Yeah, I’m on 5.24 on iPhone because I’m on the Testflight build which, I believe, is usually 1 version ahead for about half the week. Then the build is released to the App Store after a few days, and the public version catches up.
The size indicated on the App Store or Play Store will probably differ slightly from your device as both Apple and Google use “app thinning” for apps - if an app has different versions of assets such as graphics and logos for different screen resolutions and devices, only the relevant ones for your specific device are downloaded. Naturally, this results in some minor app size variations.
And HSBC are by far the most bloated, yes. It’s true across their global apps as well. Something in their platform model must have a huge load of dependencies/coding libraries just baked in!
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phildawson
(Sorry, I will have to escalate this.)
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I don’t bother with things like photos for payees or loads of custom pot photos, though, so that may be why. Some people presumably (legitimately) have far more app data if they make extensive use of those kinds of features.
To be clear, I don’t upload images, I don’t use receipts, and I have one pot. So I’m not using a lot of features that store data. It’s just my bank. Plain and simple.
I wouldn’t want this to be a priority for Monzo only if it’s affecting “power” users - some of us are just regular folk!
But at least some users with large app sizes will be, so not everybody with a large app storage usage will actually be experiencing the bug. Something clearly is up here though, I’m not disputing that. It very much seems to be only affecting a subset of users, which presumably makes the scenario difficult to reproduce, but if Monzo are aware of the bug already (and it seems they are) they must have tracked the cause down.
@N26throwaway Thanks for your kind welcome back comments, I’ve not had much time lately but I’ll still be popping up here and elsewhere when I can and hopefully I can keep up with the latest developments!
Out of interest, does it affect app performance at all? I can imagine it’s not great having so much space taken up by a banking app, wonder if it’s a cache somewhere and a delete/re-install might resolve.
I ask this as the HSBC app takes up over 500mb which I think is quite large but it’s quite a speedy application, never any lags or anything.
please do! I was wondering the same as @N26throwaway as to where you had gone
With the Monzo storage bug, it seems like it’s got to be some kind of cache issue leading to either old data not being cleared out properly or duplicate cached files somehow piling up.
With HSBC, I’m pretty sure it’s just a “bundling” of code libraries which then aren’t actually used in their entirety. Either that or the global app platform creates lots of cruft which may be invisible to the user but is there in the background (maybe the UK app still has the code and resources for Canadian Interac payments, Australian Osko payments, and so on, despite them not being features of our app).
It must be something about the way they produce their apps though, as even First Direct and M&S Bank have unusually large apps - which is all the more strange given that they both have a fairly basic set of features. Not as many features as HSBC, anyway, but the apps are almost the same size.
Reached out to @Demmedelusive over at the other place yesterday for wiki privileges in case you weren’t there for our annual banking on iOS beta wikis!
The Facebook app is like this, it has huge amounts of auto-generated classes and is extremely bloated, I don’t know how large apps like this are made these days but I think a lot of that file size is just excess libraries as you say. Coming from web development where a composer or node_modules folder can be larger than the actual application, it’s not surprising there’s a lot of space taken up by various libraries with complex apps. Probably only a small amount of it is actually run during app execution.
