Some software bloat is OK

Sometimes bloat is forced on you.

I had to write Android app recently. I don't like bloat. So I disabled all libraries. Well, I did it, but I was jumping over many hoops. Android Development presumes that you're using appcompat libraries and some others. In the end my APK was 30 KB and worked on every smartphone I was interested (from Android 8 to Android 16). Android Studio Hello World APK is about 2 MB, if I remember correctly. This is truly madness.

The reason being that Android used to advocate how great it was versus J2ME fragmentation, a marketing move that only impressed those without experience, turns out that a great deal of appcompat code is actually to deal with Android fragmentation across OEMs and devices.

I used to release an Android app 10ish years ago (before I was banned by Google from releasing Android apps) and this was the case back then. Every time I opened Eclipse it would automatically add the 6MB "support library" to my otherwise 50kB app. There was no way to turn this off, but if you removed it, it would stay removed for that session. Usually I only noticed I'd forgotten when I built the final .apk and went to upload it to the App Store.