The Size of iPhone’s Top Apps Has Increased by 1,000% in Four Years

According to Sensor Tower’s analysis of App Intelligence, the total space required by the top 10 most installed U.S. iPhone apps has grown from 164 MB in May 2013 to about 1.8 GB last month, an 11x or approximately 1,000 percent increase in just four years. In the following report, we delve deeper into which apps have grown the most.

Do you want to know why?

Poor software management, and the increasing reliance on libraries which add code bloat.

The former happens when designers and product managers try to fit more and more features in to an app, and developers are rushed to add features wind up implementing the same functionality five or six different times.

And the latter–well, no-one has ever been fired for using Cocoapods (or another library manager) and sucking in functionality from a third party library of twenty.

One project I worked on a while back, the project manager didn’t tell me he had someone else working on the project as well–and while I noted it in the check-ins, I didn’t think anything of it, until one day suddenly two dozen libraries were checked in. I slow-walked my way out of that project starting that day, in part because the other developer replaced a very simple network interface (which worked reliably) with a link to a half-dozen libraries and a rewritten network interface which didn’t work correctly. (For some reason he thought including AFNetworking v2 was better than simply hitting NSURLSession–despite the fact that AFNetworking v2 uses the older NSURLConnection class–and despite the more important fact that he was using AFNetworking wrong.)

So if you’re an iOS developer and you’re wondering why your app is bloated?

Look in a mirror.

Yes, Apple’s tools have contributed to the problem somewhat. And yes, various resolution of artwork has helped–though even there I’d argue one huge problem there is that so many developers punt on gradients and other special effects by including a huge .PNG file rather than using CAGradientLayer and other API entry points.

But in the end, software bloat is coming from poorly built applications constructed by iOS developers who don’t know what they are doing being rushed by product management to deliver garbage.