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Comment by Scorponok | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the solution is to make it a choice for the user? An option to "clean up documents when space is low on the device" in the instapaper options. If checked, stuff gets stored in cache. If not, in documents.

That way, the default behavior is that "download something = want to keep it on device", but users can do the other one too if they want. I don't think the option is particularly useful, but it might make the app reviewer happy?

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I would bet Apple's never going to make this sort of a choice obvious to the user -- it goes against the "just working" (whether or not it works the way you want) they're currently pushing. It sure does worry me to read all these comments though; it seems like you'll never be able to count on an app having the data it needs to run, without re-downloading. As somebody who spends half his day in an airplane or a subway, plus plenty of time in expensive places (like overseas), that's terrifying.

Actually a couple video players right now do make this choice available to the user - OPlayer and AVPlayer. They both say something to the effect of "Backup media" in their settings. This simply toggles which location the media is stored in (AVPlayer even seems to move the media on the fly).

This is literally exactly how I would implement the choice if I were Marco.

The problem is if the user chooses not to backup the data, it'll get wiped if she runs out of storage space. What would be nice would be to not sync to iCloud AND not get cleaned out.

This is what needs to happen. Either there needs to be a user confirmation before information can be "cleaned" from an app, or there needs to be a setting in the Settings/Appname for disallowing cleaning of that app's data.

[Edit] Upon further examination of the new Settings/iCloud in iOS 5, what will need to happen is that the user should be able to disable iCloud syncing for individual 3rd party apps. That's the most consistent solution for the current interface. [/Edit]

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