets in, not stripping symbols or compressing assets. And that's not even touching the hundreds of megabytes worth of tracking frameworks from google and facebook, etc.

 

[pacorob]

I wish every iOS app had to mandatory build in a feature to clear cache as some apps (like your Apple Podcast app) become bigger and bigger.

Some developers do build in such a feature themselves such as: Hydra (Reddit client), CloudBeats.