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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Now if someone could figure out how to reduce the size of installed apps. And preferably explain why most Android apps seem to be about 60MB even for trivial things.

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I have worked on a few mobile games where there was a big developer push for reducing the app size but it was shot down by management to add more new features instead. A lot of features had expected performance targets to hit before they got the go ahead and it was hard for reducing the app size to have a sizeable difference on KPIs until it got to critical levels.

I think there is also a certain amount of developer apathy towards application size.I was recently talking to a colleague who had worked on a new banking app and they saw no problem with developing, what was essentially a web front end, with the Unity game engine. When I asked if he was concerned the effect on the app size including a game engine would have he said it was what they where used to using and that was more important.

A banking app in Unity??!?

Come to think of it, my banking app takes forever to start up, I wonder why...! I've never bothered to check how big it is, though, which possibly proves your colleague's point. :(

Might have Crosswalk or similar browser based view embedded

Well, if they are a C# shop, that might be a really easy way to get their app on phones while being able to reuse code that might already exist, while also not having to deal with phone specific toolkits.

> banking app

> Unity game engine

Bruce Schneier just had a heart attack

3 items needed to login: Username, Password, beat this Candy Crush level in under 2 minutes.

Which bank is that?

I believe it was Atom bank. https://www.atombank.co.uk/

And the app can be found here confirming it was created in Unity https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atombank.r...

Which trivial app is 60MB? Most apps I use are 1-10MB. The games are, of course, much larger.

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