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, right under the name, and plenty of people read it before they read anything else.

Size decides who finishes installing. On an older phone with a nearly full memory, the store refuses the download and the person moves on. On a slow mobile connection, a 150 MB app is a two-minute wait that many people abandon halfway. Google has published this for years, and installs fall by roughly one percent for every extra 6 MB. A shop that pays for advertising is paying for those lost installs twice. Linkysoft measures the size on a cheap Android phone before launch, not on the newest device on the desk.

Apps get fat in two ordinary ways. The first is pictures. A product photo straight from a camera can be 4 MB, and a hundred of them shipped inside the app is half the download before a single line of code. Photos belong on your server, sized for a phone screen. The second is unused libraries. A developer adds a whole mapping toolkit to draw one small map, or a chart package for a single graph, and every user carries the rest of it forever.

A realistic target for most business apps is 15 to 40 MB. 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. Does the work need 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. Save the download for the customers who will keep the icon on their home screen.