this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
775 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

63133 readers
3425 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
775
‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 day ago by nahostdeutschland@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
179 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 35 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 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 8 points 6 hours ago (2 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.

[–] nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 14 minutes ago

And that's one of the benefits from open source apps. I have a very low end and dated phone, and yet I have more apps installed and hardware functionality than the average person, because I grab everything I can from f-droid. It's amazing how much smaller and performant everything is.

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

...I miss the c64

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 19 points 9 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 22 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 12 points 9 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

[–] throwback3090@lemmy.nz 5 points 7 hours ago

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