I’m working on a small project using Electron. However, from what I recall, a few years ago, I compiled a desktop app and the file size was around 160MB (for OSX) and the Windows version was about half that size. That seemed a bit much. Does anyone know if AppStudio optimizes or at least makes the filesize it smaller?
There isn’t much that can be done. Electron needs to bundle the Chrome browser and the V8 JavaScript engine into the executable so the app will run. It isn’t dependant on the user already having the right versions of these things already installed on their system.
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It’s been a while but I recall slack was a lean 50MB file when I downloaded it and it was built with Electron. Granted a majority of users will most likely have about 1TB these days and this may not even be an issue but downloading a 160MB file for an app seemed excessive to me. Not sure if anyone else here would feel the same way.
I did some Google searches on how to lean out Electron but had little result in how to get it leaner / smaller file size. It seems to be like some golden unicorn at this time.
Just checked. For Windows, a minimal installer is about 44 megs to download. For Mac, it’s 65 megs.
For Mac, are you looking at the .app file? It will be about 160 megs, but once you make it into a .dmg, it’s compressed to 65 megs.
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Yes, it’s the app file itself. Compressing it does help.
A bit more reading and there are some possibilities in carefully removing unnecessary bloat but I currently don’t have the expertise to do that. I’ll figure something out.
It would be great to deploy a < 50MB app uncompressed.