Why are applications, on average, increasingly requiring more storage space?
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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.
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.
Other answers are good, but to really drive home the basic reason: almost every application nowadays is built on top of a framework and use various “off-the-shelf” tools. These frameworks and tools save tons of time in development, but they can add an incredible amount of bloat (except in the exceedingly rare case you use every single feature of the framework).
When projects get compiled, the application is embedded inside of framework code and a full copy of the tools is included in the compilation. This is much more convenient than having the end user attempt to manage the references to the framework and the tools.
For instance, you want to build an app that works on iPhone and android. You could hire a couple of developers to create both an iPhone and android version of your application. Or you could take advantage of one of many frameworks that compiles to iPhone and android. You trade off some optimizations and add a little bloat, but the choice is clear. Let’s say you want to allow users to login with their Twitter account, Google account, or a basic username and password. You could spend months writing that code, and inevitably end up with security issues – or you could implement a vendor library that handles authentication for you in a few hours. Perhaps you want to turn user input into excel exports.. you get the idea.
The biggest trade off is development time (and often cross-platform compatibility).
we’re no longer playing tetris only our devices are now much more capable of handling higher resolution more complicated applications with multiple mechanics and purposes and developers are just taking advantage of that
If you have a developer working 40 HRs a week and that person can either optimize something that will run fine, or create a new feature which do you prefer? Most people want new features. Sometimes there is still a need to optimize but if there is hardware resources available to you it’s basically a waste of resources to not use it.
Laziness mostly and space is cheap.
Read some stories like fitting a spell check on a word processor program. Heck even [how they fit the intro video to Sonic 3D blast](https://youtu.be/IehwV2K60r8) is really fascinating from a programming perspective.
Hotfixes, bug fixes, major updates. Really anything, but it could also be the in-app data (Facebook is known to do this, Viber aswell) piling up
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