Remember the good old days? Back when the default applications in a Windows installation used to take no more than a few MBs? Well, those days are now long gone.
Windows 11, with its vibrant array of default apps, now requires more than 1.5GB of disk space.
This collection of applications — also known as inbox apps — comes in real handy for Windows 11 users because these little software programs are included in the box of their operating system installation. It sure saves hunting for alternatives when deploying the OS.
That said, not everyone finds these apps helpful and may feel that these are more on the bloatware side of things.
If you fall into this category, you may be wondering just how much disk space these apps take up. This new report aims to shed light on this, with some welcome calculations to determine the exact digital footprint of these built-in applications.
PowerShell was here to help figure out the reported size of these native Windows 11 applications. As the image below shows, when sorted by size (in bytes) in descending order, good old Microsoft Teams is the biggest one of them all, with its 91MB size.
However, some further digging was necessary.
That’s because some apps like the Microsoft Store Purchase app were eating up only 11KB of space. It so happened that there were two separate folders for it, and the actual size of the app was around 37MB.
Doing this exercise for all the default Windows 11 apps, and the sum of the sizes of all came to 1.5GB.
Of course, this is not a lot of disk space unless you are running Windows 11 on very limited hardware. Gone are the days of budget tablets that ran the OS on 16GB storage.
But if you do not use these default apps on your device, you can always debloat it by removing them.
Also provided is a script you can download to try this yourself and see how much space these inbox apps are taking on your machine.
