1107
‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
1107 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
67987 readers
3411 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even if I was willing to download all of those apps I don't have room for them. They chew up 50-300mb each (why!?) and if I installed all of them I'd run out of memory. Since most phones now don't support memory expansion I have to be picky about which ones I use.
I have THREE separate parking apps because I travel.
The reason they're so huge is
Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.
Same thing with rendering/layout/functionality frameworks. And each app has their own.
My favorite Android app, Trail Sense, which has the ability to know when sunrise and sunset are without Internet, is like 10MB
Well of course not. If phones supported memory expansion you would just buy more memory, instead of buying an entirely new phone Don't even get me started on how bloated these apps have become. I used Paperclip word processor on a Commodore-64; you can not convince me that your app needs to be 50+ Megs in size.
You can't compare (what is arguably) the peak of human computing to modern phones.
...I miss the c64
Edit: fixed pique to peak. Sorry. Autocorrect got me again
I actually wrote my own text editor for the C-64
And that's one of the benefits from open source apps. I have a very low end and dated phone, and yet I have more apps installed and hardware functionality than the average person, because I grab everything I can from f-droid. It's amazing how much smaller and performant everything is.
Have you looked at Obtainium? It pulls apps directly from their release page, or f-droid repos.
I see people mentioning obtainium, but never tried it. Will it give some relevant benefits over fdroid for low end devices?
No benefits regarding performance. But you get faster updates and more apps than on f-droid.
Every app is a bundle of a full website and spyware.