Why are applications, on average, increasingly requiring more storage space?
In: 46
A few reasons. The first one being graphic resources. The higher resolution the more space is needed for textures, videos etc.
Another reason is the available resources. For simple programs it’s easier to be sloppy when your not resource restrained. You may want to get something out fast or it may not be worth the time to optimize
Because they don’t have to optimize as much any longer.
You can draw an analogy with how people/organizations budget as their resources get larger.
If you’re a starving college student, you know where every dollar is going. You are trying to get the most out of every single dollar that you spend, because you have so few resources that you can’t afford to waste any. Meanwhile, millions of dollars can go missing from the Pentagon’s budget without anyone knowing where they went.
Same thing with storage: In the earlier days of computers, we were limited to 1.4 MB for a floppy disk (or even less, in the 80s). If you couldn’t get a particular file below that threshold, you couldn’t distribute it through the only widely available method for transferring files. So developers had to work hard to make sure all of the individual files could fit onto a disk if they wanted to sell it. And when all of your individual components are forced to optimize, your program ends up optimized as well.
With the advent of CDs and especially DVDs, this restriction became massively loosened. And now that we mostly transfer files over the Internet and have hard disks measured in terabytes, there’s even less incentive for developers to spend time optimizing their code.
There’s the lack of necessity to optimise due to the abundance of consumer resources. There’s the ease of using 3rd party tools to curate & compile data. And there’s the perceived demand that apps must look graphically modern/fresh which increases texture size/volume.
However, there is a great degree of bloat being added to apps, which we should not ignore. Apps, mostly from well established devs, often have nefarious/unecessary crap running ‘under the hood’. Such as: debugging, analytics, theft of data, DRM, overlays, always-on services (e.g. update scheduler), cryptominers, or adverts. Devs seemingly chuck in new background services as soon as they are innovated, without care for the consumer.
Not all of them do, tho! If you’ve seen an app and thought “wow that is a smaller download than I expected”, then the devs probably kept their app free of the aforementioned.
Applications, like games and videos, are getting bigger because they have more things in them, like more levels in a game or more pictures and songs in a video. Think of it like getting a toy with more pieces, it takes up more room in your toy box but it’s also more fun to play with. Just like how you need a bigger toy box for bigger toys, your phone or computer needs more space to store bigger applications.
Simply because the developers no longer have to care as much due to the increasing storage sizes of devices. But yes, more/better features/graphics and whatnot are added.