There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app, which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself.

Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).

Sounds like how Internet Explorer used to be integrated in Windows. That was quite contentious at the time!

'90s Microsoft was like early christians: harshly persecuted, only for everyone else to eventually adopt their ways. In this metaphor, emperor Constantine is probably Steve Jobs.

Harshly persecuted how, exactly? They got a slap on the wrist, still continued to ship IE as the default browser and stayed dominant browser vendor until another monopoly started to abuse its position.

The verdict significantly hamstrung their internal developer processes. Yes, IE didn't go anywhere, but the path of tight integration of web and OS was effectively abandoned for several years, and they generally toned down integration features between their products.

Which brings up another point: the total used disk space of a Windows install with Internet Explorer and Outlook Express used to be way smaller than Gmail alone is now.

If you have those apps handy and could share the sizes it would be very useful. I don’t have a way to check this. (Or do I? All I have is an iPhone )

Safari on MacOS is 66M, Safari Technology Preview is 226M

Yikes thanks. I remember when a full browser fit in a 1.44MB floppy disk.

I don't think that Safari should be used for comparison here since web views have a special place in the OS. Which of the other stock apps have a similar architecture?

All of them (except the downloadable ones like Xcode on Mac).

With Safari it's a lot easier to see, as you can get the standalone version.

Reminds me of when people were clamoring for the ability to delete 1P apps to save space

The Gmail app takes 175 MB on my Android phone. That’s better than iOS, but still a lot for an e-mail app.

To add to the comparisons. Protonmail is showing as 180 MB on GrapheneOS. Add in user data and cache and it's 495 MB. I don't consider myself a big email user so I am a bit appalled.

Pixel OS16 with fastmail is 20MB for app, 60 for usercache and 7 for cache. I use it once or twice a week if that

Probably bundles its own copy of Chrome just in case :)

I can totally imagine someone doing just that.

> Product Requirement: Even if the user deletes the Chrome app, the Gmail app must work to display HTML emails, the authentication screen including 2FA options, etc. Can’t rely on WebViews for security reasons.

It doesn't, that's Android Webview which is distributed separately. It may however bundle its own instance of the Chrome networking library which is a few MB itself.

For apps like Gmail and a handful of others, they are big enough that they need multiple layers of fallback. e.g. they can't just use a networking layer, they need a fallback separate implementation in case that breaks, so that they can recover. They might have 2 or even 3 options for some of the critical parts, all so that if stuff goes wrong they can as close to guarantee recovery as they can get.

Mobile is quite specific in this regard, because you don't have hardware access, network is heavily restricted, battery reduces the amount you can do, etc.

Source: I work on mobile SRE things at Google.

No need to.

Android does that already and allows apps to use it (the webview)

K-9 mail (aka Thunderbird) is a nice 12MB, 70MB installed.

The app size is 44 MiBs for me. With user data just above 70 though.

Windows 98 and Office 97 in their entirety are less than 700MB combined. How have things gotten so out of hand that a single email client needs more than an entire OS and office suite used to?

I’m sorry but ~700MB of compiled code, text, and vector graphics is a lot of assets, almost a truck load. It doesn’t look like they care about how much space they take in users’ devices at all.