> Google can't force people to not use frameworks. So they work on the bits they can control.

Couldn't they just penalize app size in play store rankings the same way they penalize slow sites in search results? Obviously for games and some types of applications you can't get around it, but I imagine Google has the resources to work around needlessly punishing those.

I don't think inherently large apps like games would be a problem on paper. Your game is competing against similarly sized games, not, say, a todo list app.

And if someone else can publish an equally enjoyable game with a smaller size, then there's no reason not to reward them for it.

How does game app size factor into the enjoyment in any way? Android phones aren't like iPhones and most have sd card slots which are dirt cheap nowadays.

I do not recommend using SD cards to store apps. I think SD cards are for storing media like photos we take or music we listen to…

SD card is just not nearly as fast as NVMe storage or even UFS 3.

shorter novels are better than longer novels? shorter movies better than longer movies? I don't think measuring on number of bytes is really a good metric. Tic-Tac-Toe is pretty small but I'd rather play GTA5

Novels and movies aren’t baked into app binaries, they’re served on demand. And most people looking to download games have specific criteria in mind, e.g. genre, rating, publisher, price etc. It’s very unlikely that Tic-tac-toe and GTA5 fall under the same criteria for any given consumer.

the tic tac toe game that's 5mb should beat the one that's 500mb in search results.

App size is penalized naturally for some classes of apps.

I worked on the main app for a top hotel brand and they wanted convincing why we should take several sprints shaving space off their builds.

They're struggling to get people off their phone lines and into the app.

Say a customer's on a mobile connection or crappy airport wifi trying to book a hotel. When a 30 minute download for your 400 mb app starts, guess what they're going to do?

Cancel it and call in.

They could, but it might be a pain to identify what's actually bloat.

That sounds like a very fun project. There is of course the technical work in identifying unused code and resources, a data science framing where statistical questions regarding bloat could be assessed, a process framing component where tooling and dev-platform interactions could be incentivized toward reducing bloat, and and economics framing where structural changes in Play store could change dev strategies toward bloat. Someone in charge of leading such a project has a lot of options available for analyzing and solving the problem, none of them mutually exclusive.

App size is inherently penalized, right? Why does it need more?

Google can make it easier to identify which apps are taking up space and slowing the system down, so that users will uninstall and developers will respond. I had an Android up until July and the interface for understanding and removing app memory usage was still poor.

Yeah, it would be nice if this was exposed to us. With just three apps open on my iPhone, sometimes I'll go back to one and it has to relaunch. Did it crash, use too much memory, or was it squeezed out by high memory consumption of the other two apps?

Even desktop OS don't go far enough. Would be nice if Windows and macOS came with a top 5 {mem,cpu} consumers drop-down in the global menu bar without having to install a tool or open task manager. We complain about bloated apps but without providing insights to the user, there's no pressure for apps to optimize.

If it seems like too much of a power-user feature, how about your run-tracking app silently closing on a long run because you were also listening to Spotify in the foreground? That's not a good experience. With no insights, all you have to act on is superstition. Do I need to find a run-tracker that doesn't crash or should I try a different music player? No data so who knows.

We still insulate users from this data for some reason even on mobile devices that LRU-close apps when memory is tight. Let the people know, dammit.

It's the OS's fault for silently killing apps that are 'in use'.

An app can already say 'I'm still doing a user visible action' (like logging a run, or playing music). Whenever one of those apps has to be killed to free up memory, a messagebox should be displayed saying "Spotify has quit due to low memory. Spotify was using 647MB and RunGPS was using 1454MB out of 3000MB system memory".

The problem is that device manufacturers employ additional killers and "efficiency managers" because too many app vendors use one of the various workarounds to collect data or whatever the fuck they are doing otherwise.

Google won't do much against it because the worst of the data hoarders are the f2p games that make money for themselves by selling the user data they can get their hands on and make also a lot of money for Google via all the IAP commissions.

Google could still choose to provide a clean and powerful interface on their flagship phones (Pixel) and the Android One certified phones. The existence of the latter program is evidence that Google does (or at least did) recognize the value in protecting the user experience from bad manufacturer incentives for consumers who are willing to pay a small premium.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One

I'd guess a built-in web browser like Electron apps? But that wouldn't make much sense since I'm sure android has a WebView built in which should use mostly built-in browser libraries / tech.