• Stovetop@lemmy.world
    6·
    14 days ago

    It’s just that we have to make space for our 5,358 partners and the telemetry data they need.

  • cylon@programming.dev
    4·
    12 days ago

    Memory is cheap and data sells enough to many parties. Most apps are just store front for Ads and data collection.

    No wonder why open source apps are quite light.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      4·
      14 days ago

      And analytics. And offloading as much computation to the client, because servers are expensive and inefficiency is not an issue if your users are the ones paying for it.

    • lobut@lemmy.ca
      1·
      14 days ago

      Web “Apps” are also quite bad. Lots of and lots of stuff we’re downloading and it feels clunky.

      Sometimes that’s bad coding, poor optimization, third party libraries, or sometimes just including trackers/ads on the page.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    3·
    14 days ago

    Fucking Chrome/Electron is why.

    I honestly wouldn’t mind that if they could all use the exact same runtime so the apps could be a few MB each, but nooooo.

  • enemenemu@lemm.ee
    2·
    14 days ago

    Paypal has 500 mb and just shows a number and you can press a button to send a number to their server.

    It’s insane

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      Check out the apps Hermit and Native Alpha. They make web pages run like an app. I’ve only run into a couple sites where they don’t work right.

  • count_dongulus@lemmy.world
    2·
    14 days ago

    Cheaper & faster development by leveraging large libraries/frameworks, but inability to automatically drop most unused parts of those libraries/frameworks. You could in theory shrink Electron way down by yoinking out tons of browser features you’re not using, but there’s not much incentive to do it and it’d potentially require a lot of engineering work.

    • zenpocalypse@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      Yeah, though the joke is funny, this is the real answer.

      Storage is cheap compared to creating custom libraries.

      • UnityDevice@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        13 days ago

        Storage is cheap on a PC, it’s not cheap on mobile where it’s fixed and used as a model differentiator. They overcharge you so much. Oh, and they removed SD card slots from nearly all phones.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      Yep. Apps are 20x bigger with no new features…that you are using.

      Let’s not forget that the graphics for applications has scaled with display resolution, and people generally demand a smooth modern look for their apps.

      • lud@lemm.ee
        1·
        8 days ago

        In the case of normal apps like PayPal graphics shouldn’t be a huge factor since it should be vectorized and there is pretty much no graphics in apps like PayPal.

        The issue comes from frameworks.

  • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
    1·
    13 days ago

    isn’t it a combination of younger developers not learning to programme under the restrictions of limited memory and cpu speed, on top of employers demanding code as soon as possible rather than code that is elegant or resource efficient or even slightly planned out

  • Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    Simple reason - dependencies.

    Modern devs dump any dependency and sub-dependency under the sun into their project and don’t bother about optimizing it. That’s how you end up with absurdly large applications. Especially electron is a problem in this regard.

    You can still write optimized and small software. However, for most businesses, it’s just not worth their time. Rather using an additional couple hundred megabytes of dependencies on the client system.