Bad app citizens
I noticed social media discussions about Facebook's mobile app size compared to other applications.
This observation prompted reflection on personal app update bandwidth consumption. As a UX design director with over 250 apps installed, I wondered about weekly update costs.
The Experiment
I disabled auto-updates for one week, allowing updates to accumulate before documenting and installing them weekly for six weeks.
After week one, 7.59GB of updates across 67 apps required installation, averaging 113MB per application.
Key Findings
Most Regular Updaters: Four apps updated weekly: Instagram, LinkedIn, Netflix, and UberEats. Ten apps updated five of six weeks. Fifteen updated four weeks. Thirty-four updated three weeks. Thirty-one updated twice. Fifty-six updated once. One hundred-two never updated.
Top 10 Bandwidth Consumers: Facebook led with 1.88GB, followed by LinkedIn (1.57GB), Uber (1.35GB), iTranslate (1.26GB), Airbnb (1.12GB), Facebook Messenger (1.05GB), Peak Brain Training (0.96GB), Facebook Pages Manager (0.96GB), Microsoft Outlook (0.88GB), and Google Sheets (0.84GB).
Company Rankings: Google totaled 5.64GB, Facebook 4.77GB, Microsoft 2.39GB.
Scaled Impact
Assuming LinkedIn's 100 million installations with weekly 261MB updates yields 13.5GB annual downloads per user—162 petabytes globally annually.
Environmental & User Cost
Data consumption carries real expense and environmental impact through battery and energy use. Users fund data via cellular or home/work wifi plans.
Platform Response
iOS 11 introduced automatic app removal for unused applications, preserving data for reinstallation. Apple's App-Thinning technology targets device-specific optimization, though adoption rates remain unclear.
Best Practices
Quality app citizenship requires avoiding bloated code and submitting updates only when user benefits justify releases. Companies should consider waiting multiple development sprints before pushing updates.
Exemplary Apps
Just Press Record (5.8MB), Overcast (37.4MB), National Rail (65.6MB), Harvest (66.6MB), and BBC News (82.5MB) demonstrated restraint through six weeks.
Update Note (June 23, 2017): Readers clarified that app thinning substantially reduces actual download sizes—potentially 47-80% smaller than full bundles. Even accounting for this reduction, app sizes remain concerning, reinforcing the importance of updating responsibly.