im genuinely surprised that anyone cares about the size of the app. its not like we are still on 8gb iphone 3gs’s. I have gigabytes of hardly used or unused apps on my phone and still got 40gb free.
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Some people will be on older phones, or newer ones with capacity approaching full due gaming/movies/videos/photography etc (I used to be one of those people 
).
@phillryu would be interesting to see a breakdown of installs by phone model/iOS versions if possible!
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A) Older phones.
B) Newer phones with less storage, like the cheapest SE version of which has 64GB. It’s a good bit, but not necessarily a ton of headroom.
C) People who work with video in some form: content creators, video editors, social media admins etc. If you have a good amount of videos and they’re all a high quality, that will eat up gigs like you won’t believe.
D) You play “AAA” games on your phone.
A 500MB app shouldn’t be a big issue for most people, but there are reasonable scenarios where it might be. And for something as minimalistic as Clear, I’ll agree it seems like an unnecessary amount.
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Some people still have slow internet, too. I only finally finally had the chance to upgrade from like 1.5mbps just a handful of years ago; there are still a lot of people whose internet speeds wouldn’t handle downloading a single 500mb app very well, especially not if it’s meant to just be a fairly straightforward and simple checklist.
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We definitely consider this a real problem to solve. 500mb I would guess among other things, dampens our download rates by 20%+ with the OTA limit warnings etc.
This past week Tim has been working on a system for downloading theme graphics, sound files etc. as you need them from our S3 server. This should mostly stop the size from going up, and we should be able to move more over to there next slimming down some.
The one unfortunate thing… is that all the app icons, Apple requires to bundle into the app bundle, because they are very paranoid of developers injecting app icons afterwards and using them to show like… a clock hand moving on your home screen. Really freaks Apple out. So that’s a growing issue and one we can’t offload to S3.
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But the difference we are talking about is the difference between say 100 meg id guess and 400 meg so we are talking about 300 meg difference. Someone for whom that’s an issue has an issue whether they have clear installed or not.
Where in the world is the internet that slow ? Genuine intrigued question not sarcasm.
Pretty much the entirety of Africa and the Middle East, parts of Russia, chunks of Europe and South America… personally I live in a large suburb of a US city of about a million people, but we didn’t get fiber optic cables until maybe 3 years ago; before then, 1.5mbps was genuinely as fast as you could get. A lot of people don’t seem to realize how privileged they are if they have faster internet speeds.
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I have a friend in rural Indiana whose internet is definitely that slow, lol. He is also a YouTuber and his uploads take like 12 hours.
Regardless, it’s just wacky for this to be (by far) the largest app on my phone. And the only one I can’t delete to reset the cache. Lots of work to be done on this front, for sure.
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Thankfully, not all of South America is like that. I’m rocking a gigabit connection from Buenos Aires 
But yeah, I still prefer smaller app sizes whenever possible. That way I can download updates even if I’m outside and with 3G speeds only (which still happens in some places).
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Sorry I didnt realise some bits of America were like that. I live in a small Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic and internet hasn’t been that slow for over two decades. Actually im sure when I moved here about 20 years ago it was already 30mb or certainly was soon after as thats the lowest package I can remember being on. I only have 500mb internet but from looking on their website they don’t offer that now so I should ask to be on the 1gb package. Mobiles are 5gb and any mobile package of €10 a month has 10gb of mobile internet.
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Yeah I assume the US is relatively advanced in internet infrastructure but it’s also so sprawling that I guess there are huge swaths of less dense areas that are underserved still, probably stuck with like early 2000s speed cable internet service etc.
I remember being surprised myself as a kind of internet early adopter generation, super excited about Steam letting me download full games etc. and seeing how it took like well over a decade for digital sales to overshadow physical in video game land.
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I mean, there’s a reason why services like Starlink are attractive in big countries with lots of rural areas.
The US and Argentina are similar in that regard. Big cities have super fast internet, available everywhere. But once you get into more rural areas, or less densely populated towns, speeds drop dramatically, simply because the infrastructure isn’t there.
I never have to worry about my internet being too slow, but I know that’s not the universal experience for everyone, not even in very developed countries.
I have a friend who lived in a rural area of the Carolinas (east coast of the US). Until more recently when they moved, their only option for internet was satellite and it was incredibly slow and unreliable. They literally couldn’t stream HD video. As Prisma mentioned, this is the kind of scenario where something like Starlink could make a real difference (although that’s ultimately still a satellite service with similar downsides, just faster speeds when it does work).
2.16 is now at 625.6 MB.
The app continues to grow and expand 
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Yeah, I chose to not install that update and will wait for the app to be reduced in size.
Can somebody explain to me why a couple of hundred megabytes matters when devices nowadays hold hundreds if not thousands of gigabytes?
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Not everyone has a newer phone.
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I’m honestly not really sure about this now. While we have some fixes in the works, the issue is actually boiling down to the app icons.
Apple doesn’t let us separate custom app icon graphics out of the shipping binary. So in the longterm as is, Clear’s binary will slowly grow as we add more themes (with the built-in icon for each) and icons.
We could possibly slow this, the most drastic move would be cutting the ‘built-in’ icons in each theme, but that would obviously kind of suck and still not completely solve this issue over time.
The only true clean hope here is that Apple changes how app icons work in an iOS update but I feel like we are such an edgecase (as in, I wonder how many other apps there are out there with hundreds of app icons) that I’m not super optimistic it’s even on Apple’s radar as an issue… we can definitely file a ticket or something on this but yeah, been recently coming to grips with this lol.
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This is especially true with iPhones, I think, due to both how expensive they tend to be and how long Apple supports them with iOS upgrades. For example, I upgraded to my current 13 from a 6S, and even then the 6S was going to get one last support round with whatever new iOS version was releasing at the time.
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