[HN Gopher] Where did my 256 GB go? Mobile storage Analysis [pdf]
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Where did my 256 GB go? Mobile storage Analysis [pdf]
Author : riyakhanna1983
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-06-25 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| inetsee wrote:
| I think part of the problem may be not taking advantage of
| external storage. I have an older Android phone with 32Gb
| internal storage and a 128Gb MicroSD card. I haven't had any
| storage problems because most big files go to the external
| storage without any effort on my part. I still have 10 Gb
| internal storage available, which is fine for my needs.
|
| I have an old Nook eBook reader that I haven't used in a very
| long time because if became impossible to update. There was an
| Android update that said it would let you configure external
| storage as a seamless extension of the internal storage. There
| was just one problem: Android insisted that Android's Apps be
| stored in internal memory. The poor old Nook only had 8 Gb of
| internal memory (what do you expect for only $49). The OS took
| almost 4 Gb, the Android Apps also took almost 4 Gb, leaving less
| than 100 Mb. After a while it became impossible to update and now
| it's in a box somewhere with all its other abandoned bretheren.
| brundolf wrote:
| Even without external storage - my phone has just 64GB internal
| - I don't find myself using even half of it. Yet I often hear
| people saying they run out of storage. I don't know what I'm
| doing differently; my app list isn't hyper-minimalist or
| anything
| CameronNemo wrote:
| My storage is mostly eaten up by music, photos, and videos.
| brundolf wrote:
| My music is all streamed; even the stuff I own gets
| streamed from Dropbox
|
| I don't really have a video collection, though if I did I
| would use Plex or something
|
| I don't take a ton of photos - sitting at 6GB right now -
| though they also get backed up to Dropbox so I could delete
| them if I needed to
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That's great when available, but many phones don't have SD
| slots.
| summm wrote:
| If you buy a phone without a microsd slot that is exactly
| your own fault. They are still available. But tend to get
| less, because people think it's uncool and buy phones
| without, but 2 years later they whine about too small
| storage...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Although you're not wrong, the app bloat is still a
| problem. SD cards are slower than internal storage in
| almost all cases except for ultra cheap phones (during
| random access and sometimes even during sustained read or
| write) so running apps of them is annoying.
|
| App developers should keep their app sizes down instead of
| driving everyone to add ridiculous amounts of external
| storage.
| romwell wrote:
| What I wish for a is a simple thing:
|
| - Apps declaring how much space they need
|
| - The OS enforcing _that size_ as the quota.
|
| That's it. There's no need for the OS to figure out how much
| space to give to apps.
|
| This way, if I install an app that is purportedly a 2GB app, I'll
| know exactly how much space I'll lose.
|
| If an app needs more space after an update, that update would
| require a manual approval from the user.
|
| Something tells me that if app developers were required to be
| honest about their disk usage, _and_ knew that he users would
| have to agree to a "This app wants 5GB more space after an
| update, are you OK with that?" prompt, we would _not_ be where we
| are today.
|
| On top of everything else, I wish Android versions were held to
| the same standard, and that phones were advertised with the
| amount of _free_ space available to the user.
| j1elo wrote:
| I feel like app developers would try to do things right the
| first time, and after fighting the issue of users not accepting
| an extra 500 MB after an update, for the future they would
| learn to just request a good measure of their expected size
| x10, just to avoid that issue.
| amoorthy wrote:
| I once built a prototype app to soft delete near-duplicate photos
| to save space. i.e. it would look at images that are very similar
| and identify the one that was sharpest, with the best lighting
| etc, and soft-delete the rest. The app worked but was very slow
| due to Python's image processing libraries. But if anyone here
| thinks this is a good idea happy to share how I did it as I'm
| sure a competent engineer can make this a reality.
| whichquestion wrote:
| I wish I had something like this for my iPhone that would
| automatically soft delete duplicate photos, picking out the
| sharpest one. Maybe an app exists already but I haven't looked
| super deep for it.
| V99 wrote:
| Not exactly the same but for Burst Mode photos (where they
| all start grouped together) it will automatically pick what
| it thinks is the best one, and you can: - Go to the burst in
| the photo roll - Tap "Select..." - Pick one (or more) - Tap
| Done - Tap "Keep Only 1 Favorite" to get rid of the others
| you didn't select.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I had an older android phone with 512MB. Which fit what it
| needed, until the google docs apps all started to get bigger and
| bigger. But I could fix that to some extent by moving them to the
| system partition.
|
| My current phone is nicer in many ways but it doesn't really do
| anything the very old phone couldn't.
| tdeck wrote:
| Surprised to see no mention of Unity.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Deprecated Google apps that can't be uninstalled nor disabled,
| but still keep updating themselves to the last bloated version
| after you do uninstall the updates.
| techrat wrote:
| And people ask me why I still root. Nothing like a phone with
| every app that can be frozen actually frozen. (App Quarantine)
| btdmaster wrote:
| Interestingly enough though removing preinstalled apps with
| `adb pm uninstall --user 0` (0, perhaps unexpectedly, being
| the main user, not root) does have a similar effect to
| disabling it, except it saves space permanently and only
| leaves the original APK in case of factory resets (not only
| this, but this works on what cannot be disabled otherwise,
| e.g. Google Play on some devices).
|
| Just a side note that rooting may not be necessary. (even if
| I would love me a true Linux phone :)
| riston wrote:
| What tools/apps are you using to figure out the size of
| applications and directories that are using the most?
| peterwandering wrote:
| My phone has storage capacity of 4MB :) it is plenty!
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| You have to ask what is the motivation to keep the storage usage
| down, I can't see any. If an app runs at a speed acceptable to
| the end user, nobody cares.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| > ... nobody cares.
|
| Yes, people care.
|
| Your app is NOT the only one on my device.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm tired of installing hard drives and I've run out of M.2
| slots.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Less code correlates with better performance (responsiveness,
| battery life, bug rate, etc). Running through multiple layers
| of indirection prevents us from reaping the full benefits of a
| pocket supercomputer. Nobody knows what they're missing out on
| because every platform does it.
| 8note wrote:
| id expect continuous network calls to make a bigger
| difference than having an extra java class inbetween
| arvinsim wrote:
| You will have to
|
| 1. Inform users what they are missing out 2. Instill a
| culture of performance first over features in software dev
| shops.
|
| The financial incentives of doing these are not very
| compelling.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| One thing I noticed of my mobile games is that they seem to
| download a huge amount of items for each "event", and because
| they will reuse the resources for future event the downloaded
| items were never cleaned up. So eventually I got a blob of a
| couple of GB instead of half a GB in the beginning. However,
| since most events only come around a few times a year (e.g.
| Christmas event only comes once per year), it's frustrating to
| keep all those garbages on my phone and waiting for them to be
| read next year.
| aylmao wrote:
| It's crazy that Fornite on PC took almost 100GB of disk space
| not long ago. The managed to cut that down to under a third
| [1].
|
| I suspect a lot of this reduction was probably loading content
| on-demand. Wouldn't be surprised if all the different items and
| event data were pre-downloaded before that update. Whatever it
| was, it was evidently not crucial since it's always used much
| less space on mobile-- they just hadn't gotten around to
| keeping disk usage under control on PC too.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21526916/fortnite-pc-
| fil...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| z2 wrote:
| I've dabbled in Android development for a rather simple app, and
| am fighting to keep it in the single digit MB size. I was shocked
| that even after as much build optimization as possible on
| libraries, a DEX analysis shows a handful of built in icons and
| menu translations into just 5 languages occupies over 40% of the
| package.
|
| As an aside, I dug out an old 16GB Nexus 5 phone to use as a
| security camera monitor. With exponential app bloat, the basic
| camera app was a 300MB download, and ate 80% of the phone's free
| space. All that for a glorified video stream player. The rest of
| the phone with its outdated apps actually feels quite usable as a
| modern Android phone--what exactly did today's 10x size get us?
| xook wrote:
| Another aside: I believe part of the argument for moving to
| "flat design" (Material) was lower file sizes since it's all
| CSS or SVG, as opposed to possibly dozens of raster images at
| different resolutions for the multitude of screens. Yet here we
| are, with our flat design, but apps now gobble up precious
| storage space because of bloated shipped libraries.
| _jal wrote:
| > I believe part of the argument for moving to "flat design"
| (Material) was lower file sizes
|
| If it was, that was a sucker-play. Just like with CPU, RAM,
| and traffic lanes, any resource optimization will simply make
| room for something else to occupy.
|
| The steady-state of storage media is full.
| butz wrote:
| I've tried using new Android Jetpack Compose libraries to
| rebuild my old Android app. Basic application with single
| activity is a bit below 6MB, optimized for release. This is
| really bad, compared to my original application, which apk is a
| bit smaller at 4MB, and includes offline maps and additional
| routing data.
|
| It's probably impossible for Google to keep all shared
| libraries on devices, as there are millions of those not
| getting updates, so only way is to keep everything duplicated
| in each app. Now I'm considering converting app to PWA, even if
| it means that UI will look out of place and potentially will
| have more accessibility issues. At least I hope to keep app
| size as small as possible.
| [deleted]
| TrianguloY wrote:
| I'm an android developer with apps around 100Kb, or 0.1Mb.
|
| The secret? Don't use android app compat, or rather, don't use
| any external library. Just plain old java. The apps are ugly
| (no themes) but they work extremely fast and to the point.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Extra: maybe it was a bug or something, but when I tried one
| of my apps on an android 12 emulator, it reported a negative
| app size! (user data to be precise)
|
| https://ibb.co/TPjH5gh
| Y_Y wrote:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=628044902530826204.
| ..
|
| In case anyone else was wondering where to get such apps.
| Probably on F-Droid too?
| TrianguloY wrote:
| Unfortunately no, or rather not yet. I guess it should be
| easy to publish most of them, as they are on GitHub
| already. (Except my most popular app by far, because in the
| past I had some issues with clones so I decided to kept its
| code private)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Does your camera app really use over 1 GB of storage? Mine uses
| about 12 MB, still pretty obnoxious but nowhere near what
| you're describing.
| z2 wrote:
| Camera app as in a required smart home app to access the WiFi
| camera. About 300MB installed. It does do push notifications
| on motion detection so maybe that's 50MB there?
| bluescrn wrote:
| Is the size of the camera app really significant when, on a
| modern high-end device, it's going to be taking 10+ megapixel
| photos or recording 4K video at up to 60fps?
| kasabali wrote:
| of course. you can store photos in sd card or cloud, but
| not the camera app
| comeonseriously wrote:
| > --what exactly did today's 10x size get us?
|
| A/B testing. Tracking. Things like that.
| bluescrn wrote:
| We've also had _massive_ increases in screen resolutions.
|
| 12 years ago, the iPhone 3GS was cutting edge. With a 480x320
| screen. That's just 0.15 million pixels.
|
| There are now Android phones with full 4K screens. That's
| 3840x2160, a little over 8 million pixels.
|
| That a 50x increase in pixel count. Anything using bitmap
| graphics (games being an obvious example) is going to be much
| bigger now.
|
| (And in that same period, it seems that the average Windows
| PC desktop resolution has remained pretty much unchanged for
| most users...)
| mcguire wrote:
| After reading the comments here, I think everyone needs to repeat
| the one true mantra: "machine time is cheaper than developer
| time". Anyone "optimizing" an app is wasting time and money.
| Anyone optimizing an app for space usage is doubly foolish: extra
| gigabytes are free.
|
| <- That's sarcasm, by the way. But if you asked any of the apps'
| developers, that is the answer you'll receive.
| ticviking wrote:
| Certainly my machines time is very cheap for them.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| It depends on your perspective I think. How many machines are
| we comparing with one developer?
| romwell wrote:
| Yes, and the user's frustration (and time spent figuring out
| how to clean up space on what was a new phone just a week ago)
| also costs nothing to the developer.
|
| Sincerely, I hope this mantra dies.
| prepend wrote:
| I think app size is a lurking problem that needs to be addressed.
|
| I thought it was just me as a "power user" but then I noticed
| that my wife and kids were spending hours deleting stuff to make
| room for app updates. It's a silent problem that people just seem
| to monkey around with.
|
| Some apps are huge, I have 256GB because I ran into problems with
| only 64GB. "enterprise" apps that use up lots of app storage and
| then require local data storage for caches to edit files.
|
| A big offender is Microsoft where the office apps are each 500MB
| and different apps are needed: Excel, Word, Office, OneDrive,
| PowerPoint. Why is Edge 200MB?
|
| It's common for apps to be 250MB and grow and grow. I used Chase
| as my credit card and their app is 300MB. I keep the app because
| their web site is horrible and requires MFA to login, so the app
| is easier.
|
| It was impossible to use my phone with "only" 64GB without
| constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed
| at the time.
|
| I remember the days of small hard drives when bloat really
| mattered, but it seems like devs just assume that people only use
| their app and it's not reasonable that the Gmail app requires
| 300MB or PayPal needs 250.
| Joeri wrote:
| It used to be that everyone wrote all of their own code and
| applications were tiny. Now it's easy to pull in dozens of
| libraries and their hundreds or thousands of transitive
| dependencies. The resulting app bloat becomes a ticket on the
| pile, to be solved some day going on never.
| markrages wrote:
| Parent comment is evergreen. It could have been written in
| 1996.
|
| I feel the same way. But as we curmudgeons stand athwart
| history, the whole of software development is moving toward
| the largest sizes the technology will allow.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app
|
| It's the "people have powerful computers now so we can be as
| lazy as we want" culture. We have amazing computers but they
| feel less powerful than an 80s arcade machine.
| mcguire wrote:
| Or rather the "developer time is cheaper than machine time"
| culture.
|
| Oy. I meant "developer time is more expensive than machine
| time." It's been a long day.
| ticviking wrote:
| This is more true than ever when the machine is my
| cellphone.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| QA should be done on a cheapest phone available to buy at the
| telcos 2 years ago.
| judge2020 wrote:
| For Microsoft sure, but people who buy the cheapest phone
| aren't the target customer for most products.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Like, you know, calling, navigation, discount codes or
| news.
|
| Not latest iPhone = poor, right?
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Depends.... Social networks, bank apps, chat apps, casual
| games, productivity apps, music/video players,...
| basically everything except new games still should work,
| even on shitty phones.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| If it involves spending money and your business model
| isn't to make pennies at massive scale, it makes no sense
| to optimize for those who actively reduce costs. I don't
| remember the exact percentages, but there's a quip that
| Apple has something like 90% of the profit with under 30%
| market share.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Today my Windows 10 PC told me that the "Snipping Tool" had
| been deprecated and would I like to try the new W10 version?
| So I did. And when I took a screenshot, it said something
| like "please wait while we make your screenshot" for about 20
| seconds! What could POSSIBLY take so long!?
| ryandrake wrote:
| > What could POSSIBLY take so long!?
|
| This is something I find myself asking more and more almost
| every time I use a computer or mobile device. I have
| multiple cores here. Why is anything stuttering? Why are
| these processes taking so much memory up? Why is this web
| page pulling down 100MB of traffic? Why do I remember text
| console DOS apps being so much more responsive than today's
| click-then-wait UI apps? Before spinning hard drives
| dropped out of fashion, you could hear that thing grinding
| away, doing who knows what, while the computer was sitting
| there supposedly idle! What gives software developers the
| idea that they can just have their software just wake up
| and do things without the user commanding it?
|
| Just a particularly egregious example: If there's one thing
| that nothing on the entire system should preempt, it's the
| mouse cursor. If I move the mouse, the cursor should move
| instantly. There is nothing more important that the
| computer should be doing. I thought this was like a basic,
| very well understood rule and a solved problem. Hell, I
| recall a long time ago things like mouse cursor drawing
| were driven off a hardware interrupt. On today's "modern"
| computers, if I have a lot of applications running in the
| background, the mouse cursor will stutter and lag, and text
| input will be buffered and show up N seconds after I type.
| Totally unacceptable, yet software continues to ship like
| this.
|
| EDIT: Sorry, the rant kind of drifted off of the "nobody
| cares about bloat" problem and into the general "nobody
| cares about performance" problem.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Analytics? Maybe under the guise of "search your
| screenshots later for people, apps, or words on the
| screen!"
| judge2020 wrote:
| I've never seen that, perhaps it was preloading the actual
| tool that makes the screenshot (since they seem to like
| lazy-loading features nowadays). Is this different from the
| Windows key+shift+S tool?
| n4bz0r wrote:
| Surely not image compression.
|
| Sounds like your screenshots are being conveniently
| uploaded to MS servers so you could share them ( _Yay!_ ).
|
| Getting such enormous delays when performing otherwise
| simple operations usually means that network requests are
| being made, and servers aren't normally snappy when it
| comes to free storage.
|
| Here is my example of enormous loading times: it takes a
| few _minutes_ to clear browsing history on the android
| version of Chrome browser. Quite outrageous.
| dspillett wrote:
| Worse is Calculator. Why does that app that simple take a
| noticeable (small, but not instant) delay to open on a
| pretty decent machine?
|
| (also why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of
| a simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating?)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > why is everyone so needy these days, to the point of a
| simple OS-built-in calculator app asking for a rating
|
| Some oxygen waster's salary and career is tied to these
| metrics.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Would be fun to reverse that app and find out!
| Severian wrote:
| FWIW, I've switched to Greenshot and I couldn't be happier.
| So many useful features. I donated to the developers due to
| the annotation features alone.
| meowster wrote:
| On Android, Microsoft has an app called "Office" that combines
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other feature. It's just 133MB.
| mornaT wrote:
| > Why is Edge 200MB?
|
| Edge is Chromium + various integration libraries. The barebone
| Chromium 64-bit build on Android, without any google
| integration, is 130MB.
|
| Add to that several video codecs, replacements for google
| proprietary libraries (crash reporting, malware/malicious page
| scanning engine, push messages etc), and you quickly reach
| 200MB.
| pnutjam wrote:
| 300MB? Wow, I thought my Capital One app was big at 128MB.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| iPhone: BoA - 457MB AMEX - 130MB
| USAA - 109 MB
|
| I only have BoA because I haven't canceled my CC with them
| yet (kept because AMEX is _not_ accepted everywhere). It
| seems I deleted my other bank apps (after I 'd closed the
| accounts, makes sense, right?) but IIRC they were somewhere
| in the 150MB-200MB range. Some people just really like bloat
| I guess.
| a3n wrote:
| USAA offers a CC.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| They do, and I signed up for it. I literally just haven't
| bothered canceling the BoA CC yet. It's not been used
| since I got the USAA card (which is only used when the
| AMEX isn't accepted).
| Causality1 wrote:
| The app my credit union uses for online banking and card
| control functions is only 81MB.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| > it seems like devs just assume that people only use their app
| and it's not reasonable that the Gmail app requires 300MB or
| PayPal needs 250.
|
| s/devs/product managers
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > It was impossible to use my phone with "only" 64GB without
| constantly deleting and reinstalling depending on what I needed
| at the time.
|
| I too have 64GB. I just checked and my phone says apps take
| 11GB, and I have about 33GB free. At 250MB each (and many on my
| phone take less) that would be over 250 apps on a 64GB phone...
|
| Do you actually use that many apps. Am I just a Luddite?
| prepend wrote:
| Apps were 35GB for me. My work uses a lot of required apps
| that use lots of storage (OneDrive will eat up space).
|
| 10GB was OS, there rest was music, photos, videos.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > My work uses a lot of required apps that use lots of
| storage
|
| Ah, that'll change the equation. I just use Teams and
| Outlook apps for work on my phone (besides calls and
| texts).
| judge2020 wrote:
| For me, iOS's automatic offloading of apps seems to save me
| from having to do this, with the caveat that sometimes I try
| to access an app I haven't touched in a while and have to
| wait to re-download in order to use.
| prepend wrote:
| I tried this, but the apps were big so it would churn. And
| the first time I arrived in a new country and didn't have
| network and Apple had decided to offload Dropbox with my
| locally saved itinerary it really sucked.
|
| I think that might with tons of apps that are rarely used.
| But it sucks if I have 10-20 apps that I frequently used.
| least wrote:
| I don't think you're a luddite, though people do use their
| phones for different things, some of which are just naturally
| going to take up more space over time. Rich media like
| photographs and videos taken on your phone is going to take
| up a lot of space, especially when you don't have them sync
| to the cloud. Some apps like reddit clients, comic readers,
| or music apps can take a lot of space up with cached images,
| music, and other files. Games also take up a ton of space.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Rich media like photographs and videos taken on your
| phone is going to take up a lot of space
|
| Right, but this was a discussion on app sizes. Photos and
| videos aren't due to the size of the apps, and can easily
| go on an SD card.
|
| > cached images, music, and other files
|
| Good point about caches. Should be some global policy for
| that IMHO. One thing is things like map apps downloading
| regions on demand for offline use, but just plain old
| caching...
|
| > Games also take up a ton of space.
|
| True, that's an issue even on my desktop computer with a
| 1TB SSD. Though I don't consider those regular apps. Still,
| point taken.
| eertami wrote:
| Until recently I was using a Oneplus X with 16GB storage just
| fine. I was never tempted to download apps except the ones I
| completely needed (because I really didn't have room for it.)
|
| Now, with a Pixel 4a the System/OS singlehandedly uses 18GB of
| storage. Today, I do not see myself ever filling up another
| 100GB of apps but who knows what app sizes will look like in 5
| more years.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| It still boggles my mind to this day that in the early 2010's,
| I was debating getting a 8gb or 16gb iPod Touch. Now I can't
| even imagine anything less than 128gb if I'm including videos
| and pictures on my phone. That's even with only essential or
| primarily used apps. If I had everything I'd want on it, 128gb
| still feels like not enough. Not to mention Android taking up
| an absurd amount of space.
| grawprog wrote:
| I'm really surprised sometimes at the size of what should
| seemingly be tiny apps. An app with a single screen that does
| literally one thing can clock in at anywhere from 20-70MB it's
| ridiculous. Yet at the same time there's apps that manage to do
| a lot, but don't gobble up the space.
|
| Looking at something like the Infinity reddit client vs the
| official one. Infinity clocks in around 38MB the official
| client is around 100MB. They provide essentially the same
| functionality, the layout and UI is even very similar, yet one
| manages to be almost 2/3rds smaller in size.
| Solocomplex wrote:
| Analytics libraries
| pydry wrote:
| You made me curious enough to look and I discovered that the
| default keyboard on my xiaomi phone "emoji keyboard" is
| 1.1GB.
|
| So, thats worrying for a number of reasons.
| yorwba wrote:
| Does the "emoji keyboard" support searching for animated
| stickers or something? My guess is that it's littering your
| phone with thousands of tiny clips.
| [deleted]
| j1elo wrote:
| When talking about raw local performance ("why my 4 cores today
| work similar or worse than 1 core yesterday?") I think part of
| the answer is: because yesterday we had comparatively less
| software, but it was written in closer to the metal languages
| (i.e. C/C++ and similar) while now there are x1000 more devs
| out there, most of them looking into writing their desktop
| applet with JavaScript / other languages similarly far from the
| metal, and wanting to know as little as possible about the
| hardware, thus relying on dozens of abstraction layers just to
| make their lives much easier (and their softwate much
| crappier).
|
| Typical counterpoint is VSCode, wtitten in Electron. But you
| know, VSCode has had some serious engineering and optimisation
| effort ($$$) so not really a typical example at all.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I've had multiple relatives (ahem, samsung) phones somehow waste
| data...
|
| I'm talking 32gig phone, with 8gb 'system', 20gb "other", and a
| few apps. I can delete all the apps, app updates (because
| preinstalled apps are installed twice, once in the system
| partition and then a new version in the data partition), and 20gb
| is still missing. I can mount the phone, and find 5mb of random
| files, zero photos (i removed them earlier), and still, 20gb
| missing. I have a theory, that samsung updates leave some trash
| behind somewhere on the system partition and never clean up after
| themselves, because after a factory reset, and full upgrade, the
| space is back, even with all the apps and updates.
|
| I don't want to root those phones, becase they're not mine, and
| this brings in more issues (eg. eternal support), and factoy
| reset seems to be the only way to "fix" them.
| magila wrote:
| I suspect the "fix" Samsung is hoping people use is to buy a
| new phone.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I had the same problem on my iPad. The "Other" category was
| taking up several GB and the only way to get the space back was
| to wipe it and restore from backup.
|
| It's infuriating that Apple allowed it to happen in the first
| place. It's yet another slow-motion quality degradation like
| the battery-induced down locking a couple years ago.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| "a five-year longitudinal static analysis of millions of Android
| apps to study the increase in their sizes over time and identify
| various sources of app storage consumption. "
|
| I thought it was going to be about analyzing what's eating up my
| phones storage (system storage I'm looking at you) - and note it
| focuses on Android only. Not sure how much of the analysis
| extrapolates to iOS apps.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Apple might not make developers have empathy for users, but it
| makes them pretend that they do.
|
| A software dev colleague of mine bought a ZTE phone early in
| the iPhone era and the immediate thing we noticed is that it
| would peg the CPU, get hot, and run out the battery in a few
| minutes.
|
| In the desktop world any program is entitled to peg the CPU as
| much as it likes; if it is blocking the render thread it might
| get some "tough love" from the OS, but otherwise it's not a
| problem. In mobile, the CPU is a precious resource.
|
| Android has not caught up with the idea that anything is
| precious.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Amusingly, iOS apps tend to be much larger than Android ones.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Oh apps are huge but at least they are upfront about the
| size - except when they start downloading and caching crap
| (Amazon app is particularly egregious). :)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Android has not caught up with the idea that anything is
| precious.
|
| I do really not want Google making this decision for me.
|
| If they decide to display a warning, or create a new
| permission for that, fine. But it's really not something for
| Google to decide in a centralized, "we don't care about
| individual use cases" procedure.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| > Android has not caught up with the idea that anything is
| precious.
|
| I don't know what your brand or last device with this problem
| was, but there's a reason https://dontkillmyapp.com/ exists.
| Most of the battery issues were solved years ago with Android
| 6 (and then the situation improved with 7 and 8).
|
| An focused application (or applications, in split view) is
| able to drain the battery, but that's just intended
| behaviour. You wouldn't be able to use a battery app or play
| a mobile game like pokemon Go if the OS would limit the
| current application.
|
| I've only experienced the overheating problem on some
| midrange to cheap (<EUR200) Android devices, but that's
| usually because of the cheap, inefficient SoC that's found in
| the bottom of the spec sheets.
|
| My phone saves battery to the point of killing background
| apps that I don't want killed. Luckily, I can turn that shit
| off, though Xiaomi has three different ways to make sure
| background apps don't get killed that I need to work through.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's barely related, but it makes me smile slightly that
| Pokemon Go is still the cross-platform standard bearer for
| excessive battery drain even five years after launch.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| In newer versions of both iOS and Android, your app can get
| terminated by the OS without warning for misbehaving. Things
| like too many context switches, using too much CPU, or
| exceeding some internal and unspecified memory limit.
| machello13 wrote:
| This isn't only present in "newer versions" of iOS -- iOS
| has worked like that since day 1.
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