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‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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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.
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.
I actually wrote my own text editor for the C-64
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.
You can't compare (what is arguably) the peak of human computing to modern phones.
...I miss the c64
Edit: fixed pique to peak. Sorry. Autocorrect got me again
The reason they're so huge is
Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.
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
Every app is a bundle of a full website and spyware.