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Why is the phone app so big? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/android@lemmy.world
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The phone app (by Google) has 700 mb of data on the phone. What is that? Call history? Contacts? Then what is in the contacts app? Is it safe to delete?

Stock Pixel 6a

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[-] 299792458ms@lemmy.zip 21 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Its safe to delete my man, its just 700 of your nudes.

Jokes aside its just a phone app that integrates with google services which is convenient but you know.... using google is allowing google in your kitchen. So its basically "telemetry".

You can use whatever app you like, preferably FOSS is the last thing I mentioned is what you are concerned about.

[-] evo@sh.itjust.works 9 points 2 months ago

So its basically "telemetry"

There's just no way. Telemetry are just text logs and should never take more than a couple MB. They are also going to be deleted routinely and frequently after being sent to the server.

[-] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I don't understand what data would be in the phone app. I use a separate voicemail app, there is a separate contacts app, and Messages should have all the text multimedia. The only data that should be in the app would be call history, which I don't mind losing, but I don't want to lose messeging media or contact info.

[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 2 months ago

You should be able to export both contacts and texts if the backup app is given contacts permission and to be set as the text app temporarily.

Not sure about the text multimedia. If it's in the system text database it can be exported, if the Messages app has it in its private data then tough luck.

Well you can probably still back it up to Google.

[-] 299792458ms@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

Its obviously not all just telemetry, it was an exageration, all they care about is your data and every feature they add is aligned for that goal whilst making the UI as "pretty" as possible. So I did not mention that because it felt unnecesary.

[-] evo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

It's a drop in the bucket though. I'd be shocked if it was more than 1%. So it doesn't explain anything.

[-] 299792458ms@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

Hey man, I did not mean to say that all 700MB were basically telemetry. I was only trying to say that the services purpose is data collection, implying that the app itself (GUI) and the integration of those services are responsible of the size of the app.

[-] evo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

the app itself (GUI) and the integration of those services are responsible of the size of the app.

That's < 100MB for me.

[-] 299792458ms@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago

Ok, and what is you point? The app I use is under 10MB and the data under 1MB. I do not know how can a log of calls and contact list be over 500MB. Another app I tested 18MB and 200KB of data. So you either have a contact list over 100 000 contacts or google contacts is abnormally huge. In the end is still 5-10x the size of alternative contact/dialer apps.

[-] bitwolf@lemmy.one 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Mine shows 702mb of user data after about 6 months of call history. However I don't find this very unreasonable for the feature set provided.

The app continues to function offline so I could imagine a cache of the information gets generated once the application is launched and permissions granted.

First off, it appears to source contact information, this appears to be standardized because access is backed by the Contacts permission scope. I imagine it caches this information, because it also builds an index of your contacts in order to drive the t9 dialer search.

The phone also offers integration for voicemail and visual voicemail transcriptions. These would either need to be stored in the app, or associated with the data if it rests outside of the apps directory.

Finally there is the call history. It looks like Android has a standard location for this because it has its own permisson scope.

This means, in order to maintain functionality when offline, the app would have to store associations to contacts, the call history, voice transcription text, and voicemail audio.

The look up of this information could be slow to do each time a tab is opened so it likely stores these associations in a local database for quicker access. That local database would need to be stored in the apps directory contributing to its size.

[-] essteeyou@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Almost all of that (excluding voicemail) is pure text data, isn't it? There's no way it should be taking up multiple hundreds of megabytes. I can't imagine voicemail audio is particularly high quality, but if you do have a load of messages then I can see it adding up.

My Phone app user data is 277MB.

Google Keep (lots of notes with offline mode) is 10.62MB.

Google Maps' offline maps for my entire local area is only 109MB.

[-] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 months ago

All of the data you mentioned, voicemail audio included, would be about 10 megabytes.

[-] Solemarc@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

My phone app(also google phone app) is only 91mb's, Google Pixel 6, everything up to date.

[-] breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

That's crazy high. Both my fairly old P6 and very new P8 have about 65mb of user data. I may not have as many nudes tho.

[-] Blackout@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Cause it has to memorize everybody's number just in case you decide to call it. That's why your cell phone doesn't need a rotary dial anymore.

this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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