> I’ve been judged by prospective employers based on reported app size being seen as correlated to complexity.

This judges the prospective employer more than it judges the candidate, doesn't it?

This is actually nothing new. Back when I was at uni some students claimed to do the same, adding code that served no purpose to inflate the resulting program executable size.

And if my memory serves me well, at this time when windows was still young and software was swapped around on floppies, software sizes started to skyrocket and I've heard then that the secret reason for this lack of care was that size was the easiest way to impress users and the tech press (all while making piracy more inconvenient).

> This judges the prospective employer more than it judges the candidate, doesn't it?

Easy to say, rhetorically suggesting that its revealing a toxic mangement environment, but no, not really. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive with great teammates and great managers, and a hiring decision maker that was otherwise completely hands off of what I was doing for the rest of the project. A hiring decision maker that probably left within 3 - 6 months of me joining, or who was randomly called to do an interview last minute and had arbitrary evaluation metrics. Maybe that is what you mean, but it had nothing to do with the day to day experience, once on board I found every place to be very similar with the mobile team pretty much on autopilot, which is the desired experience. Even quicker paths to leadership roles and higher compensation.

They all have interesting-enough projects at the time, or fulfilled some other interest of mine, or money without being a bad environment. Interview gaffs really don't carry as much weight as people think, it requires a special kind of privilege to think it matters that not all of us have or had.

Yes, binary size, deployment size, deployment time, LoC, source code zipped size, number of directories in GitHub, number of repositories in GitHub. I have heard all kind of VC metrics to increase ‘success’ of being believable by partners, clients and VCs. Small and lean is something ‘they’ generally do not believe anymore.

In a rather successful business I had, I had a product of a few 100kb which installed easily on servers; just ./install.sh. Someone told me that this was really not smart. The script downloaded it’s dependencies (just rpm install; nothing proprietary) and then it copied the binary to /use/local/bin. I figured I could fix 2 issues at once; people running other distros complained that it did (obviously) not work; in our target audience, well over 90% ran rpm based distros, mostly centos. This was before Docker etc so I changed the install to apt-get and included a zipped chrooted Debian with everything already installed in it. Suddenly install.sh was over 100s of mbs and worked on any x86 Linux. It indeed made sales jump with people saying in forums that ours was bigger than even the largest competitor install download so it must be better. It is lame but true; especially when people pay for stuff, they want to get bang for their buck.

Yeah, the same concept applies to airline and hotel sites and apps

Their server returns results instantly but found that if they showed a loading animation (even fancy ones like an animated svg or gif of a cartoon passenger in an airplane) that people trusted the results more

Well it may not be correlated to complexity but it certainly is correlated to end user satisfaction. If their device prompts a "device cleanup" operation and your app is near the top of the list that doesn't do much good for retention.

Not to mention the billions of devices in the world which are running old OS versions with scant memory capacity.

> billions of devices in the world which are running old OS versions with scant memory capacity.

are not the rich or loose-walleted people that app sellers and advertisers care about.

If your app is too fast you should also make sure to add a sleep() to it so the customer knows that its 'working.' I read a humorous story about a contractor who did that to satisfy a customers complaint that it was too fast.

And then there's me. I somehow manage to squeeze quite a lot of Android app into several megabytes of an apk — and that's with proguard turned off. Some people's minds get blown by this, but for me it's just sensible engineering decisions.

On the other hand, when your app is actually functional at 12 MB, you'll find users from more parts of the world using it.

Yes when I ever make an app for my own project

But for most employers they just need presence, almost nobody was breaking even on apps they just needed the presence on the app stores. Big waste of money for most, and for most projects I was pitched

You can geofence a Lite version

Release lite version without that file.