App Download Size

The download size is how many megabytes a person spends to get your app onto their phone. It is printed on the store page directly under the name, so plenty of people read it before they read anything else about you.

Size decides who actually finishes installing. On an older phone with a nearly full memory the store simply refuses the download, and the person moves on to something else. On a slow mobile connection a 150 MB app means a two-minute wait, which plenty of people abandon halfway through. Google has published the pattern for years, and installs fall by roughly one percent for every extra 6 MB you ship. So a shop that pays for advertising ends up paying for those lost installs twice. That is why Linkysoft measures the size on a cheap Android phone before launch, not on the newest device on the desk.

Apps get fat in two very ordinary ways, and the first one is pictures. A product photo straight from a camera can weigh 4 MB, so a hundred of them inside the app is half your download before a single line of code. Photos belong on your server instead, cut down to the size of a phone screen. The second way is unused libraries, which is when a developer adds a whole mapping toolkit to draw one small map, or a chart package for a single graph. Every user then carries the rest of it around forever.

A realistic target for most business apps is somewhere between 15 and 40 MB, because a shop app or a booking app has no reason to be heavier. Games and heavy design tools are a different matter. When Linkysoft hands over a mobile app, the size sits in the handover notes next to the opening time, because a number nobody writes down is a number nobody defends.

One honest question is worth asking before any of this, and it is whether the work needs an app at all. Staff behind a counter, on wifi all day, are often better served by a web application they open in the browser, with nothing to install and nothing to update. So save the download for the customers who will keep the icon on their home screen.