A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water

Such is the state of Electron.
I'm slowly stopping to care about web apps, however the amount of shit Electron causes is through the roof. Discord, Element, Signal, even Steam is full of it, so you just end up having 8 different "programs" running with every single one using at least around 400MB of RAM.
Can't wait to see something using Rust and Tauri. Graphite wink wink

410mb for chat app seems very unoptimized

The inability to continue chat from phone is a feature.

Signal's desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad as the project as a whole is good, tbh.

It's no wonder people prefer stuff like Telegram. It has native apps and all. Or can be used in a browser. Meanwhile Signal is only used in a browser, but you have to download it and it fucks up font scaling and it shits the bed on font antialiasing and it can't even get UI design consistent with the OS it's running on and it won't even use the OS emoji font.

Let's not even mention how you still cannot use Signal on a tablet.

For the most part, I don't care about App Size. Storage is cheap. What I miss with the Signal Desktop App is the option to save everything in an encrypted container.

That's why I am so happy that I switched to Matrix - selfhosted with Signal and WhatsApp Bridges(amongst others) and now I only need to keep one App on our mobiles, Notebooks,desktop,etc. but I can still communicate with everyone. (we have have a few mixed groups now)

Signal package has Electron (which is built on top of Chromium and NodeJS) + Signal app code and assets. So not surprised that it's bigger than Chromium.

Like I know native apps are always better, but why doesn't electron ship an installable runtime so we don't have to have a shitload of inert chromium installs on one machine?

Debian Linux installation ISO is only 336 MB, FFS. And that’s a whole operating system with user land!

Haha, WeChat is even more outrageous than this. All your forwarded files will be automatically stored again. Your chat records will always be stored on the disk, but WeChat will tell you that the chat records have expired. In addition, it has recently been discovered that every Once you log in to WeChat, your avatar will be saved more than ten times

Given that they have a native, non-Electron iOS version, it’s a shame that they haven’t built a desktop macOS version using mostly the same code. (To make it look like a proper Mac app, they’d need different UI code, though even without that, they could build a version that looks like the iPad version with no changes, and it would look no worse than the Electron web-app UI and run an order of magnitude more efficiently.)

On my phone is only 171mb.

Why would you not be able to continue chat from the phone? I don't all the time.

ignoring the fact that it's absolutely horrid.

An install of ICUE on windows takes up multiple gigabytes. Why? Uhm, good question.

even the phone app is larger than telegram and whatsapp

Sadly, it's the only way I can contact someone to buy a decent quantity of weed in this state. I get less even if I go to a state where it's legal and I pay more.

Is it possible to run the android app on Linux somehow? Hmm...

Well dooh, you installed Chrome with it. Add to that their application and there you have it.

the solution could be deduplication, not sure if microsoft store has it, or windows supports it, this help with the size, bot not ram usage

Yeah, I've been having a lot of issues with Electron which is basically a browser emulator. It has gotten huge, so applications using it have gotten out of control in size. I get that it's a quick way to build a cross platform application, but there really needs to either be a better way to distribute it that is more modular, or people need to start building on better cross platform front-end systems.

Harddrives start at 16€/TB, so 500MB would be 0.008€. SSDs start at 50€/TB, so it would be 0.025€ or two-and-a-half cents

While I'm on the subject, Signal's phone UI is not great. The home screen severely lacks contrasting colors and borders. Font size and spacing is inconsistent. It is hard and unpleasant to read - it's sad that this is the first screen the user is greeted with. The message screen looks good though!

This is why I moved to Telegram. Idk if it's actually native, but often feels much more so, and less phone-centric than Signal which requires weird auth rituals involving the phone.