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?