I looked at screen shots of an app that is used to do calcualtions of ingredients and there are probably average 100 ingredients per program with each ingredient having 6-10 values each, so this is a very small spread sheet.

I'm trying to figure out what could be taking up so much room before I download and install something as I saw no pictures (they wouldn't make sense with these recipes...).

The reason I post is because I have seen many apps and programs that are WAY bigger than I think they should be. I know the size of programs I wrote and what they did and I see the size of programs that are available and I don't know what is going on -(this is referring to the online/downloadable area - but retail has large programs but video often hides possible size issues) meaning they are very large for what they are supposed to be doing.

Do some programs include language libraries within their programming by any chance? I could only see that being a reason for the size of some of these programs.

I have an app installed that is using 569MB
That one holds 5 Bible Versions, 26 e-books, and 4 small videos.

I'm raising an eyebrow at 53MB, but I'd believe it.

Bloat!

Programmers nowdays are careless with their space and RAM usage.

I have seen much worse than that

all the CRAPWARE that is installed along with it
and that includes all the SPY-WARE and AD-WARE that it is installing
and the tiny keyloger tossed in for good measure


also it could be using a TON of BIG MS windows *.bmp images
those things take up a lot of space

If you're not talking about android, then this isn't relevant, but anyways...

I know what you're talking about. That is one of the reasons I hate "App Markets" (including the Ubuntu Store). WAY too much crapware (Ubuntu store isn't so bad about this). Even on iOS. It makes me wonder, do these people make apps like that just to make other people mad? Or are they just... stupid? If they are writing the apps, I doubt that they are really stupid, but still. Maybe it's related to the Java-ART thing Android has going, but that doesn't explain the cross-compiled apps being big.

I have a son working on IOS & Android software.

Believe me, there are some very crappy coders out there who haven't kept up. One such guy (On a sound app, now replaced, where timing was critical) had code to determine how fast your iphone was. and inserted time lags based delays depending on the efficiency of your hardware. In a similar fashion, groups of libraries are thrown in because some functions in some of them are used. Somebody once said

"There never was, or will be, a programming language in which it was not possible to write bad code."

If it's android, the .apk file really is a zip file. Files of type .dex are Java code. So maybe unzip it and take a look?