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IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

marco.org

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Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#61

Post by chacha102 »

smokey_the_bear wrote: post #47

I write several offline mapping apps, and this is totally throwing us for a loop. We're recommending our power users not upgrade to iOS 5. Users download gigabytes of maps to their cache directory, they don't want to eat their iCloud allotment with that, or their slow their iTunes sync. But they also don't want to have to download those maps again, or find themselves in the middle of the woods without the maps they d…

Isn't this what innovation is about? Finding ways of solving problems? Is forcing apps to make more efficient of their use of space such a bad thing?

From what I see, your users have 3 choices: They can use your app and use up their iCloud allotment, they can use your app and not upgrade, or they can upgrade and find a mapping app that is more efficient in its use of space.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#62

Post by ghshephard »

chacha102 wrote: post #61
smokey_the_bear wrote: post #47

I write several offline mapping apps, and this is totally throwing us for a loop. We're recommending our power users not upgrade to iOS 5. Users download gigabytes of maps to their cache directory, they don't want to eat their iCloud allotment with that, or their slow their iTunes sync. But they also don't want to have to download those maps again, or find themselves in the middle of the woods without the maps they d…

Isn't this what innovation is about? Finding ways of solving problems? Is forcing apps to make more efficient of their use of space such a bad thing? From what I see, your users have 3 choices: They can use your app and use up their iCloud allotment, they can use your app and not upgrade, or they can upgrade and find a mapping app that is more efficient in its use of space.

Or Apple can provide a persistent store that isn't uploaded into the iCloud.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#64

Post by modeless »

mynegation wrote: post #33
Mavrik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there's no point in burning your cloud storage, Apple bandwidth and prolong backup times when those articles can be easly re-downloaded from Instapapers servers on iPad. Same result, without long backup times, Apple server bandwidth usage and your iCloud storage usage.

Why there is no point in burning Apple's bandwidth, but there is a point in burning Instapaper servers' bandwidth? I don't care how Apple (or Marco) solves the problem, but I sure do not want to lose Instapaper articles at random.

It's not just Apple's bandwidth; it's users' iCloud storage, which costs users money.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#65

Post by barista »

ghshephard wrote: post #62
chacha102 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what innovation is about? Finding ways of solving problems? Is forcing apps to make more efficient of their use of space such a bad thing? From what I see, your users have 3 choices: They can use your app and use up their iCloud allotment, they can use your app and not upgrade, or they can upgrade and find a mapping app that is more efficient in its use of space.

Or Apple can provide a persistent store that isn't uploaded into the iCloud.

I think this crosses the line regarding how much control Apple has over the device for which I paid!!!

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#66

Post by marchdown »

sudoman wrote: post #35
ender7 wrote: post #14

Apple's in a tight spot here - either they leave things as they are and piss off developers (and, by fiat, piss off users), or they have to start forcing users to more proactively manage their remaining space. One can probably easily imagine an interface for showing the user how much data a particular app is using and allow them to nuke the temporary stuff. It might even look beautiful. It might even be fun to use. B…

This general problem is a symptom of a major issue regarding the use of software that does not respect the freedom of its users. Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. Any negative choices or limitations imposed by Apple Inc. are virtually uncircumventable. On the other hand, if users and developers in a community are free to view, modify…

For the vast majority of developers of iOS apps the specifics of how their data is stored and backed up do not matter. If they were not forced by Apple to adopt this set of constraints they would make decisions on a whim, it would lead to less freedom for user, because where there is uniformity, there is a power to abstract, there is a freedom to not micromanage.

Circumventing design decicions is hard. Learning the specifics of particular design is hard practically in the same way. Hacking in an intentionally prohibitive environment is not much different from hacking in an overtly permissive environment — there's a pile of poorly undocumented design decisions which you have to grock before you get anywhere in this system.

So the actual difference it political. I won't argue that preventing little Joe to write the coolest Doom clone ever by requiring all software to be cryptographically signed before running it on a particular game console is somehow more evil than forcing him to spend years learning the ropes and working late hours in QA.

But I believe that imposing certain constrains on people willing to build on your platform is a good thing, because the resulting uniformity gives the platform more leverage. Whethere the constraints are technical or political /in origin/ is irrelevant.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#67

Post by adamjernst »

smokey_the_bear wrote: post #47

I write several offline mapping apps, and this is totally throwing us for a loop. We're recommending our power users not upgrade to iOS 5. Users download gigabytes of maps to their cache directory, they don't want to eat their iCloud allotment with that, or their slow their iTunes sync. But they also don't want to have to download those maps again, or find themselves in the middle of the woods without the maps they d…

Put it in Library/ (but not Library/Caches/). That's exactly the behavior you're looking for, I believe.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#68

Post by mw1234 »

This is also particularly problematic for my own apps, which are offline photo browsers that sync your collection of photos. Keeping GBs of data in the Caches folder was the only way to have iPhone backups occur reasonably fast. Sure, they can be re-synced, but that will be a very time-consuming process for thousands of photos.

Re: IOS 5's "Cleaning" Behavior

#69

Post by marchdown »

cschep wrote: post #57

So, people (developers) are going to have to put their stuff in Documents, and instruct users to disable the iCloud sync for their particular app, unless the user really wants to have it eat into their iCloud storage. Would that work?

The whole quagmire is bigger than just flushing Cache. Apple prohibits developers to store stuff that can be regenerated or re-downloaded. So, arguably, you can't just switch to using Documents for downloadable data.
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