I was about to install PixelFed, listed in Google Play as a 13-MB app, but it demanded to delete apps before I free 500 MB. Similar thing happens with F-Droid, although it gives less data. Why? Does it not, like Flatpak on PC, list dependencies? But that’s dumb; plus, no dependency for a browsing app may take 500 MB of space, and the demands aren’t getting smaller when more apps are on device.
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Android apps don’t pull in dependencies like that. But even though it’s a 13 MB download, I see when installed it’s showing me it takes up 76 MB, before I’ve even opened it for the first time.
No, I don’t know why there is a discrepancy, nor why it told you 500 MB. But I do know the fancy new thing for apps is a split package, and usually apps require dynamic recompilation during installation, so that might be why they ask a safety margin of up to 500 MB. (But I agree it still seems high.)
Download size vs. Install size
From my experience filling my phone’s storage a bit too frequently, there’s a threshold where past that, Android considers as being low on storage, and starts doing contingency procedures to not fully fill out (if it does, data may start corrupting). Don’t know how short on storage you were, but from I observed on my phone at least, below ~1 GB, cached files start getting deleted, and below 500 MB, Android gives the persistent(ish) storage running out error. If you were on either of these thresholds, this may have been the reason.
13MB is the download size in GP. This is different from fDroid, because you download only a device or architecture specific installer, which is different on fdroid. After installing this extracts to maybe 75mb, which should be identical to fdroid. After first start the app, this can download additional packages, if needed and the wasted space grows. It grows more with the cache and other temporary content. A app can also reserve some space. For some apps, this could be up to 5gb and more.
