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Some software bloat is OK

(waspdev.com)
50 points senfiaj | 1 comments | 04 Nov 25 08:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.315s | source
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vbezhenar ◴[04 Nov 25 11:03 UTC] No.45809611[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>45809669 #>>45815530 #
1. pjmlp ◴[04 Nov 25 11:13 UTC] No.45809669[source]▶
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.