I recently made a tiny utlity app with a single screen, one dropdown and a few lines of text (it makes a single API call to populate the text).
According to my phone it's 25MB.
There's no assets, not even an app icon.
I have no idea what would be taking up more than a few hundred kb, let alone 25MB.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by marcosdumay on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:09PM
(#46520168)
Maybe your compiler isn't pruning dead code?
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by saidinesh5 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @11:25PM
(#46522548)
I think it could be all the compat /support libraries that try to give you the same API across different Android versions.
There are ways to analyze the content of your app so you know exactly what's taking all the space.
Tools can vary depending on what language you used. For example i wrote a small app using flutter and i used the flutter's app size tool.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by abareplace on Thursday January 08, 2026 @07:31AM
(#46540293)
Is it for iOS? Then, it could be the Swift runtime library.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by paulddraper on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @02:49PM
(#46517613)
> a few dozen kilobytes
A "hello world" Android starts at ~5MB.
It is possible to make it smaller if choosing some non-default different tools.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by paulddraper on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @05:41PM
(#46534215)
> non-default different tools
The “default” recommendation is clearly Android Studio plus Kotlin/Java.
Other tools are smaller.
Idk what to tell you but my "hello world" + a few dozen lines of functionality are 9.6KB. Haven't done anything special to shave things off
Hello world Android app includes a lot of dependencies like compat libs, constraint layout, kotlin runtime. These are not essential and can be removed.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by binaryturtle on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @03:52PM
(#46518529)
Outch… and I though an ~8KB "Hello, World!" here on my rusty Mac is HUGE already.
I am quite sure that isn't using the plain Android APIs, and has a bunch of needless libraries.
Use plain Java, regular Android views, handle yourself the ifdefs for Android versions, and the 5 MB won't be there.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by throwaway81523 on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @05:40PM
(#46519858)
I remember hearing that even a trivial React Native app is around 100MB on Android.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by marcosdumay on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:07PM
(#46520146)
If you use Electron, yes, any application starts from around 100MB.
But there are alternatives that reuse the OS's libraries nowadays.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by presentation on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @08:11PM
(#46521237)
React Native doesn’t use Electron
Why Electron? React Native doesn't even use HTML.
How does a web application reuse browser system-native libraries?
Electron ships a version of Chrome. Other frameworks like Tauri use the device's webview.
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
by marcosdumay on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @07:04PM
(#46520733)
The entire discussion is about native applications, not web.
More like a few dozen kilobytes to a handful of megabytes. If you look in F-Droid you can find some good old apps where graphics are either small or it uses the default styles for buttons and the like
Looking at a tiny utility app I made 6 years ago, it's 9KB, most of which will be the default things the compiler includes