> And they're all necessary. A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB.
On native platforms, no it’s not.
I know this for a fact because I maintain moderately complex, functional phone apps that have binary sizes that sit below the 30MB mark. I use multiple desktop and mobile apps from other developers that also match this description.
The cause of the bloat there can be attributed to the following things, mostly:
- Apps including gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage
- Third party libraries unnecessarily including their own gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage
- Apps being wrappers of a web tech stack project built by devs who have zero dependency discipline, resulting in a spiral fractal tree of dependencies that takes up way more space than it needs to
Engineers who care about good engineering are pretty much a thing of the past. Today the game is buffing your resume with as many complex tools as possible, and jumping to the next thing before your pile of complexity crumbles under its own weight.
On native platforms, no it’s not.
I know this for a fact because I maintain moderately complex, functional phone apps that have binary sizes that sit below the 30MB mark. I use multiple desktop and mobile apps from other developers that also match this description.
The cause of the bloat there can be attributed to the following things, mostly:
- Apps including gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage
- Third party libraries unnecessarily including their own gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage
- Apps being wrappers of a web tech stack project built by devs who have zero dependency discipline, resulting in a spiral fractal tree of dependencies that takes up way more space than it needs to