Skype’s emoji cache
Skype, a 117MB application (as of right now, on macOS at least), keeps a 340MB stash of emojis on your computer. What?
Clearing some space on my SSD today, I notice that Skype’s Application Support folder takes up over 600MB.
The Upgrade subfolder contains 230MB of old Skype versions, with the oldest dating back to late 2012. That’s a little odd, to keep a five-year-old version around, but fine.
How far we’ve come: Skype today is over five times the size it was five years ago.
Drilling down into the robjwells subfolder we find emo_cache_v2, accounting for nearly all the 370MB size of its parents. What’s inside? 5,138 emojis and animations. Here’s a taste:
Except that, unlike the super-low-quality version above, the original is 2.4MB and has a delightful reggae soundtrack to accompany its 17-second length.
5,000 of these things. There’s even a Forrest Gump one!
And you’d think “cache” means that “you sent this before, you might need it again” — but as far as I can remember I’ve only ever sent “standard” emojis on Skype. 🤷♀️
Postscript: If you delete all the mp4 and png files in that directory and then relaunch Skype, it will refill it — but with 3.5MB of animated png emojis.
Post-postscript: I changed the title to remove the emoji as some feed-reading services (like Feed Wrangler, the one I use), couldn’t handle 🤦♀️. Oh well 🤦♂️. (And, funnily enough, BBEdit doesn’t handle the “emoji + zero width joiner + modifier” as a single character. Unicode is hard.)