> And they're all necessary. A typical phone app is 200 MB, when Word 4.0 was less than 1 MB.

On native platforms, no it’s not.

I know this for a fact because I maintain moderately complex, functional phone apps that have binary sizes that sit below the 30MB mark. I use multiple desktop and mobile apps from other developers that also match this description.

The cause of the bloat there can be attributed to the following things, mostly:

- Apps including gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage

- Third party libraries unnecessarily including their own gobs of poorly optimized analytics/marketing garbage

- Apps being wrappers of a web tech stack project built by devs who have zero dependency discipline, resulting in a spiral fractal tree of dependencies that takes up way more space than it needs to