londons_explore
18 hours ago
Really wish the app store had a "only apps under 10MB" filter.
The fastest, least ad-filled and micropayment filled apps are usually the small ones. By downloading a 3 megabyte thermometer app you'll be much happier than a 150 megabyte thermometer app.
onlyforthat
17 hours ago
I remember there was a publisher in Play Store who had very small apps like single digit kb flashlight, sudoku, calender, etc. I can't find them now. Those apps were really small all within <200kb
butz
16 hours ago
Google Play probably kicked them off for not using latest Android SDK or something. So many tiny and high quality apps were lost.
epmaybe
12 hours ago
This is something that really bothered me - I had an app that was small and worked fine on the latest Android OS, yet they took the app and account down because we hadn’t uploaded a new version in a year. Appeals didn’t help
ClassyJacket
6 hours ago
That's horrendous, but it fits with Google's method of releasing a product, immediately abandoning it, and shutting it down permanently a year later.
heyoni
9 hours ago
What was their reasoning?
jart
8 hours ago
To keep you running on the hamster wheel.
They'd ban Mozart and Shakespeare from the app store if they could.
bee_rider
7 hours ago
I don’t think that was their reasoning.
Like, Google, all these megacorps, they are bad, but we should at least argue against their actual arguments.
ryandrake
7 hours ago
3P app developers are also complicit. Often they deliberately cut off support for old OS's and old devices, because it's "too hard" to support them or whatever. Everyone seems to be working together to keep us on the hamster wheel.
post-it
4 hours ago
Granted, it is hard. It's a whole extra version to QA on. If it works fine, fine, but if there are consistent negative user reviews on a version with < 5% market share, it's not worth it.
We don't support old iOS versions at all. We can't source new devices on old iOS versions so we can't reliably develop or test on them.
PhasmaFelis
7 hours ago
There may not have been any. Individual app-store reviewers can block you any time they feel like it, the guy checking your appeal is the same, and none of them have any real pressure to behave unless you have money and corporate power behind you.
johnisgood
15 hours ago
Google is not only killing their own projects, but other people's, too.
refulgentis
11 hours ago
I'm no fan of Google, but it's slightly more complicated than that, there's a lot of security and privacy stuff that can't be enforced if your app was build 6 years ago and still slopping around.
tourmalinetaco
10 hours ago
Does that really matter for a local-only 5KB app that only talks with my phone‘s flashlight, or reads sensor data? Now, maybe for the 500MB adware-filled “flashlight” app that connects to 100s of servers and demands access to everything my device can do, but that would be banned on any competent app store anyway.
JoshTriplett
9 hours ago
I don't know if this is still the case, but at one point the permission needed to access the flashlight also gave access to the camera. And there aren't restrictions on network connections from apps. (I'd love to have app network access restricted by permissions, but that would be a large change.)
And in any case, Android has had built-in flashlight support for a while now, for any phone that has a camera with a flash. Is the "turn the screen bright white" style still useful with modern Android?
freedomben
6 hours ago
Kind of a side note, but flashdim is an amazing open-source flashlight app that everybody needs[1][2][3].
[1]: https://github.com/cyb3rko/flashdim
[2]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.cyb3rko.flashdim/
[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cyb3rko.fl...
MrLeap
7 hours ago
It is if your flashlight's broke.
ninetyninenine
9 hours ago
No but enforcing policy is manageable. Enforcing reasonable security measures based on nuances and case by case situations is not manageable for an ecosystem of that scale.
azthecx
15 hours ago
I use the minesweeper, sudoku and solitaire apps from dustland design (search pub:Dustland Design) they're very minimalistic and clean.
There's also currency / unit converter and calendar by Sam Ruston which are in the same vein very good and clean.
Sarkie
13 hours ago
sprak
13 hours ago
This (Simple Mobile Tools) used to be a good set of apps. But it got bought up a an ad firm. The new, still ad free apps, are known as Fossify: https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=729783837865432255...
bscphil
12 hours ago
I'm surprised to hear this. Fortunately it doesn't look like the source code itself got taken over [1], and of course F-Droid, which is always the best place to get any open source Android application, still has the same version as the latest Github release. [2]
These applications are blessedly feature complete, and I haven't noticed any issues being "stuck" on the F-Droid versions.
[1] https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-File-Manager
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.filema...
Sarkie
10 hours ago
Ah yeah.
Forgot about that!
bcraven
14 hours ago
https://simplemobiletools.com/index.html
The gallery app is superb.
aorth
14 hours ago
The Simple Mobile Tools suite was sold to an adware vendor last year. Plenty of links to stories if you're interested, even here on HN.
p4bl0
13 hours ago
Yes, the SMT apps are slowly being forked over to the Fossify project: https://www.fossify.org/.
Viliam1234
12 hours ago
I can't even get angry at that, because it seems like just another popular business pattern:
* build a nice product
* become popular and gain trust with customers
* sell the company to a scammer
* profit!
valval
9 hours ago
I’d do that in a heartbeat. I have a family to take care of. My customers can follow me to my next project.
JoshTriplett
9 hours ago
> I’d do that in a heartbeat.
> My customers can follow me to my next project.
If you are willing to sell your customers to an ad firm, why should they trust your next project?
lambda
14 hours ago
Weird that their GitHub says "without ads", but the apps in the play store say contains ads. It looks like they're doing ads/paid model in the app store, are they ad-free from F-Droid?
zwirbl
13 hours ago
It was sold to an adware vendor that is milking the brand hard. Another one for the 'used to be great' pile
pwg
5 hours ago
They were forked to the "Fossify" tools from the version just before the adware takeover. All the "Fossify" versions are available on F-Droid:
nine_k
4 hours ago
Install from F-droid :shrug:
simonmales
10 hours ago
f-droid is a great way to find bloat free apps
n_plus_1_acc
11 hours ago
Aurora Store can at least filter by paid/IAP/has ads
jart
8 hours ago
> 150 megabyte thermometer app
Does such a thing really exist? Or are you just making a point?
zamadatix
4 hours ago
For reference the first app I got on Apple App store (ignoring the ad result) for "thermometer" is > 100 MB. Looking at the first ~dozen only 1 comes in under the <10 MB category. The two biggest offenders of huge app sizes are shipping cross platform runtimes (the kind that tend to throw in the kitchen sink, not the kind that act as a thin layer) and tracking/analytics bloat.
Waterluvian
11 hours ago
The red flag for me is that they're all “free.”
Let me filter by apps that cost money, are ad free, and sometimes even: don’t have in-app purchases.
yieldcrv
13 hours ago
That reminds me of one reason I got out of mobile app development, totally forgot about until now
Often times the hiring managers wanted to see something more akin to a portfolio, like an art project, for apps that many times didn’t exist anymore or have a production server up anymore
But the more arbitrary metric was trying to be sure that I worked on anything “big”
And the 8-12 megabyte package sizes - which I spent a lot of time optimizing with many competence inspiring techniques - would signal that the app or service or userbase wasn't big. Which had nothing to do with anything, could have hundreds of millions of downloads and users
In that space there is a huuuge incentive for bloatware
sunnybeetroot
9 hours ago
I have never experienced nor heard of a hiring manager determining the outcome of a candidate based on the MB of an app they worked on. I would run away from working for a company like that.
nine_k
4 hours ago
Oh, does that manager also measure productivity in lines of code? And maybe even a movie by the amount of money spent?
Ciph
9 hours ago
Doesn't fstore have a filter for that?
refulgentis
11 hours ago
I continue to be puzzled by how much smaller apps are on Android, ex. Took me 9 tries, including ads, to find a thermometer app over 7 MB. I've worked on both platforms for years and yet don't really know why. Only guess is Android has a much richer tradition of vector art over bitmaps, and Swift libraries had to be compiled in for years until ABI stability enabled using dynamic linking to OS ones
nine_k
4 hours ago
Publisher not also being a major hardware vendor helps :-|
(Only partly a joke, etc.)
Vt71fcAqt7
14 hours ago
How would this feature handle an update that increases the file size? What about apps that download assets after you install them?
Ylpertnodi
13 hours ago
Isnt this one of the world’s software ...why would a thermometer (for example) app need updating? And, would you let it?
oneplane
12 hours ago
Because a thermometer is software and software is imperfect. Perhaps it made some assumptions that causes phones that were released after the app was released to drain the battery very quickly. Or it has a calculation error where over time it accumulates a significant difference between the measurement data and the data that is rendered on screen. Or perhaps it's using an API that we all thought was safe, but turns out it's not. Or it needs to use an API to get temperature data (thermometer can have different meanings) and the API no longer exists.
Even something as silly as an app that does nothing can run into these issues. The APIs and other interfaces used to run applications are imperfect. Sometimes doing nothing about it is a choice, sometimes the vendor doesn't deem that acceptable and then it is no longer a choice. Either way, the application will have to adapt or degrade (to the point where it degrades out of existence).
Zambyte
an hour ago
Hardware is also imperfect, but "good enough" is much easier to accept in the context of hardware. Good enough should also be good enough for software.
Changing from using one system API to another shouldn't push an app over an N MB filter anyways. If the user runs into an issue, they can update. Otherwise, if it still works fine just continue to use it.
The argument for updating to keep up with API changes can also be flipped against updating to protect against UI/UX changes. I have lost features from Android updates that I have never been able to get back on my phone, only recreate them on my GNU/Linux desktop.
nixass
12 hours ago
Why, what's wrong with 172MB calculator app?
oneplane
12 hours ago
A calculator app doesn't need that many megabytes of code and assets to be a calculator app. So if an app is way bigger than it should be, it usually means one of two things (usually!):
1. The app was not very optimised, perhaps created by a novice, containing a lot of things it doesn't need.
2. The app used to be really small, but a lot of extra code was added to serve you ads, profile you for better targeting or do sneaky stuff you didn't ask for.
mdp2021
10 hours ago
If a trip to the baker took 172 days, there would be over 171 used days to justify; if it took 172 engineers to change a lightbulb, it would have to be a very special lightbulb or explanations should be in order. Besides uses of concern of the extra resources spent, it simply just makes no sense.
camel-cdr
9 hours ago
Nothing, but it better have a fully featured computer algebra system baked in.
userbinator
8 hours ago
Early versions of Mathematica were only a few dozen MB and certainly have more functionality than probably most calculator apps you can find that are much bigger.
nuancebydefault
8 hours ago
I would add an /i to keep your karma happy
bagels
12 hours ago
Whatever is in the extra 150MB. Ads, spyware, bloat, slow performance.
kragen
11 hours ago
i would say 'whatever is in the extra 171.97 megabytes'
i wrote a calculator app including its own implementation of decimal floating point and it's still only 20 kilobytes
internetter
10 hours ago
1. I doubt this includes GUI
2. The Qalculate CLI is 2mb, so perhaps your 20kb calculator could add some features while still being a 100% pure calculator
kragen
9 hours ago
yeah, the 20-kilobyte calculator runs as an x-windows application, but it doesn't have any buttons or anything; it's keyboard-driven. the 'gui' is https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/yesocalc...
nixass
10 hours ago
People here are vaccinated against sarcasm it seems
mdp2021
10 hours ago
People arrived to this shore after having experienced that what they considered unbelievable and untenable is actually believed and held by some - who may not even seem to be particularly an uncommon tail of an emerging population.
And this is why a good '/S' keeps you safe from misunderstanding.