Ask HN: Why are iOS apps so huge and is there anything the end user can do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are iOS apps so huge and is there anything the end user can do?

9 pointsbuttocks6 comments

Running out of space on my iPhone, I'm looking for ways to clean up. My app list frustrates me:

- Every Google app is > 150 MB. Probably all of the Google libraries are included in every app. - Two banking apps with identical functionality: one is 163 MB, the other is 20 MB. How did the (better) bank efficiently squeeze all the functionality into their app that the bank required 163 MB to do? - Hugely bloated apps like Twitter are nothing but web shells and occupy 300 MB plus data/cache.

I realize that this is like shaking my fist at clouds, but what can we do? Is this simply lazy app development, including too many libraries or debug symbols?

Someone will say, "upgrade your phone." Yes, this is what Apple would like me to do, ideally every year. I have a different mentality about the longevity of electronics and e-waste. The only thing that would be driving my upgrade at this point is unnecessarily bloated apps.

You can uninstall the apps you don’t use or need. Sometimes the website is more than enough.

If an app is bloated you can review it in the App Store and mention the problem.

Otherwise you can make more space by moving some of the data to the cloud, such as the music you don’t listen often or your old pictures.

Getting a new phone with a lot of storage is the easiest.

Facebook and Twitter want everything done in-app. so they include the whole kitchen sink, including their own bespoke browser (although Twitter t.co links open in Safari sans extensions). Facebook wants to know every link you click on in their app and attach a bunch of tracking params to the URL so the destination site knows who 'you' are.

Facebook is also very feature heavy and they don't apologize for that. Every week something new is added (like in their recent 'favorites' feature and short video Reels crap). They need to be bloated because they are bloated apps by design. It would be nice to have 'lite' versions of the apps however.

These massive companies also seem to bake every possible localization on the planet into the app rather than loading them on demand so that users can start using the app immediately. It would help if Apple provided a mechanism to bundle specific localizations with an app download based on the user's locale - they already seem to have the infrastructure to allow this.

Facebook and Twitter in the Safari browser are good. You can put them on the home screen and they feel more or less like the app. I don't need notifications from these.

I would love lite apps. Specifically, I want a Discord Lite app that is smaller and chat only and a Google Maps Lite that is only nav (I guess this is pretty much Apple Maps).

> is there anything the end user can do?

Where possible, use and support apps from smaller, independent iOS developers. I realize this only works for some categories of apps.

Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Offload Apps > enable

may help slightly

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