

Apple Increases Maximum App Size from 2GB to 4GB - davidbarker
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=02122015a

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Someone1234
Neat. Now when will they dump this antiquated 16GB lowest tier for their
devices? About 20% of that is lost to the OS, and an addition 5-15% when you
download an OS update [0].

While there are Android devices who still come with 16GB, most flagships have
moved to 32 GB baseline and may or may not come with a micro SD card slot on
top of that.

Apple's devices with 16GB are actually legitimately painful to use after about
a year or more. They really are ruining the customer experience, and I bet if
Jobs were alive they would have moved to 32GB long ago.

It isn't like Apple needs the money.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7474947/apple-sued-
over-1...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7474947/apple-sued-over-16gb-
iphone-ipad-storage)

~~~
gress
You seem to be forgetting that if you want more storage you are free to choose
a larger model.

There are a range of customers for whom the built in apps, plus a few big
names like Facebook and Uber, and maybe google maps, are more than adequate.

Yes, 16GB isn't great for large music or photo collections, but those are
solved problems. You can choose from a wide range of streaming options for
music, and you can use iCloud Photos to offload your photo storage from the
device.

~~~
krschultz
While true, this is a pain point for Apple and app developers. The upgrade
rate to iOS 8 is hurt by the large number of people that do not have enough
disk space left available on their phone. In retrospect, 16GB is penny wise,
pound foolish for Apple.

~~~
mentos
I agree, I imagine Apple will be doubling their memory offers now.

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mcmancini
It would be really great if somehow, automagically, a downloaded app would
trim away all the unneeded assets for the device it's installed on. My iPad 2
doesn't need 3x iPhone 6 Plus assets.

~~~
jkestner
Or if Apple could just pluck those @3x files out of the bundle before it
downloads.

~~~
rys
They can't do that without resigning it on your behalf, which would probably
be bad.

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6stringmerc
Kind of interesting this is around the time that Android seems to be working
out some of their Audio Latency kinks.

This is good news for musicians. I've been very, very pleased with the music
software and hardware products catering to music production / performance.
Some catalogs nearly have a 2 page spread devoted to just iOS components. Due
to circumstances regarding my damaged Lenovo laptop, I prefer to travel and
work out new tunes on an iPad 2 using an Akai LPK25. Not that I'm the first or
best, but I managed to put together an entire EP using just those with some
headphones while on a family trip and waking up before the rest of the group
(San Antonio Riginals).

I still have yet to try out a new Line6 amp interface product I picked up on a
SDOTD for $10. Seems like every major player has embraced iOS. Between
Garageband and Figure, I'm a very happy customer. Even the entertainment stuff
like DJay and Traktor are thoroughly workable. Glad to see this.

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Geee
Can someone explain why there is still the 100 MB cellular limit?

~~~
wvenable
...and no way to turn it off! I've actually used one iPhone as a Wifi hotspot
to download apps on another iPhone to get around this limit.

~~~
Someone1234
That's actually a very clever way of bypassing it.

~~~
JosephRedfern
Although the part requiring two iPhone is a bit of a downer...

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robterrell
This isn't as important as the (not changed) 100 MB over-the-air download
limit.

Please, Apple: raise the OTA limit.

For games, with Apple mandating fat binaries with both 32-bit and 64-bit
executables, it's getting really difficult to keep sizes under 100 MB.

I assume this is tied to carrier deals and will only happen as those deals
expire / are re-negotiated, so I don't expect a miracle this year, but it's a
very serious problem for us right now.

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matznerd
What vertical will this benefit most, aside from gaming?

~~~
zorpner
Some of the GPS apps with mapping data embedded are already very close to the
2GB limit (e.g.: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-
europe/id355680531](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tomtom-europe/id355680531)
), but I don't know offhand if that's putting any pressure on them.

~~~
matznerd
This was my next guess, apps with huge databases that are mean to be queried
offline etc.

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mrfusion
Would this be enough to store Wikipedia locally on the phone?

~~~
bowmessage
No, according to this article[1], the English database alone is 10 GB
compressed.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download)

~~~
rasz_pl
and about 78GB for media data(images), I know because I run my own offline
wiki :o)

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collyw
That's enormous. The only software I can think that is in those sort of size
ranges is a Windows install.

What other software even comes close to that sort of size?

~~~
wodenokoto
Computer games. I haven't really played PC games since they where sold on CD's
so installing steam and a few games from there recently was really shocking.

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mahyarm
There is still a max executable size of 80MB although right?

~~~
chrisdroukas
60, actually. Page 78:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Langua...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/iTunesConnect_Guide/iTunesConnect_Guide.pdf)

~~~
mahyarm
This can be frustrating. They add another ISA that we have to bundle into iOS
apps that make them %150 bigger. Have a +40MB binary and then you run into a
wall by adding arm64

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RayLau135
I can think of one app which would benefit - The Simpsons Tapped Out.

So annoying having to wait for 1GB of updates to download before you even get
to play the game

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bennyg
Huge iPad games coming in the future.

~~~
TillE
4GB isn't even particularly huge for games these days. Basically any PC game
with lots of voice acting and high-resolution textures will blow past that
pretty quickly.

~~~
spain
At least with Titanfall coming in at 48 GB (and probably other heavy-weight
AAA titles coming out nowadays) the reason for the huge size wasn't really the
amount or quality of the assets, but mostly just because the audio assets were
_uncompressed_. According to them it was so that "they could dedicate more
system resources to running the game, and less to unpacking audio files." [0]

[0]
[http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132922-Titanfall-D...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/132922-Titanfall-
Dev-Explains-The-Games-35-GB-of-Uncompressed-Audio)

~~~
jjoonathan
The US Army has them beat.

About 10 years ago they released a first person shooter called "America's
Army." It was free, it was mac compatible, and for a kid that wasn't really
supposed to be video gaming that was a killer combination. When they stopped
updating the mac version I started poking around the files to see if I could
backport some of the maps from the newer PC version to the older mac version.
One of the first things I implemented was texture import/export. I wanted it
to work on entire folders at a time and I didn't want to rely on EXIF
annotations to store the pixel format of textures so I relied on the hack of
looking at the histogram to see if an image should be stored in the compressed
format.

At first I thought I had a bug: I knew for a fact that some textures were
stored uncompressed (RGBA8) and some were stored compressed (DXT3,5) but they
were all importing as compressed. Turns out the bug wasn't in my code. Someone
had lossfully compressed the textures and then stored the compressed images in
an uncompressed format.

I sent the devs an email letting them know how they could save ~50% of their
download size at no further loss of quality by re-enabling compression. I
never got a direct response but the next day they banned me for hacking.
Naturally, when the next version of the game came out the problem still wasn't
fixed.

A few years later I told my parents. My father, who had served in the army,
just laughed and said "Now that's the Army I remember!"

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LarryMade2
Curious, what small screen apps need or could use that much space?

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Arsenije
Are they into storage business?

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mikesena
FINAL FANTASY 7 HERE WE COME!

~~~
rasz_pl
ff7 was originally 3 CDs, and probably half of that was for fmv in outdated
inefficient format

~~~
test1235
You seem to be implying that 3CDs is more than 4GB?

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rasz_pl
less than 2GB

