The short business answer is that it's currently not a metric that influences people's decision to install or uninstall an app. If it were one, we would've seen an engineering effort to reduce bloatware and duplications as seen in the post.
People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis.
Does Apple send telemetry information back to developers about failed app installs due to users' device being out of space?
I don't have a current Apple Developer account to test this but the documentation doesn't have any obvious statistic concerning failed installs: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/view-app-....
EDIT reply to: >I don't think there's any special permissions required to get free disk space, so presumably he's getting it via telemetry from his app.
I was thinking of new users who didn't have the app at all.
E.g. hypothetical... "We're a brand new YC tech startup. Our app is 500 MB. This bloated size prevents 20% of potential new users from installing the app." <-- Does Apple provide enough stats to make that type of confident correlation?
For all I complain about OKR’s, this is a super simple one for LinkedIn to understand: Every MB your app takes up can probably be shown to decrease user stickiness by some percentage. Fix it!
Ah who am I kidding, they’ll probably switch to moving the assets out of the app bundle and making them live-download on first run and stored in the Caches folder somewhere, which will make the app “smaller”. Problem solved on their end, app-size OKR accomplished. The fact that it makes the app slower due to asset fetching is next quarter’s problem.
In my experience publishing on the Apple App Store, and as a user of iOS, there's likely no material difference between iOS and Android with storage issues, or if there is it's probably in Android's favour with the (mostly historical) availability of expandable storage and Google Photos providing a lot more off-device photo storage.
Read: company doesn't care about including a large % of potential audience. It only cares about including the users that are most easily turned into profit.
P.S.: maybe those companies are right. But it also means they're fishing in a small & crowded pond. There's a lot of untapped market out there if only a company would care to cater to it.
P.S.2: Things change, and people's circumstances change. Today's 'useless' user could be your company's most valueable asset tomorrow. Get 'm while you can.
To me it is just disgusting.
The trend towards huge installations is one of the many reasons I install as few apps as possible, especially in this class of "should have a fully functional web version" type social media things.
The damage is also cumulative: I have a perception that "apps" in general are likely to be huge piles of junk, so I'm reluctant to install any of them, regardless of their own merits. Even if LinkedIn were to spend the time improving their app it would suffer from the overall reputational damage to the entire ecosystem, and I still wouldn't even think to install it.
They are very sensitive over this kind of bloat over there, and it is definitely a key metric. You will even get a warning in your email if one of your builds increases bundle size too much!
On my phone, 500MB would put you as ~30 largest app on my phone. Those largest 30 include, messages (large attachments), photos app, music/media (downloaded for offline play) and a variety of junk games I never play.
I'd have to delete LinkedIn 40x to save the same amount of space as the dozen or so junk games I have on my phone.
You are referring to a hypothetical scenario where A/B testing took place.