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 execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer progra ...

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. 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 administrat ...

s (bloatware) 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 f ...

changes even if those changes had little or no effect on the hardware requirements. In long-lived software, perceived 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. An algorithm must be analyzed to determine its resource usage, and the efficiency of an al ...

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/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

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 to compensate. 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 perceived as unnecessarily long, slow, or otherwise wasteful of resources.

Library bloat

Library bloat refers to libraries that are declared or used in the build script while they are not necessary for executing the software application. A library that becomes bloated in a project is very likely to remain bloated in future evolutions of the project, which artificially increases maintenance effort since developers will maintain these bloated dependencies.

Causes

Software inefficiency

Software developers involved in the industry during the 1970s had severe limitations on 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 unit ...

and clock cycle 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 ...

", 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 number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empi ...

). 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 or subroutine is a sequence of program instructions that performs a specific task, packaged as a unit. This unit can then be used in programs wherever that particular task should be performed. Functions ma ...

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 demanded to save in HTML, XML, XLS, CSV, PDF, DOC, and other formats.

Niklaus Wirth Niklaus Emil Wirth (born 15 February 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally ...

has summed up the situation in

Wirth's law Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Ple ...

, 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 referring to the Mozilla Application Suite (which later became

SeaMonkey SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netsca ...

"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, 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 the development of IBM's System/360 family of 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 ...

.''

Bloatware

The term "bloatware" may be applied to software that has become bloated through inefficiency or accretion of features as outlined above. The term also commonly refers to software preinstalled 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. These elements may include whole programs, libraries, associated configuration information, or other data. Performance may deteriorate overall as a result of such leavings, as the unwanted software or software components can occupy memory, waste processing time, add disk I/O, consume storage and cause delays at system startup and shutdown. In the worst cases, the leftover software may interfere with the correct operation of wanted software. Bloatware can be easily removed if the user has root access on their device, though the rooting process has its own advantages and disadvantages, such as voiding the manufacturer's warranty, and that certain software refuses to run on rooted devices.

Examples

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...

's iTunes 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 A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide ...

'' 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 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, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

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 released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearl ...

core components, Microsoft engineer Eric Traut 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 oper ...

. 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 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 Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

devices, although this phenomenon exists on phones running many other operating systems. Some of the most popular current

messaging apps Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigg ...

, which were previously only focused on

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

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

WeChat WeChat () is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users. WeChat has be ...

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, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, po ...

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain mana ...

hub,

e-government E-government (short for electronic government) is the use of technological communications devices, such as computers and the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers ne ...

feature, cinema booking system, restaurant finder and

ridesharing company A ridesharing company (also known as a transportation network company, ride-hailing service; the vehicles are called app-taxis or e-taxis) is a company that, via websites and mobile apps, matches passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire th ...

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

Facebook Messenger Messenger is a proprietary instant messaging app and platform developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, released standalone iOS and Android apps in 2011, and ...

, which has been separated from the

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

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

Snapchat Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before th ...

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 David Marcus ( ro, Mărcuș; born April 12, 1973) is an American entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Diem, a cryptocurrency project initiated by Facebook. He is the former president of PayPal and Vice President of Messaging Products at Fac ...

, 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 ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized ...

, 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 computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

may use a similar technique using

preprocessor directives In computer programming, a directive or pragma (from "pragmatic") is a language construct that specifies how a compiler (or other translator) should process its input. Directives are not part of the grammar of a programming language, and may vary ...

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 Jamie 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, and XScre ...

). 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 minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix d ...

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-circul ...

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 scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manip ...

s, or other forms of

interapplication communication In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categori ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Software Bloat Anti-patterns Software quality Bundled products or services