> How do you know the 40MB download wasn't aggressively optimized down from 400MB?
I don't; I thought the context made it clear, that I meant relatively trivial apps that do little but are bloated internally.
> Is there any known correlation
Possibly, I don't know. But I also learned that heuristic from experience. When large app sizes are justified, you usually see this in functionality.
> That's a significant waste of precious time (and money) for a developer.
OTOH from a consumer point of view, you're saving time by externalizing your waste on me. I know that "optimize everything" isn't the right answer, but so IMO isn't "optimize nothing". If you save one dev day by wasting each user's 10 minutes over their use of the app, those 10 minutes multiplied by 100k users suddenly become over two man-years of wasted time.
I know that you can't compare users' time to developers' time 1:1, but the scale at which those decisions affect people is still worth minding. Especially for other resources, as e.g. electricity usage does add up pretty much linearly, unlike small time periods.
> We (humans) waste a lot of things that are much more important than people's data plans. Gasoline and food, for examples. Why haven't we reduced those 10x? It is possible.
And many people are working on it too. I find wasting those things to be bad as well.
Applications become increasingly bloated when they need to support lots of different environments and runtimes.
To give a modern example: if I want a web app to run on a wide range of browsers, I have to include shims and polyfills to handle missing functionality, API differences, and implementation bugs.
But it's not a problem limited to the web, it exists with native applications as well. This is why Electron apps are huge energy and memory hogs. It abstracts every native layer in order for the application to run pretty much everywhere.
IMO, it's not such a horrible thing in some cases. I usually prefer native applications for anything that I'll be using regularly... But electron apps can be incredibly handy for one-off utilities. To give an example I'm personally familiar with: I occasionally use Etcher [0] to burn images to USB and SD cards. I've used it on macOS 10.12, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 17.04 without any issues! The most famous native alternative I'm familiar with is UNetbootin, which didn't seem to work on macOS when I last tried it. Of course, on macOS and Ubuntu I also have the option of using the terminal, which requires me to look up or remember the platform-specific way of listing all disks, identifying the target, unmounting it, and copying the image.
That's all fair. I don't like bloat either. I'd suggest the ecosystem is more to blame than individuals devs. Apple and Google could do more to fix this problem than anyone else. It's too easy to make a basic app that's large, and it takes too much effort to get the file sizes down. If it were easier to make a small app than a large one, apps would be smaller.
The real problem is economic, which is why I brought up food & gas. We are optimizing them slowly, but it's not happening quickly because it takes too much effort and consumers don't care enough. You're right that not optimizing is externalizing the waste onto consumers, and that user waste happens at a vastly different scale than developer waste. Which is why if consumers made a big enough stink, the problems would get fixed more quickly.
I agree with everything you wrote here. I too see the problem as primarily systemic.
The problem here is also that users are kind of "captive consumers" of software; i.e. more often than not, there's no other choice besides either using or not using a piece of software. And even if there is a choice, it's usually between two or three pieces of softare, all competing with each other on shiny features and accumulating bloat at tremendous speed.
The frustration is there though; it shows in the rare cases when there is a partial choice. For instance, I know plenty of people who refuse to use Facebook app because of the battery usage, and instead choose to go to Facebook mobile site (which is objectively more annoying and less user-friendly than the app).
> Which is why if consumers made a big enough stink, the problems would get fixed more quickly.
Which is why I do my part in making the stink, complaining about the bloat and waste in places where both users and developers can hear, besides trying to ensure my own backyard (at work and otherwise) is as bloat-free as possible. I guess that's the best I can think of without going into full advocacy mode.
Well, since the problem is economic, the stink has to be economic. For consumers to make a stink, it means they have to withhold their money and stop purchasing wasteful products, not voice their complaints after purchasing.
Despite how much time we all spend solving problems we fear we have but don't really have, most devs don't actually have the option to spend significant portions of their time optimizing, even if they want to. I've been exposed to squeezing large games down onto a Wii console because it was a requirement to ship, but not because we cared about bloat. We did care about bloat, btw, but we didn't spend anywhere near as much time reducing file sizes on the PS3 as on the Wii, even though we could. It was an organizational decision that I had almost no control over.
Gamedev plays by different rules. You guys work too hard already :). I was thinking more about regular run-of-the-mill app and webdev.
> For consumers to make a stink, it means they have to withhold their money and stop purchasing wasteful products, not voice their complaints after purchasing.
Yeah, but that's not easy to do either. I added that point in the ninja-edit to my previous comment. In my experience, in many areas consumers don't really have any real choice. I.e. you choose from what is available on the market, not from the space of all possible products. There is no good line for getting feedback from consumers to producers about options not explored, or even about the reason you refrain from buying something. Again, I currently have no idea how to approach this.
I don't; I thought the context made it clear, that I meant relatively trivial apps that do little but are bloated internally.
> Is there any known correlation
Possibly, I don't know. But I also learned that heuristic from experience. When large app sizes are justified, you usually see this in functionality.
> That's a significant waste of precious time (and money) for a developer.
OTOH from a consumer point of view, you're saving time by externalizing your waste on me. I know that "optimize everything" isn't the right answer, but so IMO isn't "optimize nothing". If you save one dev day by wasting each user's 10 minutes over their use of the app, those 10 minutes multiplied by 100k users suddenly become over two man-years of wasted time.
I know that you can't compare users' time to developers' time 1:1, but the scale at which those decisions affect people is still worth minding. Especially for other resources, as e.g. electricity usage does add up pretty much linearly, unlike small time periods.
> We (humans) waste a lot of things that are much more important than people's data plans. Gasoline and food, for examples. Why haven't we reduced those 10x? It is possible.
And many people are working on it too. I find wasting those things to be bad as well.