The basic clock app on my Android phone takes 33MB of memory. That is completely and utterly insane. Except for playing MP3 alarms, everything on it could be done on a 64K Commodore 64 without breaking a sweat. And of course, the actual code for playing an MP3 is baked into the Android operating system, so that's not what's taking up all the space.
The basic clock app on your Android phone has up to 4k assets, shadows, faux-3d layering, tons of animations, multi-touch support, gesture support, includes a timer, a countdown timer, an alarm system, every timezone imaginable, a separate "night mode", automatic "home time" for when you are traveling, multiple clock styles (digital vs analog), and all of the code runs in a VM.
Besides some of the features, there is no way in hell a Commodore 64 would be able to handle the textures, input, and UI of an app like that.
And while you may think that those things are useless, to the overwhelming majority it's the reason why they use that app at all.
Besides, why not use 33MB of memory? I think the number of people that would actually benefit from being able to have 30MB more memory (while using the clock app) on their Android devices is literally 0. Plus being able to be somewhat wasteful with memory provides tons of benefits. It speeds development time, it reduces CPU usage via caching (which reduces battery consumption), it allows higher res textures and a nicer UI, it allows easier-to-maintain code, and tons of other little benefits.
Multi-touch is in the system libraries, shadows and faux-3d layering and animations, too, the alarm system and every timezone imaginable is in the system, automatic home time is in the system.
The app uses 33MB of storage on disk. Only the app, none of the above mentioned libs.
The Facebook app is nowadays 159MB. That’s 120 floppies. For a single app.
I thought you were taking about RAM memory, not storage memory.
Also, the Facebook app (on my Android device at least) is 40.36MB...
But accounting for assets, multi-language translations, functionality, and the fact that it contains a bunch of multi-platform code (multi platform meaning Android with Google services, android with Amazon's stuff, Android with none of that, etc... which means it cant depend on a lot of "system" libraries that might not be there), and more then 40mb isn't even that bad. That being said the Facebook app is a bit of an outlier, with most apps being in the 5MB range.
I am working on an open source project, we have a simple IRC client for android (it uses a server for the translation between IRC and our protocol, the server also allows the app to show messages from times when the device was off).
This app already has over 8MB storage space and 34MB RAM. And the app has only 5 images overall in it, uses no Google services, and has only about 25k LOC.
Is it actually taking up an additional 33 MB, or is it just using libraries that are probably already loaded into physical memory, and it just happens to map those into its virtual address space?
