Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dont__panic 1578 days ago
Just checked the other day: one of my favorite apps this year, Hyperweb, is just 18.2 MB. Granted, it's only a browser extension for adblocking, styling, etc (sort of a replacement for all of the various Firefox addons I wish I could use on iOS), but the competition, AdGuard, clocks in at nearly 500 MB.

I really wonder what some of these apps are doing with this space. My banking app clocks in at 400 MB as well.
4 comments
ryandrake 1578 days ago
Just for some perspective, the entire installer package for the Shareware version Doom took up about 2.39MB of space. This included the EXE and all art assets. The installer for WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) was about 3.6MB. The full on-disk footprint of Microsoft Office 95 was less than 100MB, including all documentation, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

I'm not entirely convinced value-per-byte is a measure of software quality that a lot of users care about, but it undeniably trends down every year.

link
bombcar 1578 days ago
The one I like is that the Finder icon on macOS is larger than the entire system on the original Mac.
link
testplzignore 1578 days ago
DOOM2.WAD has always been my measuring stick for software size, as I remember how frustrating it was to download such a huge file (15MB!) in the dial-up days. I never did get it to complete - I couldn't justify to my parents that the phone line would be busy for a whole day :)
link
andai 1578 days ago
My favorite iOS app, Decoupled, is 2.4MB. My favorite Android apps were 5-10x smaller.
link
PascLeRasc 1578 days ago
Thanks for recommending Hyperweb, you've just saved me a ton of space.
link
dont__panic 1578 days ago
Keep in mind that even on the free version, you can add (unlimited?) adlists. I've added some of the most popular uBlock Origin default lists to mine to make the ad blocking even better. It is absolutely insane how many apps Hyperweb replaced for me, too!
link
pgalvin 1578 days ago
I have AdGuard on my phone at ~60MB, you might want to check that.
link
dont__panic 1578 days ago
Strange, the download from the app store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-adblock-privacy/id1047...) is 100 MB, but my install somehow crept up to ~400 (logs, maybe?) over a couple of years of use. I don't have it installed any more, but it's wild how much this varies across devices. What phone do you use? I use a 2016 SE, I wonder if there's a bug that's consume extra space on a device as old (and likely untested by AdGuard) as mine?
link