IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

This highlights the fact that Apple doesn't have the resources to be able to work through issues like this with developers of well-used apps before changes are made. Maybe they should open more positions like these: http://apple-careers.com/job/Austin-Mac-2FiOS-Developer-Supp...

Sending an email out is insufficient. I've had similar experiences with a company that develops a product that I've written extensions for. If your product relies on an ecosystem, and you do something that is going to disturb that ecosystem, you'd better be prepared for the backlash.

The whole idea of an app like Instapaper (or any of the other examples presented) is that the "stuff" that is saved for later is all user-generated content. Some articles may even vanish (different location, move behind a paywall, deleted, etc...). In this case those articles would become inaccessible when the OS deletes the cache.

It seems that the argument that only the list of metadata is user-generated can apply to any type of media (music, movies, etc...). Technically speaking all of the music on my phone could be downloaded on demand. Of course this requires an always connected, fat, and cheap network connection. Which is pretty much the opposite of what most folks have.

This also breaks the user's expectations. I was annoyed/surprised when I upgraded to iOS 5 and Instapaper had to re-download everything.

I'm sympathetic to Marco's blog post here, but I wonder if he's failing to interpret the two paragraphs from the documentation within the context of Instapaper's purpose.

With respect to point #1, and in the context of what Instapaper is for, the user is intending to read an article offline, and the local copy of the article was generated by the user's intent (and can, therefore, be considered user-generated even though the user is not the author of the article.)

With respect to point #2, the articles fail the "can be downloaded again" test in light of the app's purpose of making the articles available to the user when the network is not available. When the network is unavailable, the articles cannot be downloaded again. Edit: JeffDClark makes another excellent point here that the article may have originally been behind a paywall and therefore cannot be guaranteed to be re-downloadable. The same is true if the author removed the original article from their webserver.

Ergo, put them in the Documents folder. Whether this would satisfy the app reviewer is another question, but it's worth a shot to carefully explain to them how your app is not violating the letter of the law.

iOS 5 now lets you see per app space usage. (it's under Settings > General > Usage) I don't see anyway to delete that temp data, however, only the app itself (for non-apple apps).

That seems to be the only way for Instapaper to give their users a reasonable experience, but it's still a bad solution. It doesn't make much sense for the Instapaper app to backup its users' cached articles to iCloud, when the whole point of the app is to backup the articles on the iPhone. If you have access to iCloud, you have access to the original article, so it's a waste of bandwidth. Not to mention that Instapaper risks getting hounded by Apple for the iCloud usage.