[danpalmer]

On the contrary, lack of storage is a huge limitation on installations. This may not be worth optimising 50MB to 30MB, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate.

People love taking photos on their phones, they love big games, and Apple are notoriously stingy with storage space and iCloud storage to ship off device. It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis.

[jasode]

>, but optimising 500MB to 300MB would be very impactful to installation rate. [...] It is a very significant portion of the population who are borderline out of storage all the time. I work quite closely to this sort of stuff on a regular basis.

Does Apple send telemetry information back to developers about failed app installs due to users' device being out of space?

I don't have a current Apple Developer account to test this but the documentation doesn't have any obvious statistic concerning failed installs: https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/view-app-....

EDIT reply to: >I don't think there's any special permissions required to get free disk space, so presumably he's getting it via telemetry from his app.

I was thinking of new users who didn't have the app at all.

E.g. hypothetical... "We're a brand new YC tech startup. Our app is 500 MB. This bloated size prevents 20% of potential new users from installing the app." <-- Does Apple provide enough stats to make that type of confident correlation?

[ninkendo]

I’m imagining a lot of users find themselves low on space, go to Settings, find what apps are using a lot of it, and delete them. “I’ll re-download LinkedIn if I need it again” they’ll think to themselves. This is terrifying to LinkedIn because it means push notifications no longer deliver, and how are you gonna increase engagement now?

For all I complain about OKR’s, this is a super simple one for LinkedIn to understand: Every MB your app takes up can probably be shown to decrease user stickiness by some percentage. Fix it!

Ah who am I kidding, they’ll probably switch to moving the assets out of the app bundle and making them live-download on first run and stored in the Caches folder somewhere, which will make the app “smaller”. Problem solved on their end, app-size OKR accomplished. The fact that it makes the app slower due to asset fetching is next quarter’s problem.

[danpalmer]

I'm not sure if Apple does, but the Play Store provides plenty of information about size of app, size relative to similar apps, size change over time, installation rates, and basically all the pieces necessary to figure out that size is preventing installs. I have to be careful about what I say here given my role, and this is all opinion or public information, but I'm not sure that Apple's telemetry is particularly insightful in this regard.

In my experience publishing on the Apple App Store, and as a user of iOS, there's likely no material difference between iOS and Android with storage issues, or if there is it's probably in Android's favour with the (mostly historical) availability of expandable storage and Google Photos providing a lot more off-device photo storage.

[paxys]

Apple doesn't incentivize developers to build smaller apps. Instead they push users to throw away their phone and buy one with more storage (at a cost of $100 per 128 GB) and/or buy iCloud subscriptions.

[gcr]

When I’m low on space I don’t even install some apps that I see on the App Store or, more commonly, I install them just to try them out and remove shortly after.

[gruez]

I don't think there's any special permissions required to get free disk space, so presumably he's getting it via telemetry from his app.

[RetroTechie]

^^ This. Companies often don't care about app size, because the (potential) users that avoid their app for size and/or performance reasons, are not the ones with the fat wallets (or valueable data).

Read: company doesn't care about including a large % of potential audience. It only cares about including the users that are most easily turned into profit.

P.S.: maybe those companies are right. But it also means they're fishing in a small & crowded pond. There's a lot of untapped market out there if only a company would care to cater to it.

P.S.2: Things change, and people's circumstances change. Today's 'useless' user could be your company's most valueable asset tomorrow. Get 'm while you can.

[jesterson]

that's right - however the anger is not channeled towards LinkedIn, therefore they can't give two f*cks about the app size

[ksec]

I have ~30 of either Banks or Payments Apps and Social Media Apps. Every single one of them are 500MB+ in size. That is 15GB of Apps. My HSBC Apps is 800MBs and I dont have a fucking idea why. And then there are Gmail, Google, Outlook all 300MB+.

To me it is just disgusting.