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by brokentone
5181 days ago
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I like this author's thoughts, and there are some creative solutions offered by him and the commenters there on how to thin the assets. However, I would be interested to see how the assets' size stacks up against the actual binary. Some of the biggest apps on my iPhone are iBooks (57.9MB) and Nook (51.3MB). I doubt their pretty little icons take up the lion's share of that size. I mean, Kindle does it in a measly 23.5MB (sarcasm, still big). I wonder, for instance, how much language support weighs in at. There was a mac program I used some years back called monolingual that would remove other languages, you know because I'll never need my laptop to work in Farsi, and thin the binary architectures. Saved many a GB when they were much more precious. I'm assuming that most of these apps are made with some fancy service that generates an app for every platform under the sun from one app creator program, and as such, each native app is way bloated. But, the consumers don't notice or care, so app creators are just going to be as inefficient in the interest of jamming new features into an app over optimizing it. (edit: spelling, added parenthetical to Kindle app) |
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iBooks used to be under 20MB. Over time it's expanded to its current size of 50.8MB when it's uncompressed (the extra space it's taking up on your device is probably the books themselves).
The vast majority of that is images. Apple have at least been somewhat smart about it, choosing in certain cases to use lossy JPGs rather than PNGs where the user won't notice (the startup image, for example).
The app also ships with some custom fonts, which take up a few of those MB. The languages, which you suspect take up a lot of the space, actually don't represent that much: each language is about 45KB.
The executable itself is 25MB: so basically, 50% of the app size consists of assets. The percentage is probably higher on most other apps, because the iBooks executable is rather large (unusually so).