It's the "people have powerful computers now so we can be as lazy as we want" culture. We have amazing computers but they feel less powerful than an 80s arcade machine.

This is something I find myself asking more and more almost every time I use a computer or mobile device. I have multiple cores here. Why is anything stuttering? Why are these processes taking so much memory up? Why is this web page pulling down 100MB of traffic? Why do I remember text console DOS apps being so much more responsive than today's click-then-wait UI apps? Before spinning hard drives dropped out of fashion, you could hear that thing grinding away, doing who knows what, while the computer was sitting there supposedly idle! What gives software developers the idea that they can just have their software just wake up and do things without the user commanding it?

Just a particularly egregious example: If there's one thing that nothing on the entire system should preempt, it's the mouse cursor. If I move the mouse, the cursor should move instantly. There is nothing more important that the computer should be doing. I thought this was like a basic, very well understood rule and a solved problem. Hell, I recall a long time ago things like mouse cursor drawing were driven off a hardware interrupt. On today's "modern" computers, if I have a lot of applications running in the background, the mouse cursor will stutter and lag, and text input will be buffered and show up N seconds after I type. Totally unacceptable, yet software continues to ship like this.

EDIT: Sorry, the rant kind of drifted off of the "nobody cares about bloat" problem and into the general "nobody cares about performance" problem.

(also why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of a simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating?)

Some oxygen waster's salary and career is tied to these metrics.

I suspect that it's he heavyweight GUI library that takes a lot of time to initialize.

Sounds like your screenshots are being conveniently uploaded to MS servers so you could share them (Yay!).

Getting such enormous delays when performing otherwise simple operations usually means that network requests are being made, and servers aren't normally snappy when it comes to free storage.

Here is my example of enormous loading times: it takes a few minutes to clear browsing history on the android version of Chrome browser. Quite outrageous.

Windows 2000 on the Pentium 3 with 300 MHz felt way snappier.

The Linux desktop isn't perfect, but basic stuff like that works way better there on the same machine.

[1] https://getsharex.com/

I would expect to just write it to disk and sync whenever. Instead it seems to take seconds any time it hits “the cloud” and makes me wait. So I bet your screencap tried to transfer your file.

I see this when trying to open files from OneDrive even though I have it local. Word will take seconds to “browse” through online OneDrive directories even though I have them local. So it might take 10 seconds just to pick a folder to save a file.

And of course, afterwards my cpu will peg for minutes doing something.

obviously, that's just a guess.

It's been like that since Win7.

Not latest iPhone = poor, right?

For example, Facebook ("lite") and google ("go") already optimize their apps to those markets. Why not eg McDonalds?

Oy. I meant "developer time is more expensive than machine time." It's been a long day.

Looking at something like the Infinity reddit client vs the official one. Infinity clocks in around 38MB the official client is around 100MB. They provide essentially the same functionality, the layout and UI is even very similar, yet one manages to be almost 2/3rds smaller in size.

So, thats worrying for a number of reasons.

not clicking that.

They don't. Not even close. It's actually sad.

Some users will build up a cycle of delete A and B to install C, then delete it to put back A and B. The smaller your app is, the more likely it is to stay installed because it's not as helpful to delete it.

The biggest obstacles are small storage phone users are well represented in non-Play store installs, which often means a fat apk that has binary libraries for all platforms and raster images for all dpis. The other big issue is translated strings; Android standard string translations can't be compressed (apk is a zip, but not everything in a zip is compressed), even though they would be very compressible. There's a lot of languages out there, and not using the standard translation tool is hard to sell (and you still need it for somethings anyway).

Doesn't help for US based banks though. Mostly their customers are going to have enough space that a bank app isn't going to get deleted to make space for whatever else.

Typical counterpoint is VSCode, wtitten in Electron. But you know, VSCode has had some serious engineering and optimisation effort ($$$) so not really a typical example at all.

However, I have always used JEdit to copy-paste huge text, like anything beyond 100k log lines from some software. JEdit seems to handle everything fine, while Kate has always hung up on me during some 10s of seconds (any kind of parsing or colorization are disabled in Kate, and the minimap is too... after that wait, everything works fine though).

Turns out, VSCode handles this kind of pasting nicely too, so I've replaces JEdit with it. Which drives me to think there is some low hanging fruit performance wise in Kate.

These days, I stick to Emacs and Vim (terminal) for large files. Perks of being in a Linux shop, I guess.

I too have 64GB. I just checked and my phone says apps take 11GB, and I have about 33GB free. At 250MB each (and many on my phone take less) that would be over 250 apps on a 64GB phone...

Do you actually use that many apps. Am I just a Luddite?

Right, but this was a discussion on app sizes. Photos and videos aren't due to the size of the apps, and can easily go on an SD card.

> cached images, music, and other files

Good point about caches. Should be some global policy for that IMHO. One thing is things like map apps downloading regions on demand for offline use, but just plain old caching...

> Games also take up a ton of space.

True, that's an issue even on my desktop computer with a 1TB SSD. Though I don't consider those regular apps. Still, point taken.

10GB was OS, there rest was music, photos, videos.

Ah, that'll change the equation. I just use Teams and Outlook apps for work on my phone (besides calls and texts).

I think that might with tons of apps that are rarely used. But it sucks if I have 10-20 apps that I frequently used.

I bet you don’t have kids.

In retrospect quoting that last piece, rather than the whole comment, made a lot more sense when I first wrote it than it does now.

Well, I have SD cards for that... Regardless, the context was apps taking space. If I had used 80-90% of my storage for pics, then size of apps isn't the issue.

This is why I think China has won. They are able to leverage free market dynamics without the ip/legal bloat here and then they just pull out the gun for national interest.

My only use case for apps is mobile check deposits, presumably because asking for camera control on mobile devices was beyond the ability of their web developers.

  BoA - 457MB
  AMEX - 130MB
  USAA - 109 MB

I feel the same way. But as we curmudgeons stand athwart history, the whole of software development is moving toward the largest sizes the technology will allow.

It’s common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase as my credit card and their app is 300MB.

For what it’s worth, 200 to 300MB per app seems entirely reasonable to me. I’m not sure why it would be smaller or different.

I was expecting you to point out a 5GB app. That’d be overboard. But 200MB? Sure, why not?

Not to say you’re wrong. It’s likely me, not you. It just… seems fine.

Now, with a Pixel 4a the System/OS singlehandedly uses 18GB of storage. Today, I do not see myself ever filling up another 100GB of apps but who knows what app sizes will look like in 5 more years.

I can't remember with Galaxy S2 16GB, Galaxy S3 32GB, Galaxy S4 64GB, Lumia 1520 64GB? iPhone 7 Plus 128GB, OnePlus6 256GB

Deleting apps or anything else to get more free space on my phone's.

I don't have a main browser, I always used Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Samsung browser or Internet.

All the Facebook apps with Instagram. Always trying to get the biggest app and load my maps from Google drive for Offline navigation too.

Double or triple photos

And still didn't run out of storage.

s/devs/product managers

Why are you bashing PM's?

At the end of the day, if delivering a new feature on time adds another 5 MB, it is what it is. Pretty useless to try to assign blame to either devs or PM's, or portray them as somehow opposing teams. They both want success for the business.

I agree that both developers and product managers want success for the business.

I probably should have said product owner here rather than product manager. I only meant to call attention to the fact that it's often others in an organization beyond the developers making decisions around whether to optimize for this sort of thing.

On average, more technically-minded folks are more likely to want to optimize for technical things like app install size where the business impact can be a bit more abstract and difficult to measure, particularly when compared to folks like product managers who are likely to have their individual performance evaluated by even less technical stakeholders on their ability to quantify the impact of whatever ends up getting shipped.

Again, I'm generalizing here - of course there are highly thoughtful and competent folks capable of balancing competing priorities across domains in any type of role.