Where did my 256 GB go? Mobile storage Analysis [pdf]

I think app size is a lurking problem that needs to be addressed.<p>I thought it was just me as a “power user” but then I noticed that my wife and kids were spending hours deleting stuff to make room for app updates. It’s a silent problem that people just seem to monkey around with.<p>Some apps are huge, I have 256GB because I ran into problems with only 64GB. “enterprise” apps that use up lots of app storage and then require local data storage for caches to edit files.<p>A big offender is Microsoft where the office apps are each 500MB and different apps are needed: Excel, Word, Office, OneDrive, PowerPoint. Why is Edge 200MB?<p>It’s common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase as my credit card and their app is 300MB. I keep the app because their web site is horrible and requires MFA to login, so the app is easier.<p>It was impossible to use my phone with “only” 64GB without constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed at the time.<p>I remember the days of small hard drives when bloat really mattered, but it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app and it’s not reasonable that the Gmail app requires 300MB or PayPal needs 250.

I&#x27;ve dabbled in Android development for a rather simple app, and am fighting to keep it in the single digit MB size. I was shocked that even after as much build optimization as possible on libraries, a DEX analysis shows a handful of built in icons and menu translations into just 5 languages occupies over 40% of the package.<p>As an aside, I dug out an old 16GB Nexus 5 phone to use as a security camera monitor. With exponential app bloat, the basic camera app was a 300MB download, and ate 80% of the phone&#x27;s free space. All that for a glorified video stream player. The rest of the phone with its outdated apps actually feels quite usable as a modern Android phone--what exactly did today&#x27;s 10x size get us?

What I wish for a is a simple thing:<p>- Apps declaring how much space they need<p>- The OS enforcing <i>that size</i> as the quota.<p>That&#x27;s it. There&#x27;s no need for the OS to figure out how much space to give to apps.<p>This way, if I install an app that is purportedly a 2GB app, I&#x27;ll know exactly how much space I&#x27;ll lose.<p>If an app needs more space after an update, that update would require a manual approval from the user.<p>Something tells me that if app developers were required to be honest about their disk usage, <i>and</i> knew that he users would have to agree to a &quot;This app wants 5GB more space after an update, are you OK with that?&quot; prompt, we would <i>not</i> be where we are today.<p>On top of everything else, I wish Android versions were held to the same standard, and that phones were advertised with the amount of <i>free</i> space available to the user.

I&#x27;ve had multiple relatives (ahem, samsung) phones somehow waste data...<p>I&#x27;m talking 32gig phone, with 8gb &#x27;system&#x27;, 20gb &quot;other&quot;, and a few apps. I can delete all the apps, app updates (because preinstalled apps are installed twice, once in the system partition and then a new version in the data partition), and 20gb is still missing. I can mount the phone, and find 5mb of random files, zero photos (i removed them earlier), and still, 20gb missing. I have a theory, that samsung updates leave some trash behind somewhere on the system partition and never clean up after themselves, because after a factory reset, and full upgrade, the space is back, even with all the apps and updates.<p>I don&#x27;t want to root those phones, becase they&#x27;re not mine, and this brings in more issues (eg. eternal support), and factoy reset seems to be the only way to &quot;fix&quot; them.

I think part of the problem may be not taking advantage of external storage. I have an older Android phone with 32Gb internal storage and a 128Gb MicroSD card. I haven&#x27;t had any storage problems because most big files go to the external storage without any effort on my part. I still have 10 Gb internal storage available, which is fine for my needs.<p>I have an old Nook eBook reader that I haven&#x27;t used in a very long time because if became impossible to update. There was an Android update that said it would let you configure external storage as a seamless extension of the internal storage. There was just one problem: Android insisted that Android&#x27;s Apps be stored in internal memory. The poor old Nook only had 8 Gb of internal memory (what do you expect for only $49). The OS took almost 4 Gb, the Android Apps also took almost 4 Gb, leaving less than 100 Mb. After a while it became impossible to update and now it&#x27;s in a box somewhere with all its other abandoned bretheren.

Deprecated Google apps that can&#x27;t be uninstalled nor disabled, but still keep updating themselves to the last bloated version after you do uninstall the updates.

One thing I noticed of my mobile games is that they seem to download a huge amount of items for each &quot;event&quot;, and because they will reuse the resources for future event the downloaded items were never cleaned up. So eventually I got a blob of a couple of GB instead of half a GB in the beginning. However, since most events only come around a few times a year (e.g. Christmas event only comes once per year), it&#x27;s frustrating to keep all those garbages on my phone and waiting for them to be read next year.

I once built a prototype app to soft delete near-duplicate photos to save space. i.e. it would look at images that are very similar and identify the one that was sharpest, with the best lighting etc, and soft-delete the rest. The app worked but was very slow due to Python&#x27;s image processing libraries. But if anyone here thinks this is a good idea happy to share how I did it as I&#x27;m sure a competent engineer can make this a reality.

“a five-year longitudinal static analysis of millions of Android apps to study the increase in their sizes over time and identify various sources of app storage consumption. ”<p>I thought it was going to be about analyzing what’s eating up my phones storage (system storage I’m looking at you) - and note it focuses on Android only. Not sure how much of the analysis extrapolates to iOS apps.

People should look at other perverse incentives not mentioned here<p>My teams did many optimizations in mobile apps to keep file sizes small, only for more than one future employer (or relevant decision maker there) to question my experience because the executable sizes listed in the App Store are small<p>“But <i>at scale</i> can you…”<p>I’ll just put dummy files in thanks!

As an app developer (both Android and iOS), I can tell where. When I’m done with the basic app features the app is no more than 3-5 MB but then I can’t ship it without some libraries that make me money - analytics and ads. Then again, if I only integrate one or two ad network SDKs, the revenue from the app can’t even support its development. So I add 12-15 different SDKs from all the ad networks and have them compete for the ad space. Then again, I need things that track crashes, and then offer in-app support, then someone emails you that you can silently earn $xxx per day only by integrating their SDK. Why not? Who doesn’t like an extra $xxx a day?<p>See what I did there? I turned that 3MB app to a 80MB app.<p>Disclaimer: Most of my apps are ~15MB and I try to put them under 20MB on Android.

I had an older android phone with 512MB. Which fit what it needed, until the google docs apps all started to get bigger and bigger. But I could fix that to some extent by moving them to the system partition.<p>My current phone is nicer in many ways but it doesn&#x27;t really do anything the very old phone couldn&#x27;t.

My phone has storage capacity of 4MB :) it is plenty!

What tools&#x2F;apps are you using to figure out the size of applications and directories that are using the most?

Surprised to see no mention of Unity.

Some laptops still ship with 256GB storage for the base model.

It went on Cordova, React Native, Xamarin, Qt, Flutter,....

You have to ask what is the motivation to keep the storage usage down, I can&#x27;t see any. If an app runs at a speed acceptable to the end user, nobody cares.

After reading the comments here, I think everyone needs to repeat the one true mantra: &quot;machine time is cheaper than developer time&quot;. Anyone &quot;optimizing&quot; an app is wasting time and money. Anyone optimizing an app for space usage is doubly foolish: extra gigabytes are free.<p>&lt;- That&#x27;s sarcasm, by the way. But if you asked any of the apps&#x27; developers, that is the answer you&#x27;ll receive.