The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"
> For most of that period, the size of the Gmail app hovered around 12 MB, with a sudden jump to more than 200 MB near the start of 2017... The Gmail app, on the App Store, is currently 760.7 MB in size.
With charts:
https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-top-iphone-apps-are-tak...
I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB. But are now hundreds of MB.
Something like Gmail doesn't have massive hi-resolution bitmap graphics. Since the article doesn't give any answer, I'm assuming it's a hand-wavy "frameworks", but that's an enormous amount of compiled code.
> I had no idea common apps used to be just 10-30 MB.
More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like
Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes
Hmm, mine is currently 673MB on iOS 26.
For a while there were app size limits for downloading over mobile data. That meant that if your app was too big you'd have terrible growth metrics.
When I doing mobile app development a decade ago, I found that many interviewers and clients were evaluating my experience more like an artist's portfolio, alongside a couple of arbitrary metrics to determine app scope
One of those arbitrary metrics was bundle size, how many megabytes on the app store was the app. The bigger the better and more serious it was.
At the time I was knee deep in optimizations, using SVGs, doing compression, even bitshifting, to make apps smaller for the companies I worked for. Reducing how many people would be bounced from downloading or installing the app.
And yet, that impressive 12MB app from a venture backed company with hundreds of thousands of users was getting me penalized for taking up so little space
I literally started putting dummy files in the app bundles and it worked for my professional goals. All kinds of premium marketing has similar fictions in them to convey value
so I can emphasize how its the difference between $50/hr upwork gigs inconsistently, and $500,000/yr at Google
> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app?
Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device.
Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms.
I’m just speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason.
You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.
There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app, which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself.
Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).
Sounds like how Internet Explorer used to be integrated in Windows. That was quite contentious at the time!
The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.
Probably bundles its own copy of Chrome just in case :)
Well, something fishy is going on because there is literally no way that Safari, in its entirety, is 5.1 MB. The numbers for the others app seem similarly off.
It would be really hard to believe that somehow Apple has found some magic formula to make their apps 100x smaller than Google and Microsoft.
Much more likely is that the reporting by the OS is off somehow (probably most of the app functionality is tied up in shared resources counted towards system files, and not counted towards the app's size).
With respect, I would expect more from articles posted on Hacker News. More thorough research, and in fact an answer to the question.
Safari probably is that size because WebKit is a system framework, so it’s just the size of the UI code
The table at the end is seriously misguided. You can’t compare the sizes of an iOS preinstalled app against a non-preinstalled app. It’s just a thin UI shell where the code for all the functionality is inside system frameworks. The Photos app is quoted at 4.2MB. Guess what, if you delete that, you still have system components to render photos, UI for a photo picker, perform analysis on photos such as face recognition, all the iCloud networking code to support iCloud Photo Library, etc.
AOT overhead 200MB (ensuring app loads fast)
Frameworks 150MB
Assets for all screen resolutions 50MB
Google Meet/Chat/etc 100MB
AI models 25MB
I find "ensuring app loads fast" to be absolutely hilarious, here. What has to be done to help a mail app load fast?
And, snarkily, can they do this for the web page? On my decent connection right now, loading a new tab to gmail takes about 3 seconds to visibly load. Another few seconds to get so that I can interact with it. Is kind of hilarious to see how long it takes to load the compose window if I press "c" as soon as I see any of the app has loaded.
AOT = Ahead Of Time? Attack On Titan? Something else?
it's ahead of time and AOT compilation is done at OS startup, not sure if that is being measured here.
OS startup? AOT compilation happens in the build pipeline, before the app is distributed.
Mobile applications need to be AOT (Ahead of Time) compiled for the target device to have optimal performance.
If you're interested in iOS app size analysis, I build and maintain this https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dotipa/id6742254881 ($4.99). Happy to share download codes, HMU at info [at] dotipa.app
I genuinely struggle to understand how apps can get that large. Games with hi-res graphics, sure. But Gmail barely has any assets. And they aren't shipping with custom runtimes or anything of that sort because Apple doesn't allow it. So how much code can you possibly write that compiles to 700 MB?
For me, the most important takeaway from the article was that the Passwords app supports 2FA codes! I was not aware of this, that's nice and getting rid of Authenticator is one less Google thing to worry about.
Having both your password and 2nd factor in the same place isn't the best idea however.
I know that in some cases, apparent bloat like this is related to needing to support so many potential devices and versions of the underlying OS. Google has to support, on iOS, roughly 6 years of devices and their variations + OS variations on them. Each of these may require their own libraries compiled against it, for optimal performance or because it simply is less practical to engineer non-breaking updates against new SDK and HW versions in the same codebase without introducing complexity.
Apple, on the other hand, doesn't have to do this. They can integrate at lower levels and even with all else being equal can develop updates with perfect insight on the ecosystem and foresight on things to come.
Somewhat supporting this possible explanation is that, similar to Apple on iOS, Google's apps on android are significantly smaller.
I believe it is because it includes a suite of enterprise management features in addition to Gmail-related features. (Search for "google basic mobile device management" for more info.)
10 MB mail app. 690 MB local llm to write snarky emails for you.
Google and others are putting 2FA notifications in their regular apps like gmail. I had to open my gmail app to get a 2FA code instead of my google authenticator app today... which is very weird and probably increases the needed security of the gmail app in addition to the size
You really think 2FA notifications cause so much bloat?
Google Auth on ios is 38MB. Assuming the core code is probably ~5-50%, which would be 2-20MB added to the gmail app.
On the middle side of that range, extra features adds up fast.
maybe because we need to be pushed to buy minimum the 256GB versions of phones. it is a wintel deja vu
Why would Google try to maximize Apple's revenue?
Google is also selling phones? Not a great point as it's probably not really a revenue driver for them though.
Duopoly. Both get richer.
Not surprising, sadly. In 2022, a friend who did trekking, asked how to view files with national parks borders on a map. I recommended installing QGIS desktop (geospatial viewer/editor of files/database tables). He replied: "1 GB of download?! Seriously?!" I was surprised, because last time I had paid attention, maybe in 2016, it was ~200 megs. I checked, and indeed, it weighed 1 gig. I checked in 2025, and it's beyond 1,3 gig now. And it's FOSS, not commercial bloatware you might think. I have no idea what they stuff it with.
Just yesterday, I wanted to generate a GeoTiff on a macbook. To do it in a simple way, you need libGDAL, a geo-spatial abstraction library that exists since maybe the '90 and supports all thinkable formats. Under Linux, you just install it together with QGIS as a dependency. Mac is still unix, so you may think, a 3-decades old library, with few patches to support modern formats, should be just a couple of megs, right? Brew suggested downloading ~2 GB of ~100 packages!!!! Half of them were aws-* (yes, AWS tools), and 1 GB of LLVM!!! (is it their whole GIT repo with 10M SLOC?)
For geotiff, I ended just using standard Tiff library, inserting my 4 geospatial tags with a few lines of code.
It is bloatware for a reason, to force you a cloud subscription, not for your money (which helps though) but your data.
I was just wondering why the Adobe Acrobat installer is nearly a gigabyte in size.
The question why is almost all modern apps pushing around 1G.
It is dependencies, if you ever compiled almost any GUI application via prots/pkgsrc on a BSD, you will be shocked by the dependencies that application needs, it is obscene.
It is dependencies but not from the GUI. As someone who has worked on several very large apps I can tell you 99% of the bloat is garbage. Someone somewhere wants this SDK from their friend's company in the app. Some manager wants to track X using this very specific framework. Some designer decided to add in animations in one screen that requires another framework to run and also 10mb in assets. etc, etc, etc. If your app is 10+ years old this all adds up and no one ever cleans any of it up. There's probably like 100mb of crap you can delete that doesn't even work anymore but who has time to remove that?
>Gmail isn’t even the worst offender, it’s just a more popular one. The Tesla and Crypto.com apps are around 1 GB each.
Those are typically apps which need to be heavily secured. So behind the seemingly "simple" user interface and functionalities, there's so much security related code to ensure their "safety".
Generally the larger the codebase the harder it is to secure. I am less worried about security vulnerabilities on small tightly focused apps than I am on gigantic monstrosities with hundreds of different attack surfaces.
According to looking at a 1,000 line code file on my machine right now, a million lines is about 48mb. You think > 10 million lines of code are required for security in an app?
Pardon? I can't tell if you're serious. How would adding more lines of code in a program (or assets or whatever make up this size) add security?
(Anna Delvey voice) ... LOC is always better.
You must be a developer only :)
https://www.securecodewarrior.com/press-releases/secure-code...
I think the joke is going over my head ^^; Maybe you mean 'just' a regular developer as opposed to a cryptobro?
Edit: I see you added in a link. Checking it out now
Hacker News is currently sitting at 130 MB. I simply do not understand how these things are calculated but I suspect the calculated amount that the Chrome tab diagnostic isn't a consistent way of comparing to other application memory usages, or at least a mental model that makes sense to most people (e.g. whats a lot of memory consumption? what should it be? is it too high, is it too low? etc.)
Do you mean the RAM used by the tab? The article is talking about disk space
There's an app. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.emergetool...
- They mention Google Chrome tabs
- They speak of HN as a single thing, so presumably not a third-party implementation but the official one
ah I misunderstood...because hilariously my chrome tab is also ~700MB!
Pretty wild. Mine (Chromium on Raspberry Pi) was 52mb, bumped up to 58mb to write this response.
That's not the same metric here. 700mb is the size on the App Store. What you're saying is the size in RAM.
The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked.
And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.
I think this might be closer to the truth than you might think.
Due to the absence of (cross-app) shared libraries on at least iOS, developers often end up building big company-internal libraries that then have to be shipped with all of their apps.
Tree shaking isn’t perfect, and the result are these > 0.5 GB monstrosities.
It is also a conferencing app. Tgat might explain some of the size.
I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.
Meet was discontinued; its functionality was merged into Duo and the resulting app renamed to Meet.
That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.
The background images alone would be more than that.
Deserves.
It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs.
This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.
There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB.
It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest.
It doesn't inspire confidence in privacy when things are so huge, connected and opaque.
Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing.
Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?
Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617
Thanks, that thread is great!
They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail
130MB is localization data.
This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706
> There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog
Non X version:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html
So is the extra space not accounted for from then to now AI related pieces?