Why Software Keeps Getting Slower and Bigger (It’s Not an Accident)
Computers and phones get faster every year, yet the apps running on them somehow feel just as sluggish as ever, or slower. This isn’t programmer laziness. It’s the predictable result of specific economic and technical pressures. If dust and hardware issues aren’t the cause of a slow device, our guide on making an old laptop faster covers the hardware side of this problem. This guide explains why software bloat happens and what it actually looks like under the hood.
Wirth’s Law: The Opposite of Moore’s Law
Moore’s Law observed that computing hardware roughly doubles in capability every couple of years. Wirth’s Law is the wry counterpoint: software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. Despite chips packing more transistors onto smaller processes every generation, real-world app performance often fails to improve, or actively regresses.
The Economic Root Cause: Nobody Pays for Speed
A widely discussed developer essay made an uncomfortable observation: the same person who will pay $15 for a sandwich without hesitation will agonise over spending one dollar on an app. Building quality software costs real money, often $50,000 to half a million dollars for a serious product, and if users won’t pay upfront, that cost gets recovered elsewhere.
How Unwillingness to Pay Leads Directly to Bloat
When direct payment isn’t covering development costs, revenue has to come from somewhere else: tracking, advertising, marketing funnels, subscription paywalls, and defensive measures against ad blockers. Each of these adds background processes, network calls, and code that has nothing to do with the app’s actual stated purpose.
The Always-On Analytics Layer
Modern apps commonly run crash reporting tools, product analytics, session recording software, and A/B testing engines continuously in the background, well before you interact with the app’s actual features. This layer alone consumes meaningful CPU and network resources purely to measure user behaviour.
Why Features Get Prioritised Over Speed
To a business stakeholder, software is usually described as a list of features, warehouse tracking, integrations, reporting, security controls, with speed reduced to a single vague marketing line like “instant updates.” If a development team spends a quarter optimising a core process while a competitor ships a flashy new feature instead, the competitor often wins more sales in the short term, even if the underlying product is objectively less efficient.
The Technical Layer: Dependency Bloat
Modern development relies heavily on external libraries and frameworks rather than writing functionality from scratch. A single imported function can drag in an entire library’s worth of code, much of it unused, filling an application with dead weight that still has to be loaded and parsed.
Why Developers Rarely Notice the Problem Themselves
Development and testing typically happen on the latest, most powerful hardware available, a machine with abundant RAM and CPU cores. This creates little day-to-day incentive to write efficient code, since performance problems that would be obvious on a five-year-old device simply don’t surface during development.
Software Disenchantment: A Long-Running Concern
This isn’t a new observation. Essays like “Software Disenchantment” and “The Website Obesity Crisis” have documented this trend for years, noting a growing consensus among developers that applications keep getting larger, slower, and more fragile, even as the hardware running them keeps improving.
Bloatware vs Software Bloat: An Important Distinction
Bloatware specifically refers to pre-installed, unwanted software loaded onto a new device by the manufacturer or through paid placement deals, often set to run at startup for advertising or subscription revenue. Software bloat is the broader, related phenomenon of any individual application growing bigger and slower over its own lifetime, regardless of whether it was pre-installed.
Technical Debt’s Role in the Problem
Code written quickly under deadline pressure often works but isn’t well documented or optimised. As the original developer moves on and the surrounding technology changes, nobody fully understands or dares to remove that code, so it accumulates indefinitely rather than being cleaned up.
What Users Can Actually Do About It
- Choose lighter-weight alternatives when a simpler tool exists for the task at hand
- Regularly review and remove browser extensions, background apps, and startup programs that aren’t essential
- Favour software from companies with a direct paid pricing model, which reduces (though doesn’t eliminate) the incentive toward tracking-driven bloat
- Keep expectations realistic: even efficient software will feel the strain eventually as demands on hardware grow
Signs a Specific App Is Unusually Bloated
Unusually high battery or data usage relative to what the app actually does, a large download size for simple functionality, and noticeable background activity even when the app is idle are all reasonable indicators worth investigating further.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is software bloat a bug that will eventually be fixed?
Not typically. It stems from ongoing economic incentives and development practices rather than a single fixable error, which is why the trend has persisted across the industry for years rather than resolving on its own.
Does paying for software actually reduce bloat?
Not automatically, but it does remove one major incentive, the need to recoup costs through tracking and ads, which are among the most commonly cited drivers of unnecessary background activity.
Conclusion
Software bloat isn’t a mystery or a sign of careless engineering. It’s a predictable outcome of how software gets funded, built, and prioritised, favouring visible features and monetisation over invisible performance work. Understanding the actual cause makes it easier to choose tools, and expectations, accordingly.
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