31–40 of 129 posts
The comments I see are about technical solutions. I think Apple's happy that there's finally a reason for people without humongous music collections to pay $200 for 64MB of flash memory.
I've looked briefly into stripping an app: the ipa format is just zip. There is a plist with hashes of the assets. Don't know if that plist itself is hashed, but I'm thinking probably.
I like this author's thoughts, and there are some creative solutions offered by him and the commenters there on how to thin the assets. However, I would be interested to see how the assets' size stacks up against the actual binary. Some of the biggest apps on my iPhone are iBooks (57.9MB) and Nook (51.3MB). I doubt their pretty little icons take up the lion's share of that size. I mean, Kindle does it in a measly 23.…
I have a feeling that Apple might just start to run into the kinds of realities MS and others have been living with for years. Either they choose to piss off millions of users of older devices or figure out how to allow for evolution without causing problems for the installed base. Or, maybe they don't. As an iDevice user I am glad that I chose to buy all my devices with the absolute max storage available. Everything…
So here is the big question: Are you going to buy less apps because of this "issue"? If not then there is no incentive to really fix it, nor for developers is it a problem that will be addressed.
I don't understand why "universal binaries" exist at all on iOS. On desktops where the app space is more "free" it has a purpose, but it's not like users are regularly moving apps from one iDevice to another -- so what on earth is the point of having three different things altogether? The much more intelligent solution would have been to simply allow developers to upload 3 different binaries, but only present it as o…
Would Apple allow an app maker to release their app for only newer iPads and iPhones, and not for the older devices? (I have no idea...)
I have a feeling that Apple might just start to run into the kinds of realities MS and others have been living with for years. Either they choose to piss off millions of users of older devices or figure out how to allow for evolution without causing problems for the installed base. Or, maybe they don't. As an iDevice user I am glad that I chose to buy all my devices with the absolute max storage available. Everything…
That is not sufficient. You also would have to detect the case where a backup is restored to a device with a different resolution (could even be a lower resolution)
"you will have to foot the bill for your free graphics-intensive app getting three million downloads."
Not necessarily. The App Store could have provisions for doing these kinds of downloads. Because of the backup issue, I even think it would have to have support there, given that Apple would want to prevent the cases "sorry, cheapGames.com's server is awfully slow" or "sorry, junkSite.com's server has disappeared; we cannot get you the graphics for that game you bought anymore" (site names made up; if they exist in real life, the name match is coincidental)
As it only takes one large app to disable the whole update all process, it'll be interesting to see how this impacts the overall update numbers.