Image source @ Visual China
Text | Radar Finance, author | Kaijing Zhang, Editor | Deep
"WeChat started out with small and beautiful products, and now it is still a small and beautiful product."
What Zhang Xiaolong, president of the WeChat business group, said on the occasion of the ten years of the launch of this product has caused a lot of controversy. In 2011, the Android 2.0 version released by WeChat was only 1.4M, and now this number has increased by more than 10,000 times.
Exponentially inflated apps, not to mention WeChat. Radar Finance noted that at present, mobile applications that occupy more than 1GB of storage space are everywhere. From Taobao, JD.com, Meituan, to Weibo, Douyin, QQ, Bilibili, AutoNavi Map, Baidu Network Disk, Alipay, Dachang Software is almost without exception.
Of course, if compared with mobile games, the above App can be regarded as a "small witch and a big witch". Take the glory of the national game king, which is regarded as a "must-have", as an example, its storage space is more than 10GB, and the original god that has recently spread around the world, although the installation package is only 200M, but the resources that need to be downloaded after registration are more than 14GB.
On January 26, the topic #Why is the memory occupied by mobile phone apps getting bigger and bigger rushed to Weibo hot search, netizens wondered, why has the memory of their mobile phones been expanding, but it is always insufficient?
App expansion puzzle
"In the past, 16G could be used all the time, and there were still a few Gs left, and now 256 Gs have inexplicably used half of the memory."
The complaints of netizens are the true portrayal of many users when using mobile phones. In 2010, Jobs's classic iPhone 4 was officially launched, as the "pioneer" product of smart phones, the three versions of the phone's memory are: 512MB+8GB, 512MB+16GB and 512MB+32GB.
"The iPhone 4 16G's memory should be enough, right?" This is a question that was active in the forum that year, and the answer of netizens is: "Enough, the program you install dozens, plus movies, songs put hundreds, basically there are 6 or 7 G left." ”
In contrast, the three memory versions of Xiaomi's flagship mi 12 pro are: 8GB+128GB, 8GB+256GB, 12GB+256GB, and the version of the folding screen mobile phone MIX FOLD is even more up to 12GB+512GB, and these memory configurations have basically become the standard of major mobile phone manufacturers. The iPhone 13 pro even has a 1TB version.
Behind the continuous iteration of smart phone products, the number and size of apps in mobile phones are also growing at the same time.
According to QuestMobile's 2020 China Mobile Internet Spring Report, as of March 2020, the number of apps opened per month by users on the mainland has risen from 21.5 in the same period of 2018 to 25.4, and the monthly per capita single-day use time has risen from 5 hours in the same period of 2018 to 7.2 hours.
According to the 2021 China Mobile Internet Autumn Report released by QuestMobile, as of September 2021, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance ranked in the top four internet enterprise traffic, while the number of apps related to these four major manufacturers reached 428, 111, 102 and 97 respectively.
If the number of monthly active users (MAUs) exceeds 100 million as the basic application standard of "installing essentials", the number of apps that exceed the standard line has now reached 25, and the types of these apps cover all corners of life such as instant messaging, integrated e-commerce, map navigation, short videos, online videos, input methods, comprehensive information, browsers, local life, and games.
On this basis, the app's occupation of the device's memory is constantly expanding.
Taking The App WeChat, which has the highest monthly active month, as an example, it is understood that 11 years ago, its memory was only about 10MB; in 2020, Flower Finance reported that the WeChat of many friends around it accounted for more than 4G to 5G of the mobile phone storage space; and today, Radar Finance has noticed that WeChat has expanded to more than 10G.
A netizen who is accustomed to cleaning up memory every day told Radar Finance that the size of The WeChat in his mobile phone is about 12G. "My phone is 128G, plus work reasons, every day will pay attention to the cache or something, but basically no matter how clear it can not be smaller." More netizens said that their WeChat size reached 36G.
In addition, applications including iQiyi, Baidu network disk, Bilibili, mobile application market, JD.com, Meituan, Taobao, Tencent News, Tencent Video, Himalaya, Alipay, etc., are also more than 1G in size, and applications such as Douyin and AutoNavi Maps are around 3G.
If you take the current degree of memory occupied by the App, I am afraid that the original 16GB iPhone 4 is only enough to fit a WeChat.
There is a risk of leakage behind the expansion of mobile phone running memory
Why is the memory occupied by apps getting bigger and bigger? Industry insiders believe that this is related to the unique software ecology in China.
Usually, the version of the smartphone will come with two numbers, the former is running memory and the latter is storage space. A phenomenon is that the running memory of domestic Android machines is generally larger than that of foreign Android machines and Apple mobile phones.
For example, the memory of huawei P30 overseas version is 6GB to start, and the Bank of China version is upgraded to 8GB to start; Xiaomi 11 International Edition provides three choices of 6GB+128GB, 8GB+128GB, and 8GB+256GB, which is less than the 12GB+256GB version compared with China. The latest 13 series of iPhone, mini and normal version of the running memory are 4GB, Pro and Pro Max are 6GB, even if the storage space is 1TB, the running memory is not 8GB or 12GB.
In this regard, an explanation that knows more than 60,000 likes of the answer is that the app of the domestic Android system needs to retain the thread in the background after opening, and once the App thread is permanent in the background, it not only needs a lot of memory support, but also consumers may have to pay for leaking privacy and other situations.
Specifically, the netizen pointed out that the essence of WeChat messages is to send messages to Tencent's servers first, and then from the server to another person's WeChat, so that in the case of WeChat completely closed, as long as the server is intact, the message can be smoothly conveyed when logged in again. But this also means that if you want to receive messages when you close WeChat, the system must keep threads in the background to ensure a connection to the server.
The above situation does not apply to Apple and Google's servers, the former and the iOS system linkage, can make the App in the phone without retaining redundant threads, and the iOS system does not support the real sense of the background running; the latter has a similar mechanism to Apple, but domestic Android users obviously can not connect to Google's servers.
However, in this context, a problem will also arise, that is, the various threads retained in the background can not only be used to keep the app running, but also to complete other "tasks".
For example, when recording personal data, users who often use taxi software will find that sometimes the platform can "guess" the destination they want to go to while the user opens the App, and the basis of the guess is the user's transaction history, geographical location and other data.
In fact, because the Android system is an open source platform, its pursuit is to be used by more devices, so as to lay more application scenarios, so for equipment such as advertising machines other than mobile phones, boot self-start is just needed. However, this function has been "played badly" by many developers.
"There is no unified application market in China, everyone's App does not comply with the norms, and some will use coercive means to keep themselves in the background, which is the need for business to make money and ensure their daily survival." Another netizen who described himself as a programmer said.
This statement has now been confirmed. In May 2020, Xiaomi added a feature called "Flares" to the latest version of the operating system MIUI12, through which users can see the behavior of the application to self-start in the background and read the device data. Even some apps will wake up each other in order to keep alive or brush.
The consequence of a large number of apps retaining the process in the background for a long time is that the mobile phone will soon become hot and stuttered, affecting the user's experience.
However, there are already operating systems in China that have their own set of judgment standards such as MIUI or EMUI to kill processes and reduce CPU consumption. But even Xiaomi may not be able to completely make the illegal App rectify and then put on the shelves, the most basic and effective prevention of this is the user's own control over the access to the App.
App storage space expansion behind, the big factory roll back pot?
Compared with running memory, the doubling of the storage space occupied by the app is more exaggerated.
In order to find out the specific components of the application software's huge memory, Radar Finance searched multiple apps and found that at present, under Huawei's Hongmeng system, most applications only have a vague classification of the storage space occupied.
For example, Baidu network disk, Douyin, Didi Chuxing, AutoNavi Map, JD.com, Meituan and other applications, the classification of storage space categories is only applications and data, and users can only do the "delete data" option.
Bilibili is a special case, users can see the data, the space occupied by the application to manage it. On closer inspection, the data part of Bilibili's storage space includes "App Basic Component Library", "Image Cache, Message Record", "Other Cache Files", "Account Number, Login Information" and "Offline Cached Video Files".
Among them, there is an order of magnitude gap between the memory occupied by the App basic component library and other cache files and other parts, and these two pieces are particularly important.
Some media tests have found that the size of the app's basic components is related to how many functions the user is trying to use, while other cache files include the user's personalization settings, such as personalized skins, browsing history data, etc.
According to these personalized data, Station B can use algorithms to recommend videos that meet users' preferences, and if this part of the data is deleted, the user will become a blank piece of paper in front of Station B.
The example of Station B can basically represent the current situation of many apps. A Zhihu netizen engaged in the program development industry said in response to the question of "how to look at the growing number of apps" that after each app has traffic, it wants to become bigger and stronger, and maximize the value of traffic, so they are engaged in application tentacle extension.
Or take WeChat as an example, the name "WeChat" comes from its original intention when it was founded - small letters. At first, weChat users received messages from each other's small emails, WeChat groups are email discussion groups, this App has basically no other functions except for adding friends and chatting, which is very much in line with Zhang Xiaolong's "small and beautiful" statement.
But now, in addition to chatting, weChat's ecology also has public accounts, video numbers, live broadcasts, mini programs, payments, etc., almost all over all corners of the Internet, and many of these functions have become the standard of many big factory Apps.
As far as the function of financial lending is concerned, the companies involved include Alibaba, JD.com, Meituan, ByteDance, Kuaishou, Baidu, Pinduoduo, Didi, Ctrip, 360, etc., which have formed a situation of "everything can be loaned".
Recently, some netizens found that the installation package of mobile QQ under the iOS system has reached 879MB, and in this huge installation package, it also includes a game development engine called "Unreal 4", which is commonly used in games such as "Peace Elite" and "Fortnite", which is put into QQ or just to render QQ show...
So, can the developers behind the scenes of each app reduce the burden on mobile phones in the future?
Analysts believe that in theory, it is possible, but in the case of external forces involved, the big manufacturers are likely not to put it into practice. On the one hand, the "Andy-Bill theorem" in computing tells us that the performance of hardware improvements is quickly consumed by software iterations. Reflected in the mobile phone, no matter how fast the processor, no matter how large the memory and storage, it is not inferior to some apps to run resources full of a big move.
On the other hand, from a business point of view, the ever-expanding memory is also more conducive to the sales of mobile phones. In the domestic mobile phone market into the stock competition now, in order to highlight their own excellence, in the flagship machine to increase memory is a very cost-effective solution. In contrast, the fierce competition in the foreign mobile phone market is much weaker.
What's more, if there is no infinite expansion of apps and never enough memory, how can users have the motivation to change their phones?