Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version, while making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from

feature creep Feature creep is the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, especially in computer software, video games (where it should not be confused with power creep) and consumer and business electronics. These extra feature ...

. The term is not applied consistently; it is often used as a pejorative by

end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrato ...

s, including to describe undesired

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

changes even if those changes had little or no effect on the hardware requirements. In long-lived software, bloat can occur from the software servicing a large, diverse marketplace with many differing requirements. Most end users will feel they only need some limited subset of the available functions, and will regard the others as unnecessary bloat, even if end users with different requirements require those functions. Actual (measurable) bloat can occur due to de-emphasising

algorithmic efficiency In computer science, algorithmic efficiency is a property of an algorithm which relates to the amount of computational resources used by the algorithm. Algorithmic efficiency can be thought of as analogous to engineering productivity for a repea ...

in favour of other concerns like developer productivity, or possibly through the introduction of new layers of abstraction like a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

or other scripting engine for the purposes of convenience when developer constraints are reduced. The perception of improved developer productivity, in the case of practising development within virtual machine environments, comes from the developers no longer taking resource constraints and usage into consideration during design and development; this allows the product to be completed faster but it results in increases to the end user's hardware requirements and/or compromised performance as a result. The term "bloatware" is also used to describe unwanted

pre-installed software Pre-installed software (also known as bundled software) is software already installed and licensed on a computer or smartphone bought from an original equipment manufacturer (OEM).bundled programs.

Types of bloat

Program bloat

In computer programming, code bloat refers to the presence of program code (source code or machine code) that is unnecessarily long, slow, or otherwise wasteful of resources.

Feature creep

Feature creep is the tendency for a product, project, or system to gradually expand beyond its original scope by adding more and more features over time. In the context of computer programs, this can result in excessive disk space usage, loss of performance and the program being harder to use and understand by most end users.

Causes

Software inefficiency

Software developers A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

involved in the industry during the 1970s had severe limitations on processing power, disk space and memory. Every

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

and

clock cycle In electronics and especially synchronous digital circuits, a clock signal (historically also known as ''logic beat'') is an electronic logic signal (voltage or current) which oscillates between a high and a low state at a constant frequency and ...

was taken into account, and much work went into fitting the programs into available resources. Achieving this efficiency was one of the highest values of computer programmers, and the best programs were often called "

elegant Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. Elegance is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness, particularly in visual design, decorative arts, literature, science, and the aesthetics of mathematics. Elegant t ...

", a term used by mathematicians to describe a proof which is tidy, parsimonious and powerful. By the 21st century, the situation had reversed. Resources were perceived as cheap, and rapidity of coding and headline features for marketing seen as priorities. In part, this is because technological advances have since increased processing capacity and storage density by orders of magnitude, while reducing the relative costs by similar orders of magnitude (see

Moore's law Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...

). Additionally, the spread of computers through all levels of business and home life has produced a software industry many times larger than it was in the 1970s. Programs are now usually churned out by teams, directed by committees in software development studios (also known as software houses or software factories) where each programmer works on only a part of the whole, on one or more

subroutine In computer programming, a function (also procedure, method, subroutine, routine, or subprogram) is a callable unit of software logic that has a well-defined interface and behavior and can be invoked multiple times. Callable units provide a ...

s. Finally, software development tools and approaches often result in changes throughout a program to accommodate each feature, leading to a large-scale inclusion of code which affects the main operation of the software, and is required in order to support functions that themselves may be only rarely used. In particular, the advances in resources available have led to tools which allow easier development of code, again with less priority given to end efficiency. Another cause of bloat is independently competing standards and products, which can create a demand for integration. There are now more operating systems, browsers, protocols, and storage formats than there were before, causing bloat in programs due to interoperability issues. For example, a program that once could only save in text format is now required to save in HTML, XML, XLS, CSV, PDF, DOC, and other formats.

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth ( IPA: ) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Tu ...

has summed up the situation in Wirth's law, which states that software speed is decreasing more quickly than hardware speed is increasing. In his 2001 essay ''Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth'', Joel Spolsky argues that while 80% of the users only use 20% of the features (a variant on the Pareto principle), each one uses different features. Thus, "lite" software editions turn out to be useless for most, as they miss the one or two special features that are present in the "bloated" version. Spolsky sums the article with a quote by

Jamie Zawinski Jamie Werner Zawinski (born November 3, 1968), commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger, and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, an ...

referring to the

Mozilla Application Suite The Mozilla Application Suite (originally known as Mozilla, marketed as the Mozilla Suite) is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition ...

(ultimately debloated as separate apps, of which the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

web browser is the only significant survivor):

"Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. ..But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla."

Software bloat may also be a symptom of the

second-system effect The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence. The phrase was first used by Fred ...

, described by

Fred Brooks Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the ...

in ''

The Mythical Man-Month ''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'' is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a s ...

.''

Bloatware

“Bloatware" is software that has become bloated through inefficiency or accretion of features as outlined above. The term is also commonly used for preinstalled software bundled on a device, usually by the hardware manufacturer, that is mostly unwanted by the purchaser. The term may also be applied to the accumulation of unwanted and unused software elements that remain after partial and incomplete

uninstallation An uninstaller, also called a deinstaller, is a variety of utility software designed to remove other software or parts of it from a computer. It is the opposite of an installer. Uninstallers are useful primarily when software components are instal ...

. These elements may include whole programs, libraries, associated configuration information, or other data. Performance may deteriorate overall as a result of such remnants, as the unwanted software or software components can occupy both hard disk memory and RAM, waste processing time, add disk I/O, and cause delays at system startup and shutdown. In the worst cases, the leftover software may interfere with the correct operation of wanted software. On Android devices some of the bloatware can be hidden from a user account with ADB, although this doesn't remove the application and will still take disk space, it won't run and slow down the system. By unlocking the bootloader, users can remove the bloatware's files, install a custom firmware or gain root privileges which allows the app to be fully uninstalled.

Examples

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

has been accused of being bloated by efforts to turn it from a simple media player to an e-commerce and advertising platform, with former ''

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

'' editor Ed Bott accusing the company of hypocrisy in its advertising attacks on Windows for similar practices. In 2019, Apple announced the impending closure of the program, a move described by a commentator from ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' as being "long overdue", stating that the program had "become baroquely bloated, a striking anomaly for a company that prides itself on elegant and functional design."

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

has also been criticized as being bloated – with reference to

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

and discussing the new, greatly slimmed down

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

core components, Microsoft engineer

Eric Traut Eric Traut is an American software engineer and software emulation pioneer. Traut graduated from Stanford University in 1992. From 1993 to 1995 he worked for Apple Computer, creating a Mac 68K emulator to be used in PowerPC-based Macintoshes.

commented that "This is the core of

. This is a collection of components that we've taken out. A lot of people think of Windows as this really large, bloated operating system, and that may be a fair characterization, I have to admit. It is large. It contains a lot of stuff in it. But at its core, the kernel and the components that make up the very core of the operating system actually is pretty streamlined." Ed Bott also expressed skepticism, noting that nearly every operating system that Microsoft has ever sold has been criticized as "bloated" on first release, even those now regarded as the exact opposite, such as

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

. Quoting Paul Thurrott, Bott agreed that the bloat stems from numerous enterprise-level features included in the operating system that were largely irrelevant to the average home user. CD- and DVD-burning applications such as

Nero Burning ROM Nero Burning ROM, commonly called Nero, is an optical disc authoring program from Nero AG. The software is part of the Nero Multimedia Suite but is also available as a stand-alone product. It is used for burning and copying optical media such ...

have become criticized for being bloated. Superfluous features not specifically tailored to the end user are sometimes installed by default through express setups. A number of technology blogs have also covered the issue of increased bloatware on cell phones. However, they refer to a different issue, specifically that of wireless carriers loading phones with software that, in many cases, cannot be easily, if at all, deleted. This has been most frequently cited with respect to Android devices, although this phenomenon exists on phones running many other operating systems. Some of the most popular current messaging apps, which were previously only focused on

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

, have been criticized for being bloated due to feature creep.

WeChat WeChat or Weixin in Chinese ( zh, c=微信, p=Wēixìn , l=micro-message) is an instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment mobile app, app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile a ...

during its transformation into a

super-app A super-app, also known as an everything-app, is a mobile or web application that can provide multiple services including payment and instant messaging services, effectively becoming an all-encompassing self-contained commerce and communication ...

added additional features such as games, subscription services, WeChat Pay e-wallet, a

news aggregator In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital Content (media), content such as online newsp ...

, an

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

hub, an

e-government E-government (known for electronic government) involves utilizing technology devices, such as computers and the Internet, for faster means of delivering public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offer ...

feature, a cinema booking system, a restaurant finder and a

ridesharing company A ridesharing company (or ridehailing service) is a company (or service offered by a company) that, via websites and mobile apps, matches passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire that, unlike taxis, cannot legally be hailed from the street. ...

, which has increased the size of the app from 2 MB in 2011 to 58 MB in 2018.

Facebook Messenger Messenger, formerly known as Facebook Messenger, is an American proprietary instant messaging service developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the client application of Messenger is currently available o ...

, which has been separated from the

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

app, is similarly criticized for adding additional features such as games, bots and features which copied from

Snapchat Snapchat is an American multimedia social media and instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of the app are that pictures and messages, known as "snaps", are usually availa ...

such as Messenger Day (Stories), face filters, a camera with the ability to edit photos, doodle draw and added emojis and stickers. In January 2018, the head of Facebook Messaging, David A. Marcus, admitted that the app itself is extremely bloated and promised to redesign the whole app to remove unnecessary features and streamline it. The redesigned and streamlined

Messenger app was announced in October 2018, in which its features are reduced to messaging, stories, discover tab and camera.

Alternatives

Some applications, such as

GIMP Gimp or GIMP may refer to: Clothing * Bondage suit, also called a gimp suit, a type of suit used in BDSM * Bondage mask, also called a gimp mask, often worn in conjunction with a gimp suit Embroidery and crafts * Gimp (thread), an ornamental tr ...

, and software with additional functionality from plug-ins, use extensions or add-ons which are downloaded separately from the main application. These can be created by either the software developer or by third-party developers. Plug-ins, extensions, and add-ons add extra functionality which might have otherwise been packaged in the main program. Allowing these plug-ins, extensions, and/or add-ons reduces the space used on any one machine, because even though the application, the "plug-in interface", and all the plug-ins combined are larger than the same functionality compiled into one monolithic application, it allows each user to install only the particular add-on features they require, rather than forcing every user to install a much larger monolithic application that includes all of the available features. This results in a "stripped-down" or "out-of-the-box" application that is delivered in a compact package yet is ready for users to add any missing functionality.

Open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

may use a similar technique using preprocessor directives to include features at compile time selectively. This is easier to implement and more secure than a plugin system, but has the disadvantage that a user who wants a specific set of features must compile the program from source. Sometimes software becomes bloated because of " creeping featurism" ( Zawinski's law of software envelopment). One way to reduce that kind of bloat is described by the

Unix philosophy The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to Minimalism (computing), minimalist, Modularity (programming), modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading devel ...

of "writing programs that do one thing and do it well," and breaking what would be a single, complicated piece of software into numerous simpler components which can be chained together using

pipes Pipe(s), PIPE(S) or piping may refer to: Objects * Pipe (fluid conveyance), a hollow cylinder following certain dimension rules ** Piping, the use of pipes in industry * Smoking pipe ** Tobacco pipe * Half-pipe and quarter pipe, semi-circu ...

shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be command languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipu ...

s, or other forms of interapplication communication.

Security Risk

Software bloat as a vulnerability

Software bloat may induce more

vulnerabilities Vulnerability refers to "the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally." The understanding of social and environmental vulnerability, as a methodological approach, involves ...

due to raise of difficulty in managing a large number of code and dependencies. Furthermore, it may make software developer difficulty to understand the code they ship, increasing the difficulty for spot and fix vulnerabilities.

Bloatware as a vulnerability

Although bloatware is not a form of

malware Malware (a portmanteau of ''malicious software'')Tahir, R. (2018)A study on malware and malware detection techniques . ''International Journal of Education and Management Engineering'', ''8''(2), 20. is any software intentionally designed to caus ...

and is not designed for malicious purposes, bloatware may introduce some vulnerabilities unintentionally and may cause the user's computer to have a higher risk for infection by

computer virus A computer virus is a type of malware that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and Code injection, inserting its own Computer language, code into those programs. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas ...

es or

ransomware Ransomware is a type of malware that Encryption, encrypts the victim's personal data until a ransom is paid. Difficult-to-trace Digital currency, digital currencies such as paysafecard or Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, cryptocurrencies are com ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Software Bloat Software quality Bundled products or services