Are there any examples of well-known apps from large organizations that aren't excessively large in size?
Even the main Amazon shopping app is less than 100mb.
I am being deliberately ignorant, having no idea what functionality one might add, but I'm actually genuinely curious. All that I see is a small databse and a lot of assets that are being downloaded on the fly.
109 on my device, not sure why it needs over 100 for a menu/search and checkout function that relies entirely on external data.
Also another commenter said Alexa was 78 when it's 124 for me and does even less than the shopping app.
You can bet that those companies' infrastructure is optimized to hell and back.
You'd be surprised. (Source: I work at a unicorn.)
There were a few times already that I thought about using them, but couldn't install it right at the time.
This is nothing new. Look how much memory your typical Java desktop app, or worse, your average Java server app, uses. As soon as you have enterprises involved where it's regular occurrence for devs to be outfitted with the shiniest and beefiest (as perks or per standard company policy) developers won't care about resource usage until it's so excessive it either slows down their machines or accounting knocks on the door and asks who ordered dozens of x1.32xlarge machines...
Seriously, another huge problem is assets. In ye olde PC days, you included ONE version of an image and that was it (okay maybe a 16x16 favicon for the small start menu and a 32x32 one for desktop)... these days with loads of different combinations of resolution and DPI, and across multiple platforms (if you're doing a Cordova build and don't split the assets before packaging), stuff can and will grow.
I'm sure they could, but i suspect the engineering effort would've been much greater. That's money down the drain if it turns out users don't care, or their competitors released earlier and grabbed more market share.
A lot of people go to wal-mart. Doesn't mean that it's a good thing overall for mankind
It's a greedy search. Just because you optimize for your local best interests, doesn't mean the COMMUNITY will benefit overall and the ecosystem itself suffers.
Look at how slow, ad-filled, and error-prone websites are these days.
So yeah, companies and people should be at least _concerned_ with the disparity between "best for me" and "best for all of us." Otherwise, we get things like rampant pollution. Well, this is app pollution.
Enterprise apps are slow because developers lack shiny new tech. You are forced to build yet another Spring App that takes minutes to start and gigabytes of memory. You also need to use MQ to interface with other systems and log/audit almost everything.
Amazon differential is not the quality of their app. Unless they create something really impressive some day, they can only lose customers by moving faster there.
Besides, none of those are small startups anymore. All of them have something to lose.
For my only real experience with amazon (audible) the quality of their app is a negative, I'd much prefer they made an API available. The same can be said of others, I'd much rather native apps connecting to a netflix API than use their awful web player.
So size being a problem seems only true for engineers. A normal user don't care as long as their device still works. And apple won't care since they can use this as an opportunity to up sell larger devices.