In 2021 we have an app for quite literally everything. App for planning your holidays, booking your cab, ordering your next meal and much more. A new report by Sensor Tower claims that the top ten apps on iOS are four times larger than what they used to be five years ago. In other words, every year app size is growing exponentially.

One of the explanations for larger apps is new features. Sensor Tower says this year; the apps have gained in size owing to new iOS 15 features. Due to the sophistication, the APIs take up more space on iPhone.

With the introduction of these new technologies ultimately comes an increase in app sizes, which have grown substantially as the sophistication of Apple’s software has ballooned. Case in point, according to Sensor Tower App Intelligence data, the top 10 iPhone apps by downloads in the United States for May were 298 percent or nearly four times larger than five years ago, requiring 2.2 gigabytes of storage, compared to about 550 megabytes at the beginning of 2016.

Sensor Tower is considering only core app size and not additional content or updates downloaded after installation. The top 10 most downloaded iPhone apps in the U.S include YouTube, TikTok, Messenger, Facebook, Zoom, Netflix, Instagram, Gmail, Google Maps, and Amazon.

The average growth is 4X over the past five years or since 2016. Gmail tops the list with a 19x increase in size over the past five years. Talking numbers, the apps required an average storage space of 550MB in 2016, whereas now they need 2.2GB of storage. The average storage requirement for apps has increased by a whopping 298% over the past five years.

Gmail tops the list with 19x growth in size. Instagram and TikTok occupy second and third place with a 6x increase in size. Perhaps this is the reason Apple offers a 512GB variant on iPhone 12 Pro Max. If rumors are to be believed, Apple could introduce a 1TB variant with iPhone 13.