this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by nahostdeutschland@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 32 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (3 children)

Even if I was willing to download all of those apps I don't have room for them. They chew up 50-300mb each (why!?) and if I installed all of them I'd run out of memory. Since most phones now don't support memory expansion I have to be picky about which ones I use.

I have THREE separate parking apps because I travel.

[–] mPony@lemmy.world 3 points 53 minutes ago (1 children)

most phones now don’t support memory expansion

Well of course not. If phones supported memory expansion you would just buy more memory, instead of buying an entirely new phone Don't even get me started on how bloated these apps have become. I used Paperclip word processor on a Commodore-64; you can not convince me that your app needs to be 50+ Megs in size.

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 1 points 12 minutes ago

You can't compare (what is arguably) the pique of human computing to modern phones.

...I miss the c64

[–] throwback3090@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 hour ago

Every app is a bundle of a full website and spyware.

[–] LodeMike 15 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The reason they're so huge is

  1. They're generally not well optimized by the creators.
  2. They all contain their own dependencies
  3. There's a LOT of stuff in them (both code and dependencies). Which is kind of an optimization problem, but potato potato.
[–] kayazere@feddit.nl 17 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.

[–] LodeMike 9 points 3 hours ago

Same thing with rendering/layout/functionality frameworks. And each app has their own.

My favorite Android app, Trail Sense, which has the ability to know when sunrise and sunset are without Internet, is like 10MB