So 40MB for an iOS app may or may not count as “small”, depending on the comparison set.
But it is small compared to the historical size of applications.
40MB is 0.5% the RAM of an 8MB iPhone.
My first computer, circa 1978, was a TRS-80 with 15KB RAM (+ 1KB for the screen). An application that used 0.5% of its RAM would have taken 75 bytes. I've written but not distributed functionality in programs of that size. I would classify it as small.
An application that used 0.5% the RAM of the original 128K Macintosh would have taken 640 bytes. An application that used 0.5% of its 400K removable storage would be 2K. I suspect there were a lot of 2K applications (bundled as Desk Accessories), but this was considered small at the time.
During my lifetime there's been an explosion in the number, functionality, and quality (as measured in every way other than absolute byte size) of applications, that may be hard to appreciate if you either haven't lived through it, or are focused on one metric. It's pretty cool.
I knew it was big, but didn't think it was that bad.
I'm not familiar with iOS, does that figure include the apps locally cached data and/or embedded resources (I imagine retina images and icons could add up quickly) or is that mostly Facebooks infamously bloated codebase?
Yeah that includes cached resources. But in my opinion that's even worse since it's not an app that I would anticipate needing so much cached information.
Music or Photo applications I would expect to grow in size with use. But for something like Facebook to grow 5x in size on my phone with use seems rather disingenuous. Like "hey we reduced our upfront app size by grabbing assets after install!".
So 40MB for an iOS app may or may not count as “small”, depending on the comparison set.
But it is small compared to the historical size of applications.
40MB is 0.5% the RAM of an 8MB iPhone.
My first computer, circa 1978, was a TRS-80 with 15KB RAM (+ 1KB for the screen). An application that used 0.5% of its RAM would have taken 75 bytes. I've written but not distributed functionality in programs of that size. I would classify it as small.
An application that used 0.5% the RAM of the original 128K Macintosh would have taken 640 bytes. An application that used 0.5% of its 400K removable storage would be 2K. I suspect there were a lot of 2K applications (bundled as Desk Accessories), but this was considered small at the time.
During my lifetime there's been an explosion in the number, functionality, and quality (as measured in every way other than absolute byte size) of applications, that may be hard to appreciate if you either haven't lived through it, or are focused on one metric. It's pretty cool.